Chapter 3
Kael's POV
She's in my arms before I know her name.
Mint and white sandalwood — the scent fills the dark behind my eyelids like smoke through a cracked door. A girl. Small. Pale skin against my chest, her back curved into me like she was made to fit there.
I can't see her face. Just the line of her jaw, the soft weight of her pressing closer, and that scent threading straight through every chemical wall I've built.
I should flood the space with enough dominance scent to make her choke. Push her out.
Instead my hand slides down. Finds the curve of her hip, her ass, pulls her tighter. She makes a sound — not a word, just breath leaving her body — and tilts her head back. Her lips brush mine. Cool. Clean. Soft enough that my teeth ache.
I bite. Gentle. Then not gentle. She gasps and my mouth drags down her throat, tasting salt and mint and something underneath that makes Nyx go absolutely still — not calm, not suppressed, just still, like a predator that's finally found the one thing it doesn't want to destroy.
My canines are out. Fully extended, pressing against the gland on her neck. One more second and I'll —
The phone screams.
I jerk upright. Heart hammering. Room dark. My hand is between my legs and there's — fuck. Cold. Wet. The kind of mess I haven't made since I was fourteen.
The phone keeps ringing. Declan Blackwell.
"Fuck," I say out loud, and it's not clear if I mean the dream or the caller or the fact that my body just betrayed me for a girl who doesn't exist.
I hit answer, toss the phone on the bathroom counter, and turn the shower on. Cold.
"Took you long enough." Declan's voice fills the tile on speaker, lazy and satisfied. "Were you in the shower? Oh — oh. I get it. Kael, buddy. You need a woman. You know, Serena's been waiting very patiently —"
"Talk. Business."
"Tsk tsk. Fine. Shipment next week. Border warehouse. This batch is special. Need you receiving personally."
Special. He never says that word on open lines unless he wants me to hear it. Live cargo or high-grade biologics.
"Time and location. Send it."
"Done. Oh, and the old man's pleased with you. Serena too. Come for dinner. Let her touch your arm for ten minutes, everybody's happy."
"You forgot what happened last month?"
Silence. Then: "What happened last month?"
"You told me to come for afternoon tea. I found aphrodisiacs in my cup. The kind they use on livestock."
Two beats of dead air. Then Declan laughs — short, dry, the sound of a man deciding how much to admit. "Ha. Did you? That's... huh."
"Tell your sister if she pulls that shit again, I'll file the batch number with campus security. Veterinary-grade controlled substances. See how the old man likes that headline."
"Jesus, Kael, it was a joke —"
"Hilarious. What else."
The playfulness drops clean out of his voice. "Old man says your suppressants are handled. This month's supply is already with your guy. And Kael — he's watching your dosage. Closely."
He hangs up before I can respond. That's a Declan move — drop the threat, cut the line, let it sit.
I stand under the cold water until my skin goes numb. The dream-scent is still there — mint and sandalwood, clinging to the inside of my sinuses like a stain I can't scrub out.
She's not real. Move on.
Two knocks. Precise. Spaced exactly one second apart.
Clean motor oil — like a freshly serviced engine. Rook. My Beta. The only person in this school who knocks like he's requesting permission to enter a military briefing.
"Come in."
He fills the doorway. Six-five, two-sixty, the scar splitting his left eyebrow catching the hallway light. Pharmaceutical box under one arm. Paper bag in the other. The bag smells like cinnamon and butter.
I wrap the towel around my waist, loose, grab the pack of cigarettes from the windowsill. Don't light it — just hold one between my teeth. The weight of it helps. Barely.
Rook's eyes go to my phone on the counter. Back to me.
"Declan?"
"Shipment next week. He called it 'special.'"
His weight shifts — barely. "Special how?"
"Didn't say. But he had that voice. The one he gets when the money's real."
"Live cargo?"
"Maybe. He wants me there in person. Either a test or a trophy."
"Or both."
"Or both."
