[Leon’s POV]
I sit on the edge of the bed of my guest room and press my knuckles into my thighs until the bones protest. My hands won't stop shaking. That's new.
I've held steady through assassination attempts. Hostile negotiations with Alphas twice my age who wanted me dead before I sat down. Years of open war. None of it has ever put a tremor in my hands.
Two children in a hallway did it in under ten seconds.
I press harder into my thighs and stare at the floor trying to get my breathing under control. Which is something I have not needed to do since I was seventeen years old and newly shifted, learning that the wolf and the man are not always interested in the same.
Right now the wolf is winning the argument by a significant margin.
My son.
A boy who planted himself between me and his sister with the quiet, absolute authority that most Alphas spend decades trying to manufacture. Dark hair. My jaw. My eyes staring back at me from a six-year-old's face with open suspicion and zero intention of standing down.
And then girl—her mother's face, those small fingers on my jaw, tilting her head like she was solving something.
He has Ashton's eyes.
I drag both hands through my hair and stand up, because sitting still has become physically impossible.
Ashton and River. My son. My daughter. Six years of their lives were spent in a servant's room while I sat in boardrooms telling myself I'd earned a good night's sleep. First words, first steps, every fever, every nightmare… gone. Because I was too busy being strategic to find the woman my wolf has been screaming about for seven years.
And the split lip she tried to hide with an angled chin and a tugged-down sleeve…
Someone in this house struck the mother of my children hard enough to split skin, and I sat across from that someone today and shook his hand. The wolf presses against my ribs, and for once I'm inclined to agree with him.
I've been sitting in this room for an hour and the wolf has been making the same suggestions to walk down the hall and do something to Thomas Bryant that will permanently end any need for a wedding and restart a war in the same motion.
The only thing stopping me is the knowledge that burning this house down does nothing for Skyler and the children tonight, and I need to be useful before I'm anything else.
I can't stay in this room.
The pack house kitchen at midnight smells like grease and dish soap and underneath that, underneath everything, her.
I stop in the doorway.
She's at the sink with her back to me, sleeves shoved past her elbows, arms deep in gray water. The bruises are in full display—purple fingerprints ringing her wrists, a yellowing bloom across her forearm that's days old, fresh marks layered over the healing ones with the casual frequency of something ongoing.
She has no idea anyone is watching, and the unguardedness of it guts me worse than the marks themselves.
The wolf goes completely silent. That's how I know it's bad.
He doesn't quiet down when he's rational. He goes quiet when something has moved past reason into something older and more absolute than reason.
Mine, he says. Mine. Deal with it.
I've been dealing with it for seven years. I'm running out of ways to deal with it.
I cross the kitchen and lift the pot from her hands. She spins—water arcing across the counter, blue eyes wide, and then the moment she sees me the shock collapses into something harder and more guarded.
"Leon." Her whisper could cut glass. "If someone sees you in the kitchen at midnight with me…"
"Then they'll see an Alpha who couldn't sleep." I set the pot down and turn the tap to warm. "Give me your hands."
"Stop it, Leon. Go back to your room." She steps backward, her hip catching the edge of the sink. "You're going to get us both killed."
"Your hands, Skyler."
I hold mine out, palms up. The Alpha of Shadowcrest. CEO of a security empire. Standing in a pack house kitchen at midnight, reduced to asking—begging, if that's what it takes—a woman half my size to let me hold her hands under warm water.
My strategic reputation is genuinely not surviving tonight. I don’t care.
She stares at me with an expression that suggests I've lost my mind entirely. Then she gives me her hands anyway. Slowly, reluctantly, like surrendering evidence she'll regret producing.
Her knuckles are cracked open again, skin raw, dried blood traced into every crease.
I run warm water over them, working the grime free with fingers that want to put a fist through the nearest wall. Her breathing stutters once when I ease dirt from a deep split along her thumb.
"I said stop," she says. But her hands stay exactly where they are, and the contradiction is so perfectly her that my mouth twitches.
"You did." I turn her palm gently under the stream. "I'm choosing to ignore that, as is my right as a deeply inconsiderate guest."
"Such behavior from an Alpha…" A ghost of a bite in her voice, and my chest does something unruly because even now she's still sharp, still refusing to be small.
"Deeply inconsiderate. I know." My thumb moves carefully across her knuckles. "I've been told."
A sound escapes her—not quite a laugh, but something that got out before she could stop it. The wolf in my chest does something embarrassing in response.
She has no idea what that does to me.
The water runs pink. Then clear.
She's close enough that her warmth reaches me across the few inches between us. Close enough that I can smell her scent underneath the dish soap and the exhaustion, and the scent is the same.
Skyler leans in—a fraction, barely a centimeter, probably not even conscious of it—and then catches herself and goes rigid, the shutters slamming back into place so fast I feel the draft.
The restraint this costs me is going to leave marks of its own.
I want to close the gap. Press her back against the counter and find out if her skin still tastes like it did on that festival night. Trace every bruise on her skin with my mouth and tongue until she forgets every hand that ever put them there.
Remind her, slowly and at length, exactly what she does to me.
What I can do to her.
Instead I dry her hands with a kitchen towel. Carefully. Holding them a beat longer than strictly necessary, because I am a man and not a saint and I will take every inch she allows.
"You won't do this work much longer," I say.
Her eyes come up to mine—bright blue, searching and torn in a way that makes my ribs tighten.
"This can't happen." Her voice is low. She pulls her hands back slowly—a retreat that costs her something, and costs me considerably more. "Whatever this is… You're marrying her in five days."
"Come to Shadowcrest anyway." I keep my voice steady, though the steadiness is pure performance. "Let me protect you and the children."
"That's not all you're asking." Her arms cross and the bruises vanish beneath her sleeves again. "And we both know it."
I want to tell her she's right.
I want to tell her I would burn the treaty and the alliance and years of careful political work to the ground if she asked me to. Which is exactly how I know I can't say it, because she would step back from that information, not toward it.
She's learned to be afraid of anything that sounds too much like a promise.
"Then let me ask for this much." I keep my hands at my sides with great effort. "Trust me enough to get away from here."
She searches my face the way Ashton did—hunting for the lie, the fine print, the exit clause. Seven years of broken promises have made her a ruthless auditor, and I deserve every second of the inspection.
"For the children." Barely a whisper, the words stripped of everything but bone and the faintest tremor. "Not for you."
"For the children."
A door cracked an inch is still a door, and I will take every inch she offers and guard it with my life.
She leaves first and I watch her disappear down the corridor and don't follow, though the restraint shreds something behind my sternum, and every step she takes feels like a thread being pulled from my chest.
A thread that wants my mate. Here. Now. Always. Forever.