Get It 20

[Kylie’s POV]

Five days before the ceremony, and I’m lacing up trainers to let my fated mate put his hands on me in a private yard. My decision-making skills deserve their own obituary.

Max is already warming up when I arrive, rolling his shoulders in the grey morning light. My stomach turns itself inside out because five days from now he names someone else and I’m here volunteering for a preview of what losing him tastes like.

“You’re early.” He tosses me wraps without preamble. “Thought I’d have to send a search party.”

“I set three alarms.” I wind the fabric around my knuckles with hands that are only slightly trembling. “Figured if I’m going to suffer, I should be punctual about it.”

“That’s the spirit.” His mouth does the thing—the almost-smile that isn’t warm enough to be safe and isn’t distant enough to survive. “We’re working grappling today—ground control, escapes, contact-heavy.”

Contact-heavy. My wolf stirs behind the concrete my mother poured over her, a faint desperate thrumming beneath my ribs I can’t quiet. I tighten the wraps and tell my pulse to behave, which is like telling weather to reschedule.

“Show me your base.” He circles me, and the air charges with every degree of his orbit. “Wider—you collapse inward when I close distance.”

“Maybe that’s a survival instinct.” I widen my stance and his hand finds my hip, adjusting the angle. My skin ignites beneath the fabric so fast I bite the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste iron.

“Survival instincts don’t make you smaller—they make you harder to move.” His thumb presses into the hollow above my hip bone, and the clinical tone doesn’t match what his touch does to the inside of my chest. I breathe through my teeth and pray it passes for effort.

We drill escapes. He takes me down, his weight shifting over mine while I bridge and turn, and every point where his body meets mine sends voltage through the cage in my chest. My wolf throws herself against the walls and the impact reverberates through my ribs, enormous and silent.

“Good—again.” He resets, pulls me into guard, his forearm crossing my collarbone while I fight for the underhook. His breath is warm against my temple and my vision narrows to the vein in his throat, the shift of muscle under his shirt.

“You’re holding your breath,” he murmurs near my ear. “Breathe through the contact or your body burns out before the technique lands.”

“My body is doing several things right now and none of them involve technique.” It comes out before I can filter it. His grip loosens for a fraction—a hesitation I register in every nerve I own—before his hands find their position again.

“Focus.” He repositions his hands with a deliberateness that tells me he’s managing the same fire from the other side of the match. “We go again.”

We go again. Each round puts his chest against my back, his thigh between mine, his palm against my stomach while my diaphragm forgets it has a job. The cage in my chest vibrates at a frequency that makes my teeth ache, and my wolf is throwing herself at the walls harder with every reset.

“Grappling round—full speed, sixty seconds.” He drops to the mat and opens his guard. “Come at me.”

I shoot in and he sprawls, arms threading around me. We scramble—knees, elbows, his hand catching my wrist, my heel hooking his thigh—contact continuous, total. My vision strobes gold at the edges and my wolf is throwing herself at the cage so hard my teeth ache.

He sweeps me and my back meets the mat. His body settles over mine—hips pinning hips, chest against chest, forearm braced beside my head—and the weight of him, the heat of him pressing into every sense I own, is more than the cage can hold.

The suppression cracks. Not a leak—a fracture, and my scent floods through. Full, unmistakable, saturated with wolf and want and the bond that has been screaming his name since I was old enough to understand it—the real scent, not distorted how it was the night of the heat.

Max goes rigid. Every muscle seizes—arms, shoulders, the thighs braced against mine. His pupils blow so wide the blue vanishes into black, and the sound that escapes him is barely human, torn from somewhere behind his ribs.

He inhales once, deep, his nose dropping to the curve of my throat where my pulse is hammering. His whole body shudders on the exhale, and when he lifts his head the expression on his face rewrites every interaction we’ve ever had.

Not suspicion, not confusion—bone-deep certainty. His eyes move across my face like he’s seeing me for the first time and the last time at once, and my chest cracks open watching it happen.

The suppression clamps back. My mother’s magic seizes the fracture and seals it, and my scent vanishes—gone, confiscated. I watch him register the absence, watch his nostrils flare on empty air where a second ago there was everything.

He doesn’t move off me. His arms tremble where they brace against the mat, his weight still pinning my hips, three inches of charged air between our mouths that neither of us is breathing. My fingers curl into his shirt because letting go would mean falling through something that has no bottom.

“That was—” His voice fractures, barely a whisper. He swallows, jaw working. “Your scent, just now, it was different from—Kylie—”

“Max.” His name comes out like a plea and a warning braided together, my throat so tight each syllable costs something I won’t get back. “Don’t.”

“Mate.” He says it like a man reading his own verdict—quiet, certain, wrecked. “That’s what my wolf—” He stops, chest heaving, and his hand comes up to my jaw without seeming to decide it.

“Tell me I’m wrong.” His voice shakes, raw, begging me to give him something he can survive. “Tell me I imagined it.”

My mouth opens. The lie is right there—shaped, rehearsed, ready—and for the first time in my life my tongue won’t carry it. My eyes burn and my chest caves and the silence answers louder than any word I could speak.

Every question he’s asked, every door I’ve closed, every lie I’ve handed him rearranges behind his eyes. His thumb trembles against my cheekbone and the tenderness in the touch is the most terrifying thing—someone choosing to stay with the version of me I was taught to bury.

His forehead drops to mine. His breath comes ragged against my mouth, and between us the air holds everything neither of us has said and everything we can’t take back.

He pulls back slowly, staring at me with equal parts devastation and a certainty that will not bend. The look on his face is the end of hiding and the beginning of something I have no map for, and my hands are still fisted in his shirt because letting go would mean admitting this is real.

“What are you?” His voice shakes so hard the words barely hold together, and the question opens a door beneath us both. The answer will bury me, and the silence already has.