Get It 16

[Kylie’s POV]

When I open the door, he looks like someone took him apart in that study I saw him walk in behind his father, and didn’t bother reassembling the pieces. Tie gone, collar open, jaw carrying tension that means he’s been grinding his teeth since he left his father’s office.

I step aside and let him in, because it’s two in the morning and I have apparently exhausted my lifetime supply of self-preservation on a single evening of counting green beans. His scent fills my room and my stomach drops so fast I grip the door handle to stay vertical.

He sits on the edge of my bed, elbows on his knees, hands hanging. “My father won’t budge. Seven days, a name in front of the pack, no exceptions.”

“I heard the toast.” I close the door and lean against it, because crossing the room would put me within arm’s reach. “The whole table heard it, right between the lamb and Mina’s victory lap.”

“I told him I wasn’t certain about her.” His thumb drags across his knuckles, wearing a groove. “He said certainty is a luxury the pack can’t afford its alpha.”

“He’s not wrong.” The words taste like vinegar, but someone in this room has to keep saying what’s true. “The pack needs stability, Max.”

“Something changed the night of the heat.” He looks up, and his eyes in the lamplight hold something raw enough that I press harder against the door. “I can’t undo it, and I can’t make anything else louder than this.”

My throat works around a sound that doesn’t make it out. He keeps pulling the word nothing from my mouth and handing it back broken.

“I’m the worst possible person for you.” I wrap my arms around myself because my hands won’t stop trembling. “Wolfless, stepfamily, a nobody who places thirty-first and eats lunch alone.”

“I don’t care.” He says it without drama—just the flat certainty of someone who’s burned the spreadsheet. “I’ve tried caring about what the pack wants and it doesn’t stick.”

“This will destroy us both.” My voice barely clears a whisper, and my nails find each other inside my crossed arms. “You understand that, Max.”

“I’m already destroyed.” He holds my gaze, steady. “Happened somewhere between the bathroom and right now.”

I should deliver the speech my mother rehearsed into my bones—stay small, want nothing you can’t survive losing. Instead I cross the room and sit beside him, and the mattress dips and our knees touch and I stop breathing.

His hand finds my knee, thumb tracing one slow circle through the fabric. His forehead tips against mine and I make a sound that is half breath, half the unraveling of thirteen years of conditioning.

“Tell me to leave,” he whispers, nose grazing mine, breath warm against my mouth. “Tell me and I will.”

“I can’t.” The admission is barely shaped by my lips. “I’ve been trying since you knocked and my mouth won’t form the words.”

He kisses me—nothing like the heat. Slow, deliberate, his mouth learning mine with a patience that cracks the walls behind my chest wide open.

He lays me back with one hand cradling my head. His mouth traces my jaw, my throat, the hollow beneath my ear, and my fingers twist into his shirt while my back arches toward him.

I pull the shirt over his head and my palms find his chest—warm skin, his heart slamming against my hand. He shudders under my touch, and the realization that I wreck him the same way he wrecks me makes my eyes burn.

His fingers peel my shirt up slowly, knuckles dragging along my ribs. He kisses the curve of my breast, the dip of my waist, the soft skin below my navel, and I’m shaking so hard the headboard rattles.

His mouth trails down my inner thigh after sliding my shorts free. His lips press against skin so sensitive my hips lift off the bed, and his hands pin them gently back down—patient, unhurried, like we have all the time instead of seven borrowed days.

His tongue finds the center of me and my vision whites out. My fingers twist into his hair and a sound tears free that I muffle against my wrist—hiding my pleasure the same way I hide everything else.

He reads my body like a language he already speaks, adjusting every stroke to the catch of my breath, the arch of my spine. My thighs tremble against his shoulders and the pressure builds until I’m clawing at the sheets.

The orgasm rolls through me—not a detonation but a slow devastating wave from the base of my spine through every nerve I own. He stays gentle through it, hands anchoring my hips while I come apart.

He rises over me and I pull him down, wrapping around him, needing his weight. He enters me slowly—so slowly I feel every inch, the stretch and the fullness and the unbearable intimacy of eye contact while he does it.

His forehead drops to mine. His hand cups my face with a reverence that splits me open. “Stay with me,” he murmurs, and I nod because my voice is gone, somewhere between my chest and the ceiling.

He moves—slow deep strokes that drag sounds from both of us, mine muffled against his shoulder, his caught between clenched teeth. His hand finds mine and pins it above my head, fingers laced, and the tenderness of the gesture makes my eyes sting.

He’s touching me like something he’s claiming, and I keep reaching for him—his shoulders, his back, the curve of his neck—like holding tight enough could stop morning from arriving. His pace builds and my body rises to meet every stroke, hips rolling against his.

The second orgasm catches me mid-breath. I bury my face in his neck, my whole body clenching around him while he groans against my temple and follows me over.

We lie tangled, my head on his chest, his fingers tracing patterns on my shoulder. His heartbeat slows under my ear—the steadiest thing in my world, which is pathetic and true and I’m too wrecked to pretend otherwise.

I watch him in my bed—the way sleep softens the line his father carved between his brows, the way his arm curls around me like a reflex. In seven days he’ll stand before the pack and I’ll be the secret he can never name.

A girl visited in the dark, in a room no one will ever know he entered. The countdown has already started and I’m memorizing him against it.

He stirs, presses his mouth to my forehead—long, lingering, a goodbye hiding behind a kiss. Then he eases out of bed, pulls his shirt on, each movement quiet and careful.

I follow him to the door because I am constitutionally incapable of letting him go without watching him leave. He takes my hand, squeezes it one last time, transferring all his warmth to me, and leaves.

I look at his back. And then my gaze slides down the dim corridor. My mother stands at the far end, still in her dinner clothes, eyes moving between where Max went and my doorway with a calculation that turns my blood to standing ice.