Voren wiped the rain off his face with his palm. It came straight back. The sky wasn’t done with any of them tonight.
"Thank you," Seraphine said, and every word of it was final. "But I’ll walk."
"It’s not safe." Voren’s eyes moved briefly down the road and back. More trees could come down. Visibility was almost nothing. Whatever strength Seraphine had, and she had plenty, it wasn’t the same as an Alpha cutting through a storm. "You can’t see twenty feet in front of you out there."
"You don’t understand." She pressed her lips together, eyes sliding sideways for just a second like she was already dreading the next part. The rain was soaking through her completely, her hair flat against her face. "It’s that time of the month."
She got the whole sentence out, and the faint smile that crossed Voren’s face was so quick she almost missed it.
"Your period?" His voice was flat, amusement sitting just underneath it. The exact tone a person uses when someone tells them something they consider a non-issue.
Seraphine looked at him longer than she normally would before she finally pulled her eyes away.
She wanted the rain to become something physical. Something with arms. Something that could pick her up and carry her horizontally into the distance so she never had to exist in this specific moment again.
Voren, completely unbothered and apparently unaware of what she was internally dissolving, bent forward and dropped his shoulders into position like this was already decided.
"I came into this world through a she-wolf." He said it simply. "It doesn’t bother me. Get on."
She stood there in the rain and stared at the back of his head.
This man. This cold, emotionally locked, impossible to read Alpha who argued with her about everything and agreed with her about nothing.
This was the same person? Because the one bent forward in the rain waiting patiently for her to climb on his back didn’t match the one she had built a whole picture of in her head. There was something underneath the surface of Voren that she kept catching glimpses of and couldn’t quite see clearly.
Ten full seconds passed, and Voren didn’t move. Didn’t rush her. He just waited.
Her brain was still running arguments until her body stopped listening to them.
She reached forward, her hands found his shoulders. And then she was up, chest against his back, legs wrapping around him from behind, and the warmth of him hit her like a wall.
He was completely soaked on the outside but warm underneath it, solid in a way that made the cold of her own wet clothes feel sharper by comparison.
"Hold on tight." There it was again, that almost-light quality in his voice. Almost like he was enjoying this just a little. "It’s slippery."
Her arms went around his neck.
And then he ran. Not carefully, but how someone moves when the ground is theirs and the weather is just background noise. Smooth and fast and completely unbothered by her weight, like she was nothing at all.
She held on and the packhouse lights grew closer through the curtain of rain and something strange moved through her that she couldn’t name properly.
There were bits and pieces of memories trying to surface and yet, too hard to grasp. It was like reaching into a dark room for a light switch and knowing exactly where it is before your hand gets there.

He walked to the car, got in, and pulled the door shut. Then he mind linked the mechanic. ’I’m bringing Alpha Voren’s car. Work on it fast.’


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