The knock
1632 Words
Sasha
I didn’t remember falling asleep. I only remembered the dark.
One moment I was staring at the ceiling, my wolf curled tight and whimpering in the cage of my chest, and the next, a soft knock dragged me back into the bruising reality of consciousness.
“Madam?” a maid called quietly. “Dinner.”
“I’m not hungry,” I rasped. My throat felt raw, scraped hollow.
“I can leave it here—”
“No.” The word came out too fast, too sharp. “Take it away. Please.”
The scent of roasted meat slipped under the door anyway—rich, warm, alive. My stomach twisted violently. Food was for the living. For the chosen. I felt like neither.
The footsteps retreated.
Good.
Hunger was manageable. It was a dull, distant ache.
The hollow rot in my chest where the bond used to be—that was something else entirely.
The night stretched on, thick and suffocating. The house sank into silence so deep it rang. Outside, even the pack had gone quiet. Everyone slept.
Everyone except me.
My wolf didn’t sleep.
She paced. Scratched behind my eyes. Sniffed the air obsessively, searching for a scent that didn’t belong to me anymore.
It was well past midnight when she froze.
Her ears snapped forward. Her body went rigid.
Him.
The knock followed a heartbeat later.
Heavy. Controlled. Three deliberate raps that vibrated through the door and straight into my bones. The knock of a man who didn’t ask to enter—he announced himself.
I sat up slowly, the sheets sliding down my body, my pulse hammering against my throat.
“Yes?” My voice betrayed me. Too thin.
“Open the door.”
Jaxon.
That deep, subterranean rumble slid through me like a blade. Something about his voice always made me feel strange. My wolf, traitorous and desperate, lowered her head.
“f**k,” I muttered under my breath. “What does he want now—at this hour?”
I swung my legs out of bed. The floorboards were ice beneath my bare feet. My hand hovered at the latch—hesitation, self-preservation, a useless instinct—before I pulled it open.
He filled the doorway.
Shadows clung to him like a second skin, but it was the scentthat hit me first.
Rain. Dark musk. Blood.
Not fresh enough to be panic-inducing—but close. Copper and violence. Beneath it all there was something thick and heavy, saturating the air until breathing became effort. The kind of power that made weaker wolves drop and bare their throats without thinking.
I was still wearing the nightdress I’d fallen asleep in—white, thin, meant for sleep and nothing else.
Moonlight spilled in behind me, turning the fabric nearly transparent. It traced the curve of my breasts, the dip of my waist, the bare skin beneath where there was nothing—nothing—between me and his stare.
I didn’t cover myself.
I couldn’t.
His eyes dropped.
Stopped.
Not rushed. Not greedy. Just… arrested. Darkened. His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly, a muscle jumping as his gaze dragged slowly back up my body, taking his time. Claiming ground he hadn’t yet stepped onto.
The air between us thickened, charged, vibrating with things neither of us were saying.
My wolf pressed forward inside me, aching, furious, wanting—and for the first time since the bond shattered, I felt it.
Not emptiness.
Hunger.
Just for a fraction of a second—but I felt it like electricity snapping across bare skin.
Heat coiled low in my belly, sharp and unwelcome, stealing the air from my lungs. My wolf lifted her head, alert despite herself.
Fuck—Sasha—he is your step father. Get it together.
Jaxon’s jaw tightened as if he could read my mind.
He forced his gaze back to my face deliberately. Controlled.
The room hummed with it.
My knees trembled—just once. I locked them.
My eyes dropped to his hands.
His knuckles were brutalized. Skin split raw, swollen and red, dried blood crusted dark along the ridges. None of it was his. I knew that with bone-deep certainty—because there wasn’t a wolf in this pack capable of making Jaxon Blade bleed.
“What did you do?” I whispered, the silence cracking under the weight of it.
His jaw flexed. A muscle jumped beneath his skin.
He didn’t answer.
He closed the door behind him instead.
The sound landed heavy, final.
“I checked on something,” he said at last.
“That’s not an answer.”
He stepped fully into the room. He didn’t ask. He crossed the threshold like it belonged to him, and suddenly the space shrank, air thinning as his presence flooded it. Power rolled off him in suffocating waves— dominance, raw and unapologetic.
