Over at the hotel, Voren had already showered and dressed himself in one of the clothes Seraphine had purchased for him the night before.

Sleep had come in its usual limited quantity, two hours, maybe three, if he was being generous with himself. That was normal, for a man who’d spent years with a wolf like Bloodfang. He’d made his peace with it a long time ago, or at least he’d gotten good at pretending he had.

This time, it was just that his sleep deprivation was not Bloodfang, but the fact that he kept awake to make sure Seraphine was safe in her hotel room.

He was standing was just about to step into the hallway when he heard her door pull open, and he stepped out of his own room at the same moment and stopped.

She looked like she’d somehow walked backward through time overnight. He couldn’t explain it any more precisely than that. There was something easier about her this morning, something that had come loose from wherever it had been held tight, and it knocked him completely sideways. Voren had no good response to it to what exactly made Seraphine look so much younger overnight.

’Tell her she looks beautiful,’ Bloodfang said, filling the back of his mind the way he always did when he’d been waiting for exactly this kind of opening but his human knew better.

’No. She’ll read the wrong meaning into it.’

’It doesn’t matter,’ Bloodfang argued. ’Tell her.’

’No,’ Voren refused, and put real weight behind it.

Seraphine’s brows came together slightly as she looked at him. "Having trouble with your wolf?" A beat of silence stretched between them because it was the same with her wolf, and she could not tolerate it any longer. "That reminds me. Can you tell him to stop messing around with mine?"

Voren pulled himself together and offered her a small, measured smile. "Good morning. I slept well, thanks for asking."

’She’s right,’ Bloodfang said, deeply unimpressed with all of this. ’You really are impossible.’

He expected his human to say something more tangible and not just divert her attention like her words did not matter.

Seraphine hadn’t caught the internal back-and-forth, but she’d caught the dodge just fine. "Don’t put this on me. I never asked you to protect me, so you can’t pin your sleep schedule on anything I did. If you want, I’ll drive so you can rest on the way over."

"No, I’ll rest once you’re in the lab," Voren refused her offer. The fact was, he never let a woman take the wheel when he was in the car. It was just in his nature to take on those roles.

He looked her over once, keeping his face easy. "That outfit’s nice, but it’s not going to work for training."

He left it sitting there, the indirect ask, the quiet expectation that she would push back already folded into the way he’d said it.

"I’m not going to training."

"Pack rules say otherwise. And I’m not leaving you alone in that lab, not after I heard that some research went missing the last time you were in there unsupervised."

He was talking about the night Seraphine left the pack. Her blue eyes went a shade darker. The anger moved into them slowly and completely, like weather rolling in across an open field. "Voren."

Her voice had that particular edge she reached for when she was about two exchanges away from shutting the whole conversation down. "Everything I destroyed in that lab was mine."

"You might be right, but who’s going to back that up for you?" Voren asked, folding his arm to his chest, his gaze unreadable.

Seraphine opened her mouth and he stepped into the space before she could fill it. "Look, to keep anyone from reading something into it that has no business being there, just do it out in the open. Two hours, that’s it. You’re in, you’re out, you’ve got the rest of your day back. What do you say?"

She had two days left before she went back to the city anyway. And there was Daisy, the rogues, the unanswered questions, all the things she needed to look at closely and directly before she left. Daisy would be at training. She knew that without needing to ask.

"Fine," she said, the word landing flat. "I’ll go change."

The breath that left Voren’s chest was quieter than he’d meant it to be. He’d genuinely expected that to take a lot longer.

When she came back out, he looked at her and gave her a single small nod, something close to approval settling across his face. "That’s much better."

She had a bag hanging off one shoulder. He noted it and though he guessed what was inside, he still could not keep himself from confirming it. "Work clothes in there, I’m guessing."

Seraphine didn’t answer. She was already moving toward the exit, and he fell into step behind her before overtaking her at the car and pulling the door open before she reached it.

She paused, just a beat, one small hesitation, and then got in.

"Do you eat before training? I know a good place," he started, and she was already shaking her head before he’d finished the sentence.

"No. I don’t eat before. But I’m going back to that restaurant tonight for dinner. I’m hoping Damon can make out the place."

Voren’s frown moved across his face and was gone quickly, but it had been there. "Why him? I’ll take you."

Seraphine pulled in a slow breath, and whatever had been forming on the edge of what she wanted to say, she swallowed it. Let it go. Left the silence alone.

The car pulled up to the gym, and Bryan came blasting through the front doors before they’d even fully stopped moving. "She’s here, she’s here! Daddy was right!"

Seraphine turned and looked at Voren.

He had found something extremely interesting to look at on the far side of the parking lot.

She knew exactly what had happened.