Get It 13

The fluorescent light turns the blood theatrical—bright red against white porcelain, splattered across my fingers like evidence I’m desperately scrubbing before anyone files a report. I run the faucet and cup water against my face, watching pink spiral down the drain.

My reflection hasn’t recovered—hollowed out, grey at the edges, the kind of face that belongs on a missing poster except nobody would notice me gone. I press a wad of damp paper against my upper lip and breathe through my mouth, tasting copper and recycled air.

“You missed a spot.” Max fills the doorway with his shoulders and his absolute refusal to exist anywhere else. “Left side, under your jaw.”

I wipe without looking at him. “Following me into bathrooms is becoming a signature move, Cornwell—should I be concerned or flattered?”

“Bleeding from your face in hallways is becoming yours.” He doesn’t step inside but he doesn’t leave either, occupying the threshold like he’s already closed every exit. “That wasn’t normal, Kylie.”

“It was extremely normal—dry air, dehydration, stress.” I toss the paper towel and reach for another, keeping my hands busy because the alternative is letting them shake where he can watch. “Pick whichever one bores you most.”

“You need to see the pack healer.” He says it the way he gives orders on the training field—not a suggestion, a coordinate on a map he’s already decided to march toward.

The word healer drives something cold through my chest. A healer’s hands on me would find the suppression in minutes—the cage crushing my wolf, the glamour stitched into my scent, every lie my mother spent two decades building. I’d be unraveled before the exam reached my pulse.

“I don’t need a healer.” I meet his eyes in the mirror because turning around would halve the distance between us. “I need everyone to stop treating a nosebleed like a five-alarm emergency.”

“This isn’t about the nosebleed.” He shifts his weight in the doorframe, and his voice drops out of command into something rawer. “You’ve been getting worse every day since the heat—not stabilizing. Worse.”

The number of people watching me is multiplying, and each new pair of eyes is another fracture in walls my mother poured her entire life into maintaining.

“It’s an exaggeration—I got dizzy on an empty stomach.” I crumple the paper towel and drop it in the trash, pressing my palms flat against the sink edge. “I don’t need a healer poking around inside me.”

“Three days ago you finished a sparring round with blood on your lip you didn’t notice.” He pushes off the frame and takes one step inside, and the bathroom contracts around us. “You flinch when lights get bright—so tell me which part of this is fine.”

My throat works around three different deflections and swallows all of them. He’s not guessing—he’s assembling a case from evidence I thought I was hiding, and his precision makes my ribs ache because nobody has ever watched me this carefully for reasons that weren’t about controlling what I am.

“What happened between us can’t happen again.” The words come out harder than I planned, each one a brick I’m stacking between us with my bare hands. “You know that, Max.”

His jaw shifts, but the change in direction doesn’t throw him—he absorbs it, recalculates, holds my gaze. “Why?”

“Because you’re my stepbrother and the pack watched our parents marry.” I turn from the mirror to face him because the reasons deserve eye contact, even if looking at him costs me something vital. “Mina’s family expects your answer in ten days.”

He doesn’t interrupt, so I keep going, building the wall higher. “Because if this pack decides I’m the reason their future alpha wavered, they won’t just come for me—they’ll come for my mother, and she’s the only family I have.”

No counter-argument assembles behind his eyes. Just his body one step inside the doorway and his attention steady on mine while I hand him every reason this has to end.

“Every single thing you just said is true.” He says it quietly, without fight, and the absence of resistance lands harder than any argument. “The pack, Mina, the optics—I know.”

“Then we’re done.” My voice should sound resolved. It sounds like a door closing on my own fingers.

Every muscle in my face is fighting to hold the performance together while my hands grip the sink behind me, knuckles white, as if letting go would mean sliding to the floor. Done is the right word—I just didn’t expect it to taste like this.

“We agree on the facts.” He takes another step and the space between us shrinks to something my lungs can’t process. “But I don’t understand what’s happening between us—I’ve tried to make it fit into something I recognize and I can’t.”

His eyes hold mine and the next words come stripped of performance, of authority, of everything except the raw weight of a man caught between what his world demands and something he can’t release. “You’re not nothing to me, and I won’t pretend otherwise.”

My chest constricts around it because I know the signs of that trap—I’ve been living inside one since I was old enough to understand what I am. The difference is he walked into his on purpose, eyes open, and I don’t know what to do with someone who chooses the cage.

“Max—” His name fractures on the way out, half warning, half surrender that I can’t afford.

“You’re not nothing.” He says it once more, quieter, and his hand rises to my jaw—contact, his palm warm along the curve of my throat, thumb tracing my cheekbone. My breath seizes so hard my ribs ache from the stop.

His forehead tips toward mine and the distance between our mouths dissolves to shared air. His fingers curve against the back of my neck and my spine bends toward him, traitorous and aching, my body overruling every calculation my brain has spent twenty-one years perfecting.

Voices. They flood the hallway outside—a group passing, someone’s laugh ricocheting off tile—and the sound cracks through the space between us.

We break apart. His hand drops, my spine finds the sink, and three feet of bathroom air fills the gap where his mouth was a breath from mine. My pulse drums so hard behind my ears the fluorescent buzz vanishes under it.

He stands there with his jaw working, chest rising with a control that looks like it costs him everything. Then he steps back toward the door, and his expression settles into something I recognize from the training yard—he has made a decision I possibly won’t survive.

“I’m going to find out what’s wrong with you.” His eyes hold mine, and it isn’t a request or a threat—it’s terrain he’s already committed to crossing. “Whether you help me or not.”

The door swings shut and I grip the porcelain with both hands while the room tilts—because finding out means records, and records mean questions, and every question leads to the woman who built the walls I’m bleeding behind.