Blaze POV
I left for an hour.
An hour. An hour to clear my head, to put the last of those red‑haired pests in their place, and somehow when I came back the scent of him and her had already soaked into the air like spilled wine. Reed's warmth clung to her like smoke. The audacity of it—of him—made something inside me snap so loud I could still hear the echo.
She'd woken up before I returned. Of course she had. Of course fate would conspire to put her within reach of another animal while my back was turned. After everything—after the kidnapping, the alpha hunt, the horrors my siblings had thought were amusing—how dare anyone assume they could treat her like a thing to be passed around?
No. Not while I drew breath.
I hadn't gone home to laze about. I hadn't gone to sleep. I went to do a job, and I did it with the sort of fury that leaves marks on the world. I went to hunt. Not for sport. For something far uglier and far more necessary: accountability.
