Danae’s POV
I looked up through the curtain of hair that had fallen across my face.
He stood ten feet away, and even in casual clothes—dark trousers, a navy henley with the sleeves pushed to his forearms—he occupied the space around him like a fixed point.
Still.
Weighted.
The kind of still that isn’t passive.
“This is not the place or time to settle personal disputes,” he continued, his voice carrying without being raised.
His eyes moved across the scene—Galen’s clenched fists, Eirwen’s bleeding cheek, my position on the ground—and something cold moved through those blue irises.
“All of you, leave.
Now.”
Galen’s transformation was almost as nauseating as everything else about him.
The wildness drained from his face like water through sand.
He straightened, smoothed the front of his shirt with hands that visibly trembled, and composed his expression into something appropriately deferential.
“Future Alpha,” he said.
Bowed head.
Careful tone.
“I apologize for the disturbance.
My mate betrayed—”
“I don’t care about your excuses.” Caspian cut him off with the precision of someone who has never once needed volume to be taken seriously.
“This is a public space with human witnesses.
Control yourself, or the Council hears about this.”
Galen paled.
“Yes.
I remained against the pillar.
Pain throbbed in steady pulses through my shoulder and wrist, and my cheek still burned where the first blow had landed.
Eirwen crouched beside me, pressing the back of her hand lightly to the scratches on her face.
“Thank you,” I said, lifting my eyes to Caspian’s.
Something moved through his expression—layered and fast, recognition and something that looked almost like confusion, and underneath both, something else I couldn’t parse.
His gaze lingered for a half-second too long, and I was acutely, unwillingly aware of exactly how we’d last seen each other.
“Can you stand?”
I nodded, used the pillar to lever myself upright, and failed entirely to suppress the wince when my shoulder protested the movement.
His gaze tracked it.
He looked at Eirwen then, taking in the three bright lines on her cheekbone with a clinical focus that shifted something in his jaw.
“Werewolf scratches can cause infection in humans.
Those need to be cleaned properly.”
“We’ll go to the hospital—” I began.
“Get in my car.” He nodded toward a black Maybach at the lot’s edge.
“My clinic is ten minutes away.”
“That really isn’t necessary—”
“And wait hours in an emergency room?” No heat in his voice.
No negotiation either.
“Get in the car.”
Eirwen and I exchanged a look.
She gave me the smallest nod—pragmatic, not enthusiastic.
We followed him across the lot.
He opened the rear door.
In the brief transfer of motion—his hand, mine—our fingers made contact, and the current that shot through me was immediate and embarrassing.
I got in quickly and stared at the headrest in front of me.
From the back seat, I watched his profile as he drove.
The way his hands sat on the wheel—relaxed, certain, the kind of stillness that costs nothing because it is simply native.
Memories surfaced before I could stop them: those same hands, that same warmth, a hotel room I’d spent three days trying to forget.
My face heated.
I shifted in my seat and focused on the passing street instead.
The clinic occupied the ground floor of a glass-and-stone building in the quieter end of the upscale district.
Inside, Caspian arranged for a nurse to take Eirwen away to treat her scratches.
Before I could follow, his hand closed lightly on my elbow.
That same current.
Longer this time.
“You need to be examined too,” he said, lower than before.
“That shoulder took a hard hit.”
He guided me to a private examination room, his palm resting briefly against my lower back, and each step I was excruciatingly aware of him—his scent, the heat radiating from his body, the fact that the last time we’d stood this close, neither of us had been fully clothed.
The door closed behind us with a soft, final click.
He turned.
His eyes moved over my face first, then slowly, deliberately, down—not rude, not leering, but thorough, as though cataloguing.
His nostrils flared slightly.
A werewolf thing, I’d come to understand.
Scenting.
I wondered, with a flush of mortification, what exactly he was reading.
“So,” he said, and a very faint, one-sided curve appeared at the corner of his mouth.
“We meet again.”