The engine's low hum was the only sound in the car, a stark contrast to the thunder still echoing in my veins. Knox drove with a frustrating, easy calm, one wrist draped over the steering wheel as if he hadn't just shattered and remade me in a mall fitting room.
I stared straight ahead, the passing streetlights washing his profile in intermittent gold and shadow. Mad wasn't the right word. It was too small. I was a live wire of fury, humiliation, and a shameful, lingering electricity that pooled low in my stomach. My body was a traitor. The anger was clean, sharp; it wanted to scream, to throw his controlled silence back in his face. But underneath it, a current of something else ran deep and warm, remembering the press of the mirror, the cool leather, the utter stillness before the storm.
And I could still feel it. The damp, undeniable proof against my skin. A flush burned up my neck. He'd reduced me to this, sitting in silence, physically marked by what happened, while he looked like he was just coming back from a casual drive.
"You have nothing to say?" My voice came out tighter than I intended, strained.
He glanced over, his eyes glinting in the dark. A slow, knowing smirk touched his lips, a smirk that remembered everything. "What would you like me to say, bunny?" he asked, his voice a low rumble that seemed to vibrate in my own chest. "That I'm sorry?"
He wasn't. Not even a little. And the worst part? The terrifying, secret part I clutched tight in the silence?
I wasn't sure I wanted him to be.
"Yes," I said, not sparing him a glance. The word was an icicle, meant to pierce.
A low, dark chuckle filled the space between us. It wasn't a laugh of amusement, but of acknowledgment. He heard the lie in it, the lie I was telling us both.
The car slowed, then pulled over beneath the skeletal branches of an old oak, still a few blocks from my house. The engine went silent, leaving only the sound of my own traitorous breath.
"Look at me."
I didn't. I kept my eyes glued to a crack in the sidewalk across the street.
His fingers, warm and inescapable, caught my chin. Not harsh, but utterly firm. He turned my face toward his. In the dim light from a distant porch lamp, his eyes were purple pools, reflecting my own fractured expression back at me.
"You're not sorry," he stated, his thumb brushing over my bottom lip, a whisper of a touch that contradicted the steel in his voice. "You're scared. Of how much you wanted it. Of how much you still want it."
He leaned closer, his breath mingling with mine. The scent of him, leather and cold night air and something uniquely Knox, wrapped around me, undoing my resolve faster than any touch.
"The proof is on your skin, Bella," he murmured, his gaze dropping to my lips for a heartbeat before locking back onto mine. A devastating, intimate accusation. "Your anger is just the fuse. I'm the flame. And you," he said, finally releasing my chin to trail the back of his knuckles down my heated cheek, a gesture almost like reverence, "are so very tired of pretending you don't want to burn."I frowned, a fresh surge of defiance cutting through the dizzying spell of his words. I slapped my palm over his face and pushed him back, hard.
"Don't touch me, you stupid panther," I spat, the childish insult the only weapon I had.
He recoiled, not from the force, but from the name. And that is when I saw it.
For a split second, as his head turned, a sleek, pointed black ear, not human but distinctly feline and velvety, puffed out from beneath the thick fall of his hair near his temple. It twitched, once, in clear agitation, before vanishing back into the dark strands as if it had never been.
My anger stalled, replaced by a cold, sharp curiosity that pierced the last of the haze.
So he hides them there?My hand fell back into my lap. The anger in my chest cooled, solidifying into something sharper: understanding, and a fresh, profound sense of betrayal.
He didn't move. The car was a silent vault, the earlier heat now frozen over. His expression had shut down, the predatory gleam replaced by a wary, calculated stillness. The most telling part was his silence. He didn't try to explain it away.
In a beast world, ears or a tail were as common as eye color. To hide them wasn't just odd; it was deeply personal. It was a rejection of a core part of oneself, a secret kept from the world… and from me.
"You hide them,"
I said, my voice flat. It wasn't a question. His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. That was the only answer I needed.
All the intensity of the fitting room, the possessiveness, the dangerous dance, it crashed against this new, cold fact. He had let me see the most vulnerable, unrestrained version of myself, while he was actively, deliberately concealing a fundamental piece of his own.
The wetness between my thighs felt stupid now. A naive reaction to a performance. I had been unraveled by a shadow, while the man, the beast, beside me remained tightly, insultingly wound.
"Take me home, Knox,"
I said, turning to stare out the window at the passing world where everyone else was allowed to simply be. The words were final. "My parents will be waiting for their daughter. Not whatever it is you're pretending to be."
His voice was a low growl, a rumble that seemed to vibrate from his chest rather than his throat. The carefully constructed human mask was gone.
"No."
He didn't touch me. He didn't need to. The single syllable was a wall, a command that resonated in the hollows of my own bones, bones that were smaller, lighter, built to flee.
My own rabbit ears, usually relaxed and soft against my scalp, went taut and rigid, swiveling back in an ancient signal of alarm I could not suppress. A faint tremor started deep within me, a primal drumbeat under my skin.
His head turned, and he made no effort to conceal it. Both sleek, black panther ears swiveled forward from his dark hair, pinning back against his skull. They were fully exposed, velvety and predatory, aimed directly at me. At my own telltale, trembling ears.
"You don't get to call me a pretender," he said, his voice dropping into a register that was pure, vibrating dominance. It was the sound of the forest's deepest shadow. "Not when your entire body is singing a fear response so loud I can taste it."
