Chapter 41
The room becomes silent again, for a minute, maybe two minutes.
“I love you,” she mumbles, folding into Jayden’s chest.
Jayden nuzzles her hair, burying kisses all over her. “Was it good for you?”
“I came first.”
“Well no good Alpha would leave his mate wanting,” Jayden snickers. He strokes her damp hair back from her face.
“You know, calling me Alpha... I wasn’t expecting it.”
“You like it?”
“You need to ask?”
Kira laughs and wraps herself all around Jayden like she could never be separated from him.
“I thought you’d like it.” She traces the new scar on Jayden’s neck with her finger. “It’s the full moon tomorrow.”
“It is.”
“I don’t think I’ll even be able to walk, let alone run.”
Jayden laughs and pulls away, swinging his legs off the bed.
Before Kira can even complain, Jayden has scooped her up in his arms, and she grabs at his bare chest like she’ll find something to hang on to as Jayden carries her to the bath in the next room.
There are no houses after Jayden’s. The wide window of the bathroom looks out to open forest.
“Then I’ll carry you,” he says, kissing her forehead.
They curl up together in the wide bath, and Kira watches as the water rises up, bubbles covering her stomach then her chest.
She rests her head back onto Jayden’s shoulder and feels every sting in her body soothe under the treatment of the hot water.
She takes care to trace each pattern of Jayden’s tattoos where his arms rest on the side of the bath, and tries to memorize those that she has not examined in enough detail before.
On his forearm, in dark black and flashes of light picked out, is a wolf. It’s Jayden’s wolf, she thinks, onyx black and bushy. She imagines, checking a small free patch of skin on Jungkook’s left arm, how it would look if he had two wolves: one jet black, and one dazzling white.
The change is easier on the next full moon.
Kira forgot how easy it could be when she didn’t have to concentrate.
The wolf takes over under the moonlight, and the freezing air begins to feel like the mildest breeze.
Every sore muscle stretches and relaxes. The trees part ahead of her, like the woods were grown to accommodate the wolves, and the moonlight that dapples the ground is bright and white. Kira’s paws are like snow on the earth.
‘The day that snow first falls, I’ll take you out to run.’
Jayden talks only to her. With the aggression of their neighbors proven false, and no threat hanging over the town, he can divert Kira so that the two of them take their own path through the woods alone, padding in the direction of their special lair.
You might lose me in the snow,Kira says, and then she freezes.
The words formed in her mind and drifted out into the air as if spoken by the very leaves on the trees.
I’d never lose you.
Kira spins around, watching the black wolf cut through the trees. The scars show when his fur ruffles with the breeze. ‘You can hear me?’
Did you think mates wouldn’t hear each other speak? Even in this tone, ruled by his wolf, Kira can hear that Jayden would be laughing if he were human, like Kira has just said something very silly.
She thinks in her other form that her face would turn pink.
In retaliation, she bumps into Jayden’s shoulder, and the wolf falls to the side with theatre, as if Kira’s small form is enough to knock him down.
For a minute, the two of them tumble over one another. Wolves love to play.
In this form Kira has found an innocence that she was never permitted to indulge in as a child.
She nips at Jayden’s tail and falls onto her back when Jayden pins her. Their muzzles brush close together, and Jayden runs his nose up Kira’s throat, scenting her with a scent Kira has come to recognise from their closeness.
Jayden lets Kira flatten him too, and it’s satisfying, even though she knows it’s kind of cheating.
They run together for a while, the sound of their paws deft and gentle in the muffled woods.
They’re predators, evolved to stalk and hunt, hunt in packs. Noel, Frank and Chris pass them, and they run alongside one another for some time under the gaze of the moonlight, but Jayden and Kira separate again to head towards their den.
Without hesitating, the two lie side by side, nestled in close and warm.
The grooming takes some time. First Jayden grooms Kira, and this time, for the first time, Kira returns the favor. It’s an intimacy she can’t imagine walking around during the daytime as a human.
If she closes her eyes, the sensation feels similar to stroking Jayden’s hair when they’re in bed, soothing for both of them, a reminder of closeness.
Usually during her time as a wolf, Kira cherishes not having to speak. She can slip into a different rhythm with the earth, giving over to instinct, listening only to Jayden’s instruction and following the movements of the pack along an innate map.
Not having to think for a while clears her head of the dark things that swirl sometimes at the back of her mind, replacing them with peace and understanding.
But she cannot pass up the chance to use the direct line she now has to the Alpha.
‘Will everyone else be able to hear me?’
‘No’. Jayden nibbles at the tips of her ears. His own has healed, but the scarring remains.
Kira thinks no wolf in their right mind would challenge Jayden to a fight now with battle scars so proudly displayed. Not to mention he’s a foot taller than any other wolf in the forest.
‘That pleasure is all mine.’
‘So we can have secret conversations?’
Jayden nuzzles her neck.
"We can do that anyway, every morning, in our bed.”
Jayden’s house has become her own. Kira doesn’t even remember moving out of the inn but then she had almost no possessions apart from the dress she brought for the funeral.
From the day Jayden limped out of the forest, held firm between her and Frank, Kira has never returned there.
Jayden needed her. Kira thinks she needs him too.
They return to silence after that. Kira allows her mind to drift. She looks up at what little of the sky she can see through the trees and examines the spattering of white stars against the clear night.
They seem to shine brighter with the fullness of the moon.
Closing her eyes, she pictures her wolf flitting through the woods, bright white and glowing, playing with her pack and following the enticing scent of prey, never caught up in thoughts, in overthinking, in memories.
Her brow tightens. She remembers the night that she crawled to bed early back at the dorm, leaving William behind at a party. Her head was throbbing.
With every breath, she lost grip on her reality. How she ended up back on the street she doesn’t recall.
Until this moment he has never remembered any of this at all. But she remembers slumping somewhere between buildings, tearing at her clothes and skin with her nails, moaning to herself in a deep distress.
She has never recalled a second of any of her episodes, but now she looks up again and sees the same moon. The moon shone full and foreboding that night. If anyone passed they must have thought her mad.
How many people ran past alleyways? Crossed the street? Changed direction when they saw this strange woman howling and scrabbling like a caged wolf?
She was a caged wolf. A lone wolf.
Jayden told her that there were no lone wolves. Lone wolves are always searching. Lone wolves are lost.
‘Kira?’ Jayden senses her distress. He nudges her side with his nose, and licks gently at her neck
‘I’m fine.’
‘Are you?’
‘I’m just remembering things.’
‘That’s good. ‘Jayden reassures her. ‘You’re growing closer to your wolf.’
Kira has never been able to block out her worst memories. Each night if she doesn’t distract herself – in the past with her work, now with her pack – her childhood plays itself out in gruesome detail like television reruns that she can never escape.
Every full moon, though, was locked away somewhere that she couldn’t access, as if she wasn’t ready yet. Her wolf lets her see them now.
Rather than an onslaught – rather than allowing her mind to be drowned in the memories – she tries to think of them as stories that she is now ready for, revealed one by one to her by a mother who has been watching, waiting, ever dedicated, for the moment in which she was ready to bear them.