SOPHIA
The sheets still carry our heat, twisted and damp with sweat and rain that leaked through the cracked window. My thighs ache with the memory of Alcyde between them, muscles I've never used protesting the stretch. The wolf inside—Hannah's wolf, the only one I have now—purrs the word like a prayer: mate, mate, mate.
But whose mate? Hannah's ghost or Sophia's flesh?
I watch him dress in the gray afternoon light, each movement precise despite the bruises blooming across his ribs from the challenge. Water still beads in the hollow of his throat where I bit him, unable to help myself when he drove deep enough to make me see white. His hands, those careful hands that worship soft flesh, button his jeans with the same focus he used to map every scar on my body.
"Stay," he says without t