The unlit cigarette rolls between my teeth. Live cargo. Biologics. Organ supply lines. Every job filthier than the last, and every one of them another link in the chain I'm building to hang these people with. The trick is not drowning in the shit before you get to use it.
Rook checks the pharmaceutical seals — intact, batch-coded, tamper-sealed. "Declan's people charged twenty over. And the old Alpha's tracking your dosage."
Twenty percent surcharge. Not market — leash check. Your veins run on our product.
"Let him track. What he needs to know, he'll find. What he doesn't, he won't."
He nods. Doesn't leave. Weight shifts again.
"Spit it out."
"Serena's pushing the old man harder. The engagement talk isn't casual anymore. They're setting a timeline."
My jaw tightens. If I get absorbed into Blackwell blood through marking Serena — every piece of evidence, every recorded conversation — becomes betrayal against family. In wolf law, that's worse than the crime I'm trying to prove.
"You need a shield," Rook says. "A reason to delay. Someone credible enough that even the old man has to pause."
A shield. The mint flickers behind my eyes — pale skin, soft mouth, a body curving into mine —
"You're distracted," Rook says.
"I'm fine."
"You're not. Something happened."
I grab the cinnamon roll from the bag. Bite into it. "Nothing happened. Eat your breakfast."
"That's your breakfast."
"Then stop talking and let me eat it."
He almost smiles. Walks out.
I sit on the bed's edge. The pharmaceutical vial catches the light — liquid refracting a sick blue-white. Clean packaging for a dirty leash.
Needle into the forearm. Cold floods outward through every vein. Nyx howls once, then drops into the dark. The red filter retreats. My fingers stop clenching.
The scar on my left ribs burns. It always does before the full moon — the silver-white line where my mother's claws caught me the night she died. Not to hurt me. To push me somewhere safe. But she'd already lost control.
That was the last time I smelled her real scent. Nightshade blood — warm sandalwood wrapped in ozone and despair. I've been suppressing that part of myself ever since.
What am I suppressing. The scent, or the memory.
Eleven PM. Warehouse. Rain on corrugated iron.
The Beta kneeling on the concrete reeks of fear — curdled milk, sour and acidic, punching through my suppressed senses like nothing's there. Fear always gets through first.
I crouch in front of him. Middle-aged. Zip-tied wrists rubbed raw.
"Fifteenth." Quiet. Almost gentle. "You have until the fifteenth."
"Please — I've got two kids, they're —"
"Fifteenth." Same tone. I take his wrist. Find the angle. Two fingers — index and middle, right hand. The snap is clean. Blackwell wants messages, not corpses.
His scream hits the walls and comes back doubled. He folds forward, forehead to concrete, shaking.
I stand up. Wipe my fingers on my jeans.
Two kids. I shove it down. Same place I keep all of it.
The long route back. Tree line along the rear mountain. Full moon eve — every scent cranked to maximum, suppressant coverage tissue-paper thin. Fir resin, creek water, coffee from half a mile south.
Then something else.
I stop.
Faint. So faint that without the moon's forced amplification I'd have missed it. A thread in the wind — mint leaf. White sandalwood. First snow on stone that hasn't cooled yet.
The dream.
Nyx goes still. The scar stops burning. Every background signal drops away like a crowded room going silent for a single voice.
My body moves toward it before my brain catches up — three steps before I lock my legs and force myself to stop. Every muscle screaming go, find, claim and I'm standing on a dirt path in the dark fighting my own skeleton.
A mate is a weakness. A hostage waiting to happen. I've watched what this world does to the people you love — watched it happen on a Tuesday night while an entire street full of wolves kept walking.
I can't become that. Not until I'm done.
I force my legs to move. Away. Fast. The scent dissolves and Nyx slams against the inside of my skull so hard my vision whites out.
By the time I reach the dorm, my nose is bleeding.
I wipe it on my sleeve and lock the door.
The mint is still there. Not in the air — in my cells. And the silence. That one second of silence no drug has ever given me.
Nyx pulled north. Same direction. Same blind insistence.
I walked south.
He'd pull harder tomorrow.
