Chapter 5 5.
KAYDEN.
The bond hummed in my chest and I stared at the ceiling and thought about how badly I'd screwed myself.
City light flickered through the floor-to-ceiling windows of my apartment, cutting slow shapes across the ceiling, and I tracked them because it was something to do that wasn't thinking about the locker room.
That wasn't working either.
I'd been lying here for two hours running the same thirty seconds on repeat and I was nowhere close to done apparently, because there it was again...her lips against mine, the way the world stopped making sense, the heat that came after it like something detonating in my chest.
My wolf hadn't settled since.
It paced under my skin constantly, back and forth, and I could feel it the way you felt a current underwater.
Not violent. Just relentless. Just absolutely certain about something I was still trying to catch up to.
I sat up with my elbows on my knees. I replayed the kiss again because I had no self-control whatsoever tonight apparently, and then I got up and went to take a cold shower because sitting there was making it worse.
The water didn't help the way I wanted it to.
I stood with both palms flat on the tile anyway, letting it run, and tried to think like someone with a functioning brain.
I thought about telling my parents.
About what it meant in the long run, not just for me but for the Lachlan name, for our pack, for every wolf on the continent who looked to my family as the highest authority in existence.
My father was Lycan Regent.
I was his heir.
Who I bonded with wasn't just a personal matter. It was a legacy one, the kind of decision that got discussed in council chambers and affected people who would never meet either of us.
But then I pressed my forehead against the shower wall and actually thought about what I was doing and felt genuinely stupid, because I was in here planning how to tell my parents like Honoria and I were something.
Or a couple.
Like she'd agreed to any of this. Like she had any clue what happened in that locker room beyond an accidental kiss she probably wanted to scrub from her memory.
She didn't know.
That was what I kept coming back to. She bolted out of that room looking confused and mortified and she had no idea...not about the bond, not about what it meant, not about what I was.
She went home tonight as Honoria Greyheart, a girl who hated Kayden Lachlan, end of story.
I made myself stand straight and think clearly.
Because there was something else. Something I'd been circling around since the moment her scent hit me in that equipment closet and my wolf went from restless to feral in about two seconds flat.
Honoria was a werewolf.
She didn't know that either.
Thorpecan Preparatory was exactly what it sold itself as.
To every human, it was elite, prestigious, the kind of institution that built futures for the children of people who already had them.
Best curriculum on the continent. Exceptional in every measurable way.
That part was true and accurate and exactly what the brochure said.
What the brochure didn't say was that Thorpecan was werewolf high.
Had been for three generations. More than half the student body were wolves... heirs to powerful packs from across the world, sent there specifically because Thorpecan understood what they were and built itself to accommodate them.
The human students were real but they were a small, carefully kept handful. Comfortable. Oblivious. And never told about our world.
I had always put Honoria in that category without thinking twice about it.
My wolf had never once reacted to a human the way it reacted to her and I'd been too irritated by her existence to pay attention to that until tonight.
I was paying attention now.
I shut the water off and grabbed a towel.
My phone was on the nightstand. I picked it up and scrolled through my contacts slowly until I found a name from one of the school's volunteer coordination groups, someone who spent a lot of time around administrative offices and owed me more than a few favors.
I looked at the contact for a moment.
This was not a well thought out idea.
I called anyway.
It rang four times before a half-asleep voice picked up. "I need a favor," I said. "An address from school records. Tonight."
Forty-five minutes later I was fully dressed with my keys in my hand, walking out of my apartment at two in the morning with no explanation I could have given anyone for what I was doing.
The bond pulled at me as I drove, faint and insistent, a pressure sitting just behind my ribs that pointed in one direction and didn't waver. I told myself I was just driving. I told myself I didn't know where I was going.
But that was a fucking lie.
I knew exactly where I was going.
I turned onto her street and drove past the house once without stopping, which I told myself was just to check the number. It was small and older and there was one light on in the upper window. And I knew before I had any reason to that it was her room.
I pulled over half a block down and cut the engine.
My wolf went quieter the moment I stopped moving. Not calm, just... quieter. The pacing settled into something low and watchful, the way it got when it had found what it was looking for. I sat with that in the dark for twenty minutes, engine off, street empty around me, watching that lit window and telling myself I was going to leave.
Her silhouette crossed the glass.Just the shape of her moving past the window, there and gone, and something in my chest pulled so tight and so suddenly that the curse I spat out loud in that empty car was not something I'd say in front of my mother.
I sat very still after that.
The light stayed on a while longer. Then it went off and the house went dark and I waited another five minutes in the quiet before I finally started the car and pulled away from the curb.
I drove home with both hands on the wheel and the deeply uncomfortable awareness that sitting outside her house at two in the morning had not felt strange while I was doing it.
It had felt like the only logical place to be.
My wolf had thought so completely and without question.
I was starting to understand that this mate bond wasn’t going to make my life easier.
