Voren wiped the rain off his face with his palm. It came straight back. The sky wasn’t done with any of them tonight.

"Thank you," Seraphine said, and every word of it was final. "But I’ll walk."

"It’s not safe." Voren’s eyes moved briefly down the road and back. More trees could come down. Visibility was almost nothing. Whatever strength Seraphine had, and she had plenty, it wasn’t the same as an Alpha cutting through a storm. "You can’t see twenty feet in front of you out there."

"You don’t understand." She pressed her lips together, eyes sliding sideways for just a second like she was already dreading the next part. The rain was soaking through her completely, her hair flat against her face. "It’s that time of the month."

She got the whole sentence out, and the faint smile that crossed Voren’s face was so quick she almost missed it.

"Your period?" His voice was flat, amusement sitting just underneath it. The exact tone a person uses when someone tells them something they consider a non-issue.

Seraphine looked at him longer than she normally would before she finally pulled her eyes away.

She wanted the rain to become something physical. Something with arms. Something that could pick her up and carry her horizontally into the distance so she never had to exist in this specific moment again.

Voren, completely unbothered and apparently unaware of what she was internally dissolving, bent forward and dropped his shoulders into position like this was already decided.

"I came into this world through a she-wolf." He said it simply. "It doesn’t bother me. Get on."

She stood there in the rain and stared at the back of his head.

This man. This cold, emotionally locked, impossible to read Alpha who argued with her about everything and agreed with her about nothing.

This was the same person? Because the one bent forward in the rain waiting patiently for her to climb on his back didn’t match the one she had built a whole picture of in her head. There was something underneath the surface of Voren that she kept catching glimpses of and couldn’t quite see clearly.

Ten full seconds passed, and Voren didn’t move. Didn’t rush her. He just waited.

Her brain was still running arguments until her body stopped listening to them.

She reached forward, her hands found his shoulders. And then she was up, chest against his back, legs wrapping around him from behind, and the warmth of him hit her like a wall.

He was completely soaked on the outside but warm underneath it, solid in a way that made the cold of her own wet clothes feel sharper by comparison.

"Hold on tight." There it was again, that almost-light quality in his voice. Almost like he was enjoying this just a little. "It’s slippery."

Her arms went around his neck.

And then he ran. Not carefully, but how someone moves when the ground is theirs and the weather is just background noise. Smooth and fast and completely unbothered by her weight, like she was nothing at all.

She held on and the packhouse lights grew closer through the curtain of rain and something strange moved through her that she couldn’t name properly.

There were bits and pieces of memories trying to surface and yet, too hard to grasp. It was like reaching into a dark room for a light switch and knowing exactly where it is before your hand gets there.

Her mind reached for the memory behind the feeling and found nothing. This exact scene seems to have happened before but it was as if the memory had been wiped and yet was trying to rewrite itself.

Back at the gate, not one warrior moved.

Every single one of them watched Alpha Voren disappear into the rain with a woman on his back and kept every single thought behind their teeth. Their Alpha was standing right there. That was enough to keep any mouth shut.

Ravyn watched until the rain closed around them completely and they were gone.

He walked to the car, got in, and pulled the door shut. Then he mind linked the mechanic. ’I’m bringing Alpha Voren’s car. Work on it fast.’

He sat there after he sent it and didn’t move right away.

Then one of the warriors outside, apparently deciding that their Alpha being behind a closed car door created enough distance, said the thing that had been written on every face for the last ten minutes.

"I don’t care what anyone thinks." His voice was low but it carried. "Alpha Voren is in love with Luna Sera."

Ravyn kept his eyes straight ahead through the rain-covered windshield.

He had been hearing some version of this all day. Every time he heard it he had put it down without looking at it too closely. Words were easy to dismiss. People filled silence with noise. It didn’t mean anything.

Except that he had watched something this time that had nothing to do with words.

He had watched Voren throw his body over hers without a second of hesitation. He had watched him lie in the mud and wait through real pain while she worked. He had watched him carry her through a storm like it was the simplest and most obvious thing in the world to do.

And none of it had looked calculated. None of it had looked like Voren being polite or strategic or performing for an audience.

It had looked natural.

For the first time, Ravyn sat with the thought and didn’t immediately bury it.

He met the mechanic, left instructions, and was heading back to the packhouse to confront Voren when a mind link cut through.

’Rav. Where are you.’

Daisy.

He stopped walking for half a second. In everything that had happened tonight, she had completely left his mind. ’You’re awake? I’m coming.’

He went to her. And when they walked into the packhouse together, what was waiting inside made the thought he had been trying to dismiss all night sit down in his chest and refuse to leave.

Voren and Seraphine, stepping out of Voren’s room together, and the way it looked made every reasonable explanation he had been building feel thin and unconvincing.

He crossed the room toward Voren.

"We need to talk."