GROWL OF A STOLEN BLOODLINE

Mate

His hand was still wrapped around my arm, and neither of us moved to break it.

"You should watch where you're going," he said, but his voice didn't match the words. It came out low, almost strained, like he was fighting to keep it even.

"I live here," I said, breathless, my heart still slamming from the woods. "I think that gives me the right to walk through my own front door."

Something shifted in his face the second I spoke. His eyes, which had been dark and unreadable a moment ago, changed. I don't know how else to describe it. The color didn't move, exactly, but something behind it did, sharpened, focused, like I'd gone from being a stranger in his way to the only thing in the room.

"Say that again," he said.

"What?"

"Your name." His grip on my arm tightened, not painfully, but enough that I felt it in my chest instead of my skin. "Say your name."

"Marlowe," I said, confused, my pulse climbing for a reason that had nothing to do with the woods anymore. "Marlowe Reyes. Why are you—"

He crossed the space between us before I finished the sentence.

One step. That was all it took. His hand left my arm and found my jaw instead, tilting my face up toward his, and I froze, every instinct in me screaming that I should pull away, that this was too much, too fast, too strange, and none of it moved me an inch.

"Mate," he growled.

The word landed somewhere low in my chest and didn't leave.

"What does that mean?" I whispered.

He didn't answer. His eyes moved over my face like he was trying to memorize something he already knew he shouldn't be looking at, and up close I could see the muscle working in his jaw, the tension coiled through his whole body like a wire pulled too tight.

"Matteo." His name felt strange in my mouth, too intimate for a stranger, too familiar for someone I'd known for exactly ninety seconds.

"Don't," he said, but it wasn't clear what he was telling me not to do. Not to say his name. Not to move. Not to breathe.

I should have been afraid. Every part of my life had trained me to be afraid of a man twice my size gripping my face in a dark entryway, growling words I didn't understand. And some small, sane part of me was afraid, distantly, the way you're afraid of a storm you can see coming but haven't felt yet.

But underneath that fear was something else. Something that felt less like danger and more like recognition, like my body knew him from somewhere my mind had never been.

"I don't understand," I said. "What's happening right now?"

"Neither do I," he said, and for the first time his voice cracked, just slightly, just enough that I heard the lie in it before I understood it was a lie at all.

We stood like that for longer than made any sense. His hand hadn't moved from my jaw. Mine hadn't moved to push him away. The house around us had gone completely silent, no staff, no footsteps, nothing but the two of us and the sound of my own heartbeat filling every inch of space between us.

"You're shaking," he said quietly, and I realized he was right. I was.

"So are you," I said.

His hand fell away from my face like I'd burned him.

He stepped back so fast it was almost violent, putting distance between us that hadn't existed a second ago, and the look that crossed his face wasn't confusion anymore. It was something closer to horror, aimed entirely at himself.

"This never happened," he said.

"Matteo—"

"This never happened," he said again, harder, like saying it twice would make it true.

He turned and walked away from me down the hall, fast, his shoulders rigid, and he didn't look back once. I stood frozen in the entryway, my bag still hanging off one shoulder, my chest still heaving from the run through the woods and from whatever had just happened in the sixty seconds after I walked through that door.

I looked down at my own hands.

They were shaking too badly to hide it, even from myself.