He kicked the door shut.
The click echoed like a gunshot. Something about a man like him in my room at this hour, made something forbidden crawl up my skin—my thoughts wandered to where they shouldn’t.
Jaxon’s gaze dipped—just once—to the pale line of my collarbone where the fabric clung too closely. His eyes snapped back up immediately, like he’d brushed flame.
“You didn’t eat,” he said.
Not an observation.
An accusation.
“I wasn’t hungry.”
“You need your strength.” His voice dropped, vibrating through my chest, settling somewhere low and dangerous. “You’re fragile right now.”
“I’m not fragile,” I snapped, though the words came out thinner than I meant.
“You are,” he countered, taking a step closer. “You’re bleeding on the inside, Sasha. I can smell the grief on you. It reeks.”
I flinched.
He was close now. Too close. I could smell the iron on his hands, sharp and metallic, tangled with the expensive soap he favored. The combination made my head spin.
“You should have eaten,” he repeated.
A breathless, broken laugh slipped out of me.
“Is that an order, Alpha?” I asked, a reckless, giddy curve to my mouth.
Shameless.
His eyes darkened to charcoal and a shiver ran down my spine.
“If it were,” he murmured, lethal and soft, “you’d be on your knees right now.”
Heat flooded me—liquid, sudden, humiliating.
My breath hitched. My wolf whined, paced, wanted to roll over and bare her belly, wanted to submit to the strength pouring off him in waves.
Traitor, I hissed at her.
My gaze slid back to his hands. To the violence etched into his skin.
“Who did you hurt, Jaxon?”
He followed my stare. Looked at his bruised knuckles as if noticing them for the first time.
“The man who thought he could discard you like trash,” he said flatly, “and walk away breathing easy.”
He looked at me then—really looked—and the heat flared again, immediate and undeniable.
“If you want,” he said low, “I can make that bastard suffer for the rest of his life.”
My heart stuttered—then slammed.
David.
He beat David. For me.
“You shouldn’t have—”
“I know,” he cut in.
Not harsh.
Final.
“But he deserved it.”
We stood there.
In silence.
The connection between us was a live wire, vibrating, begging to be touched. He was dangerous. Lethal. Everything I shouldn’t have wanted—especially not tonight, when my heart was still bleeding from another man’s knife.
My wolf didn’t care.
Jaxon’s scent was intoxicating and she wanted to drown in it and I was afraid, I did too.
“I didn’t ask you to protect me,” I managed to whispered.
He held my gaze, unblinking, and the intensity nearly brought me to my knees.
“I didn’t do it for thanks, Sasha.” His voice wad firm, “ I did it because the idea of him sleeping soundly while you cried—”
His hands curled into fists at his sides.
“—displeased me.”
The word sent a shiver straight through me.
The arrogance.
The dominance.
The room felt stiflingly hot. One step. Just one—and I’d be inside his space. I could touch the bruise on his hand. I could taste the iron on his skin.
He saw it—the shift in my eyes, the dilation of my pupils.
He exhaled sharply, frustration rough in the sound, and stepped back. The loss of his proximity felt like sudden cold.
“Get some rest,” he ordered, his voice gravel now. “I’ll have food brought in the morning. Eat it.”
I lifted my chin, clinging to a shred of defiance. “And if I don’t?”
The corner of his mouth ticked—not a smile.
A warning.
“Then I’ll come back,” he said quietly, eyes locking onto mine. “And I won’t be asking next time.”
The silence stretched, volatile and thick.
If I stepped closer—
If I pushed—
Something sinful would happen.
We both knew it.
His shoulders tensed. His hands curled—then stilled.
He stepped back first.
Deliberately.
He turned and left before I found the breath to stop him.
The door clicked shut.
I stood alone in the dark, skin tingling, my wolf pacing restless circles in my chest—wide awake now, starving.
“What was that?”
“What just happened to me?”
“Ugh—f**k—stop it,” I snarled at my wolf.
Nothing had happened.
He hadn’t touched me.
And yet my body hummed, aching and alive—
Like I’d just been claimed.
- Writer
