SCARLETT POV – CHAPTER 48
I never thought Jesse Lauder was dead.
That would have been easier.
Death is final. Clean. Something you can mourn and lock away. What I believed was worse — that the world had moved on without us ever crossing paths again. That whatever future might have existed between us had been swallowed by distance, blood, and time.
I thought I would simply never see him again.
Until he stood in the clearing.
Until his eyes found mine.
Until his body gave out beneath the weight of that realization.
Jesse’s collapse happens fast.
One moment he’s upright, wounded but stubbornly refusing to show it — the Alpha he’s always been — and the next his knees buckle, his breath catching like his body finally remembers how much blood he’s lost.
“Jesse!” someone shouts.
Skye's
