Her mouth curved a fraction, but otherwise, she didn’t move. She did not need words or actions to move people.

She just needed to look at them.

He moved off the door and into the space, careful with his steps because the softness here deserved it.

The candles painted his knuckles gold. The nest swallowed his shadow. He stopped at the edge of the bed and let the distance sit between them until the request in his chest found the shape it wanted.

He let the smile drop a notch so the weight of the moment could be seen clearly. 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

"I need you to take me out hunting."

The pup lifted its head at the tone, blinked once like a child woken too early, and then dropped its chin back to the blanket when Sera’s fingers drifted along its back. The room held still the way a field holds still when a hawk settles its wings.

He did not speak again. He did not fill the silence with jokes or old tricks or the kind of charm that makes men underestimate you.

He let the request stand, unadorned, because truth did not need dressing.

Psycho purred in his bones. Good. Ask without apology. You want to learn. She wants you strong. This is how we begin.

He met Sera’s eyes and did not look away.

The creature in him leaned forward, interested rather than hungry.

He wondered how far the cold would carry him if she said yes. He wondered what the air would feel like on his skin when he let the leash slip and gave the voice inside him more room to move.

He wondered whether the ice would crawl his forearms like gauntlets or whether it would bloom across his chest first like a crest.

He also wondered if her answers would hurt, and found he did not care. Pain had never taught him to turn back. Pain had taught him to listen.

She closed the book with two fingers in the page to keep her place.

The soft thud of paper against paper sounded like consent in his head, but he did not let hope jump too soon. Her palm rested on the pup’s spine until its breath deepened again.

The scent of apples warmed as one of the candles found a fresher seam of wax.

He sat on the edge of an ottoman at the foot of the bed because it felt wrong to loom and wrong to kneel.

The nest pulled at his balance the way a tide pulls at someone’s ankles.

For a moment he pictured himself in that nest and felt the image burn a hole in the usual shields he kept between himself and comfort. He glanced away, embarrassed by no one but himself.

You want to belong, Psycho noted, curious rather than cruel. Interesting.

"Out there," he continued, voice steady and low, "I can hear things the way water hears a shoreline. I can feel the pull in the air before snow forms. I have been testing in small ways. I want larger ones. I want limits. I want to break them. I need someone who can call me back if I go too far."

A small thing to admit. A large truth hidden inside the shape of it.

He did not pretend it had anything to do with meat for the freezer shelves or hides for the cold rooms.

He wanted the hunt because the hunt would loosen whatever hid under his skin and let him learn its language properly. Sera knew it. He knew she knew it. She could have mocked him for the ambition, but she did not.

The pup’s ears flicked at the word hunt, and its tail thumped once against a quilt before settling. Sera’s gaze moved over him like a hand checking for fever. He felt measured and did not resent it.

Psycho’s hum deepened. She will take you. She understands what we are. She is not afraid of the cost. You chose the right Alpha. We chose the right Alpha.

He breathed out slowly and found the edges of his hunger again.

It was not the frantic gnaw that had lived with him as a boy. It was a clean, sharp appetite for skill. He wanted to return from the ice with new tools inside his hands.

He wanted to come back with answers that made future fights quick and precise. He wanted to be dangerous in ways no one expected when they looked at the grin and assumed that jokes were all he brought to a room.

He also wanted to know if the shift Lachlan wore like a punishment would fit on him like a second skin.

The first time he had glimpsed it in the other man—the stretch of tendon, the alteration of bone under muscle, the wrongness made right by speed—he had felt envy hand him a glass of cold water and tell him to drink.

If a Reaver lived in all of them, Alexei wanted to greet it first rather than pretend it was a stranger at the door.

His fingers rested on the ottoman’s edge.

Frost kissed the leather without biting through. He let it form and then called it back, pleased when the cold obeyed like a trained animal rather than a wild thing unwilling to heel.

He looked up again.

The candles made small halos in Sera’s eyes. Apples and cinnamon wrapped the room like a story.

The dire wolf’s breath rumbled soft and even at the foot of the bed. The stuffie’s stitched mouth held its eternal grin. It all should have felt ridiculous to a man who had slept in wire cages and under trucks.

But it did not. It felt like home... more so than the rest of the penthouse did.

"I learn fast," he added after a heartbeat, not to persuade, but to promise. "I follow faster."

Psycho approved. And when she lets us run, you will not hide. You will not apologize. You will change because you choose to, not because fear shoves you. That is the difference between us and the ones who pretend they can go back to what they were before.

He waited.

The room, the candles, the wolf-pup, the book—all of it held still as if the tower itself leaned forward to hear the answer.

He did not hurry the moment with more words. The leash inside him loosened another notch, and he felt the ice in his blood lift its head as if the hunt had already begun.

"Of course."