Derek swung the bedroom door open just as Kira stepped out of the bathroom, one towel wrapped around her body and another twisted through her damp hair. She stopped when she saw Derek, and he stopped when he saw her.

For a moment, neither of them said anything.

He had barely looked at her properly since the chaos at Alpha Lucas’ packhouse. He had come to bed beside her in the early hours, not to sleep but to anchor her, because he had not forgotten how shaken she had looked after the Umbra attack, and he did not trust that the nightmares would stay away. He had lain there stiff as a board in the dark, telling himself it was purely practical. That was the story, and he was sticking to it.

But now, in the soft morning light, with water droplets cascading onto her shoulders and her skin flushed from the shower, his beast, Leo, stirred and gave a low, rolling howl that vibrated through Derek’s ribs.

Her jasmine scent rushed up to him across the room, warm and sweet, and it hit like a fist to the chest.

Dray’s voice pushed into his head, uninvited and irritating as always.

"You can’t trust this thing you’re feeling for her. You know you can’t. Love will only destroy you."

Derek rolled his jaw and pushed the thought aside. He was not in love. He was a man with functioning senses standing in a room with an attractive woman. That was all this was. The trouble was that Kira had been skinnier when he had first brought her to Dravengard. Weeks of regular meals and actual rest had changed that. She had filled out properly now, her frame softer and rounder in all the places that made keeping a wise distance genuinely inconvenient.

Now, she looked like she wanted to rain down fire, and he knew exactly why.

He moved further into the room and cleared his throat. "You’re ignoring me."

Kira moved past him towards the wardrobe, pulling the towel from her hair and running her fingers through the damp strands. "I’m not ignoring you. I’m getting dressed."

"You haven’t looked at me once since I walked in."

"I’ve been busy."

"You’re annoyed."

She pulled open the wardrobe door with slightly more force than necessary. "I’m not annoyed, Derek. Why would I be annoyed?"

He studied the back of her head, the tight set of her shoulders, the very deliberate way she was rifling through her clothes as if the fate of the world depended on finding the right jumper. His mouth curved just slightly.

"You’ve been very protective of me since last night," he said. "Throwing water at women. Standing in front of me in the courtyard." He paused. "Are you jealous?"

Kira spun around, pointing a hanger at him. "Coming from a man who almost tore another Alpha to shreds just for speaking to me."

He had the audacity to look unbothered. "I don’t get jealous. I get corrective."

She let out a short, sharp scoff and turned back to the wardrobe.

"Sandra is my ex," he said after a moment. "Nothing more."

"An ex," Kira repeated pleasantly, "with a son, who clearly doesn’t know her place and keeps showing up at your locations." She plucked a dress from the rail and held it up. "Totally normal. Totally fine."

Derek’s expression shifted. Something between amusement and something else crossed his face. "Is that what she told you? And you believed her?"

Kira lowered the dress slowly and looked at him properly for the first time since he had walked in. "Was there another version of events available to me? Because from where I was standing, she showed up with a child who has your eyes and your jaw, and you didn’t exactly hand me a written explanation."

She picked out another dress. "I’ll tell you what—I’ll see how you like it if a boy I once dated shows up out of the blue and starts telling charming stories about our shared past right in front of your face."

Derek crossed the room.

He didn’t do it quickly or dramatically. He simply walked towards her with that particular ease that always meant he had made a decision, and the rest of the world was just catching up.

Kira backed up on instinct until her shoulders met the wall, and then he was right there, filling up all the available air, his presence pressing in from every direction.

His hand came up and gripped her chin, tilting her face upward so that their eyes met and stayed met. Their breath mingled in the small space between them. His gaze dropped to her mouth for a half second before coming back up.

"Ralph is not my son." His tone was flat and certain. "He is the son of another man entirely. A man Sandra was seeing, while she was also claiming to be devoted to me. She has used that boy as a prop more times than I can count. I have no paternal connection to that child, and I do not want one."

Kira was quiet for a beat. Something in her chest unknotted slightly, though she refused to let him see it.

"Fine," she said eventually and made to move.

But Derek shoved her back, pinning her to the wall.

"Do you want to know what happens when that boy shows up?" he murmured.

Leo was not even trying to behave anymore, and Derek could feel the gold bleeding into his own eyes.

Despite every sensible thought she had ever had in her life, Kira’s legs went genuinely unreliable. Heat burst across her skin in waves that had nothing to do with the warm morning.

She swallowed hard, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird, yet she refused to back down. "Possessive much?" she managed, lifting her chin against his grip. "What exactly are you going to do?"

He did not answer with words.

His free hand found the edge of her towel, and in one swift motion, he pulled it loose and let it fall.

The cool air hit her skin for exactly one second before his hands found her waist and lifted her clean off the floor. She gasped, her hands flying to his shoulders as he pressed her back firmly against the wall. He didn’t even bother to fully undress. He just freed his hardened shaft from his trousers, and then, with a low growl that seemed to vibrate through the wall behind her, he lowered her down onto him.

The sound that left Kira’s mouth was immediate and involuntary, a sharp, breathless cry as he filled her completely, the stretch of him drawing a full-body shudder out of her that she had absolutely no hope of containing.

He gave her no time to adjust. His hips rolled forward with a slow, grinding force that pushed her higher up the wall, and her fingers dug into his shoulders hard enough to bruise. Not that he seemed to notice. His face was pressed against the side of her neck, his breathing rough and uneven, his grip on her hips bruising in its certainty.

"Derek—" His name came out broken.

He pulled back and drove forward again, harder this time, and the cry that tore out of her was swallowed by the solid wood of the wall behind her head. Her legs wrapped around him on instinct, drawing him deeper, and the sound that came from his chest at that was dark and satisfied and entirely animal.

He set a relentless, thorough pace, one hand braced against the wall above her head, the other gripping her thigh, holding her exactly where he wanted her. There was nothing tender about it. It was possessive down to the bone, every thrust a statement, the kind of thing that made articulate thought completely impossible.

Kira’s head fell back. She stopped trying to hold herself together. The pleasure built in tight, urgent waves, cresting faster than she expected, and when it broke, it broke completely. She cried out sharply, her whole body shaking, her nails raking his shoulder through his shirt, inner walls clenching around him with an intensity that dragged a deep, guttural groan from somewhere low in his chest.

He followed within moments, his rhythm stuttering then deepening, his forehead dropping to her shoulder as he spent himself with a roughness that felt entirely genuine, no performance or distance in it whatsoever.

They stayed like that for a long moment. Her back against the wall. His weight pressed her into it, both of them breathing hard.

When he finally lifted his head, he looked at her with those amber eyes, still slightly gold, still holding that unnerving steadiness.

"Any male who as much as breathes your way?" he said, his voice quiet and very, very serious. "He’d learn very quickly that some air isn’t just forbidden. It’s fatal."