He leaned closer, not enough to touch, but enough for his scent, deep, musky, carnivore, to envelop me completely. My breath hitched.
"That wasn't a human in that room with you," he murmured, his gaze dropping to the frantic pulse in my throat. "And you weren't just a girl. You were prey who chose not to run. Who arched into the bite."
He let the truth hang in the air, raw and unmasked. The most terrifying truth of all.
"The hiding is for a world that doesn't understand the dance," he said, his eyes, now gleaming with a faint, bestial purple, holding mine captive. "But you and I, we don't get to pretend. The rabbit knows the panther. And the panther," he finished, the ghost of a sharp toothed smile touching his lips, "has never wanted anything more."
The word cracked through the car like a whip.
"No."
It was sharp, harsh, a desperate bark of sound from my own throat. I recoiled, pressing my back against the passenger door, putting as much space between us as the seat would allow. My ears lay flat, defensive.
"I think you're mistaken," I said, my voice trembling despite my effort to steel it. "I would never be with you. I don't want you as my alpha. You crossed a line, Knox. You crossed so many lines."
The words were a shield, hastily erected. I was building a wall of denial, brick by furious brick, to protect the terrified rabbit cowering inside.
I was scared. My whole life, I'd promised myself, promised my family, that I would bond with a gentle, herbivorous alpha. A stag, perhaps, or a sturdy ox. Someone safe. Someone whose nature didn't whisper of blood and sharp teeth in the night. It was the sensible path for a rabbit.
But I had never accounted for this. For the blinding, possessive focus of a carnivore. For the way his attention didn't feel like gentle grazing, but like being fixed in a spotlight from which there was no escape. They were dangerous. Unpredictable. Their instincts were woven with a violence my kind had evolved to fear above all else.
A cold dread slithered down my spine. What if he hurt me without meaning to? What if, in a moment of passion or anger, the predator simply overrode the man? The old school story flashed in my mind, the tragic, hushed-up accident where a wolf alpha, overcome during a territorial dispute, had badly injured his sheep mate. It was called an accident. A loss of control.
My breath came in short, panicked little puffs. I stared at him, seeing not just Knox, but the panther, the powerful jaw, the retractable claws, the instinct to chase, to pounce, to consume.
"I can't," I whispered, the fight draining from my voice, leaving only raw fear. "You could… you could eat me."
He went very, very still. The low rumble in his chest cut off into a sudden, absolute silence that was somehow more terrifying. His panther ears, which had been focused intently on me, swept back, flattening against his skull in a gesture that wasn't aggression, but something like… pain.
For a long moment, he just looked at me. The ultramarine glint in his eyes dimmed, banked like dying coals.
"Is that what you truly see when you look at me?" he asked, his voice quiet, stripped of all its earlier dominance. It was just a voice, rough with an emotion I couldn't name. "A mindless beast who can't tell his mate from a meal?"
He didn't move closer. He did the opposite. He leaned back into his own seat, putting deliberate distance between us. The action felt more devastating than any advance.
"The accident," he said, the words precise and cold. "The wolf and the sheep. He was sick, Bella. Rogue. His mind was already gone long before he ever bit her. It wasn't instinct. It was madness." He turned his head to stare out the windshield, his profile sharp and bleak in the darkness. "You think I haven't spent every moment since I first caught your scent fighting my own instincts? Not to hunt, but to protect. To hide you away from anything that might scare you. Even," he added, his voice dropping to a near whisper, "from me."
He finally looked back at me, and his eyes were full of a solemn, devastating honesty.
"You fear I'll consume you. And you're right. I will. But not with my teeth." He placed a hand over his own chest, right over his heart. "It's already happening to me. You've consumed every thought, every breath. So yes, I'm dangerous. But not to you. Never to you. The most dangerous thing I'll ever do to you, little rabbit, is love you more fiercely than you think you can bear."
The words were a small, cold stone dropped into the heavy silence between us.
"Just take me home."
All the fire, the fear, the dizzying confession, it drained away, leaving me hollow and tired. My ears, still laid back, ached with the strain. I couldn't process his words, the raw vulnerability in them that was more disarming than any threat. It was too big, too terrifying. The safest thing, the only thing I knew how to do, was to retreat.
I turned my face fully toward the window, watching the familiar streets blur past, a silent wall erected between us.
For a second, he didn't move. The air in the car was thick with everything unsaid, everything I was too scared to touch. Then, I heard the soft click of the gear shift, and the engine's purr deepened as he pulled back onto the road. He didn't speak again.
The rest of the drive passed in absolute quiet. The only sound was the hum of the tires on asphalt, a steady rhythm carrying me away from the precipice he'd shown me. He didn't look at me. His hands were tight on the wheel, his own ears still pinned back, a silhouette of contained storm.
When he finally pulled up to my house, the lights were on inside. My parents were home. The normalcy of it was a stark, almost cruel contrast to the world inside his car.
I reached for the door handle, my movements stiff.
"Bella."
His voice stopped me, just my name, spoken so quietly it was almost lost in the sound of the idling engine.
I didn't turn around. I couldn't.
He didn't say anything else. After a moment, I pushed the door open and stepped out into the cool, ordinary night air, leaving the heat and the heartbreak and the haunting promise of his world sealed behind me in the dark car.