[Leon’s POV]
Something is different, and I can't find where it's bleeding from.
Dylan and Skyler stood four feet apart at last night's bonfire. Unremarkable distance, appropriate posture and all. Except the air between them had rearranged itself into something charged.
My conscious mind can't parse it, but my body reads the shift the way it reads weather: pressure dropping, skin tightening, the animal under my ribs going still. I've been sitting with this nameless thing since the bonfire ended, turning it over in the dark like a stone I pulled from a wound.
So I'm in the training gym at dawn, because the alternative is lying next to my wife cataloging ceiling tiles while my skull dismantles itself from the inside.
The heavy bag absorbs a cross that lands ragged, too much shoulder, not enough hip. I reset and go again—jab, cross, hook—the rhythm mechanical enough to drown everything except impact shuddering up my wrists. It doesn't work.
Between sets, my thoughts run a perimeter they can't breach: Skyler.
My wolf goes cathedral-silent every time she leaves a room—not restless, not pacing, just a vacancy so complete it echoes. Then when I'm alone, he howls with the kind of anguish I can't attach to any memory I possess.
Either a spiritual crisis or a plumbing issue, and I'm fresh out of plumbers.
The dream-girl surfaces again between combinations. Silver hair, barely reaches my chest, the specific tilt of her head when she's deciding whether someone deserves her trust.
I've seen that gesture a hundred times behind my eyelids.
And I've seen it four times this week on a real woman's face, in a clinic doorway, executed with identical muscle memory.
My mind walks toward the connection and something slams shut—a door I didn't build, iron dropping between the thought and its conclusion. My wolf hurls himself against my ribs, screaming the answer into a void that returns nothing but echo.
I shower too hot and don't adjust it, because the scald gives my nerves something honest to process. I dress, arrange my face into the version that runs a pack—composed and faintly amused by the world's failure to organize itself according to my schedule.
The council chamber is half-full when I arrive. Dylan's already at the table with notes spread and coffee steaming, looking like a man who slept well. A luxury I resent with the pettiness of someone who hasn't managed it in weeks.
"Eastern border patrol logged three crossings." He flips a page without looking up. "Two deer hunters from the human settlement, James handled it. Third's unidentified, scent vanished at the river."
"Rogue?" I take my seat and pour coffee I don't want, watching the dark stream fill a cup I have no intention of drinking.
"Could be." He shrugs one shoulder. "I'll double the night rotation and add scent markers at the crossing."
"Do it." I scan the agenda, turning a page I've already memorized because sleep deprivation has made my preparation compulsive. "Clinic status?"
"Covered through Thursday. Friday's short—Dr. Fielding's at conference." He drags his finger down the roster page. "Skyler's handling triage solo."
He says it while scanning, casual, professional. Except his mouth does something around her name—not a smile, subtler than that—a looseness at the edges that speaks of hours in proximity he hasn't disclosed.
My wolf snarls. Not a growl—a sound that starts below my diaphragm and tears through my chest before I can intercept it, vibrating the table with something predatory and unmistakable.
Dylan's pen stops mid-word and every wolf in the room goes rigid.
My brother's eyes find mine with the sharpness of a man who's just heard a threat from the last direction he expected one. The silence stretches, thick enough to bruise.
"Continue." My voice is level because thirty years of training can override almost anything, including the animal trying to shred through my sternum. "Anything else on the eastern perimeter?"
Dylan holds my gaze one beat too long, reading something I pray he can't translate. Then he nods, and the room exhales, and the meeting limps to its conclusion—budgets, rotations, handshakes, an entire performance of normalcy over smoking wreckage.
Award-worthy, truly. An entire hour of performing stability while something feral paced behind my teeth.
When it ends and the office door closes behind me, the composure detonates.
I'm pacing before I've decided to move—five steps to the window, five to the desk, the distance shrinking each circuit. My hands won't still; I grip the edge of the mahogany desk and they tremble through the wood.
I want to find my brother, seize his collar, and demand to know what lives in the space between him and Skyler.
Not a vague impulse but a detailed blueprint: the corridor, the confrontation, my fist connecting with the jaw of the man who held this pack together while I couldn't hold myself.
This is Dylan. Twenty-two, stepping into a role that should've crushed him, running meetings while I sat in the dark after our father bled out on a festival floor.
The person I trust beyond strategy or calculation—my own brother. And I'm mapping the fastest route to his quarters over a woman I supposedly met a month ago.
The absurdity should defuse it, and it doesn't touch it.
Kailani's face flashes behind my eyelids. That unguarded second after I said the wrong name in her bed, the mask slipping to show something cold and precisely aware.
I said ‘Skyler’ while my wife was underneath me, naked and claimed.
The memory sits in my chest like swallowed glass that I can neither dissolve nor cough up. I forfeited every right to possessiveness the moment that name tore out of my mouth against a pillow that carried another woman's perfume.
Knowing this changes exactly nothing. Every pulse of wanting arrives already curdled. Each wave of possessiveness dragging the aftertaste of what I did to Kailani. And that bitterness curling right back into the wanting because there's nowhere else for it to go.
I've run the math a dozen times tonight and the equation keeps returning the same answer: I am a hypocrite.
But the hypocrisy has not decreased the wanting by a single fraction.
I stop pacing and stare at my own fists clenched against the desk. Knuckles blanched, tremor visible even in the dim study light.
If Dylan walked through that door right now, I would fight him. I would put my hands on the man who carried my pack when I was drowning, the man who has never once asked for anything he deserved, and I would not stop.
I love my brother the way I love breathing, and I'd do it anyway. What kind of man fractures the most important relationship he has over a pull he can't even explain?
A man with no framework for his own behavior. Which is, let's be honest, a first in my carefully curated existence.
Two sharp knocks on the study door—the cadence as familiar as my own heartbeat. I straighten, unclench my hands, arrange my face into something that isn't a confession.
"Figured you could use a refill after that riveting budget discussion." Dylan steps in carrying two coffees, his grin easy and open and utterly unguarded.
My fists curl behind my back before a single word finds my mouth.