Page 217 of Pucking Feral: Part Two

I want to see her so fucking badly it hurts.

But her scent is… different.

There's the wild and sweet honeysuckle that's always present, flooding the stairwell and my lungs as I breathe in without a mask or a scarf in the way.

And then there's the deeper, darker undertone that wasn't there before. A woodsy note to her scent. My feral brain registers it before my conscious mind has a chance to catch up.

Below, in the entryway, I hear Whiskey's voice spike. "Dude. Dude, Thane. Fuckin'… dude."

"Don't," Thane says, but he's laughing.

I descend the stairs carefully, ducking under the light fixture at the landing that's been my nemesis since the day I moved in. The closer I get, the stronger her changed scent becomes, and by the time I reach the bottom step, every alpha in the house has their pupils blown to the edges.

Including mine, I'm sure.

She's standing just inside the door, still in the green dress, but the dress is rumpled and the hem is crooked where it was clearly hiked up and pulled back down in a hurry. Her hair is a beautiful disaster of tangles and Thane's cologne is all over her, and her mascara is smudged under her eyes.

She's wearing Thane's tie loosely knotted around her neck, draped to hide her scar.

The edge of a new one is peeking out from beneath the tie.

She's been marked.

My heart slams against my ribs and I grip the railing.

My brother's scent is woven into hers now, threaded deep at the molecular level the way only a mating bond can do. The woodsy undertone curling through her honeysuckle isn't his cologne or proximity.

It's him.

Grafted into her blood.

My brother marked our mate.

Somehow, I'm not jealous.

The happiness is immediate and real, surging up through the tangle of everything else I'm feeling. I'm so fucking happy for her, and for Thane, that for one blissful second, nothing else matters.

It doesn't last.

Because if the pack is marking her, she'll want my mark, too.

I've known this was coming. It's been looming over my fucking head. Fuck, I was just thinking about it ten minutes ago.

How I'll never be able to give that to her because my body is a weapon. I savaged Wade Kelly like an animal, like the monster that was kept locked in a basement and fed raw meat squished under the door.

My teeth don't make marks.

They make wounds.

I can't mark her.

I can never fucking mark my mate.

My vision narrows to a pinhole and the static in my ears drowns out the sounds of my pack in the entryway.

Then her hand touches my face.

The pinhole opens.