Fuck. What have I done?
He’d kissed a patient. A pregnant patient. A vulnerable woman who’d come to him for medical care, who trusted him to maintain professional boundaries, and he’d?—
She kissed you first, Hyde rumbled in his mind.Wanted it. Wants us.
“Shut up,” he growled, not caring if anyone heard. The street was empty anyway, just snow and shadows and the weight of his own failures pressing down on his shoulders.
He forced himself to start walking, not towards anywhere but simply for the sake of movement. Just the burn of cold air in hislungs and the crunch of snow under his feet and the desperate hope that physical activity might quiet the chaos in his mind.
It didn’t work.
He replayed the kiss with every step. The softness of her lips. The small sound she’d made when he’d pulled her closer. The way she’d gripped his shirt like she was afraid he’d disappear. The trust in her eyes when she’d looked up at him afterward, snowflakes catching in her dark hair. And Hyde, rising to the surface with a possessive growl that had felt less like losing control and more like coming home. That was the truly terrifying part.
He’d spent every day of his life since he’d reached puberty building walls between himself and his Hyde. More than twenty years of discipline, chemical intervention, and sheer force of will. More than twenty years proving he was nothing like his father. And one kiss from a brown-eyed librarian had shattered it all.
Hyde prowled beneath his skin, restless and unsatisfied.Want her, he insisted.Need her.Protect her. Keep her safe.
“She doesn’t need protection from the world,” he snarled. “She needs protection from us.”
Wrong.
“You don’t get a say in this.”
But Hyde did. No matter how thick his walls, Hyde was part of him. Sometimes his ancestors had found the balance between man and beast, between intellect and primal desire. His father had lost that balance, and Victor had spent his entire adult lifeterrified of following the same path. And now he was on the verge of losing the battle.
Professional consequences first. He’d kissed a patient. Even if she had kissed him first, even if every cell in his body believed she belonged to him, his behavior was grounds for losing his license. The ethics were clear.I have to refer her to another doctor.But who? The nearest OB was in the city, an hour’s drive. The thought of her making that trip alone, especially in winter, especially pregnant, made Hyde snarl with protective fury.
Our mate. Our responsibility.
“She’s not—” He stopped himself, unable to speak the lie aloud. Every instinct he possessed—man and Hyde both—had recognized her as his the moment she’d walked into his clinic. And that was the second problem.
He couldn’t be with her. He couldn’t risk the loss of control that intimacy would bring. His father’s records were full of incidents—minor at first, then escalating. A slammed door that cracked the frame. A raised voice that made windows rattle. And finally, the night his mother had locked herself in the bedroom while his father—Hyde ascendant and raging—had torn apart the living room.
He’d been twelve, old enough to understand that love hadn’t protected his mother, and old enough to swear he’d never put anyone through that. And now here he was, thirty-six years old and still alone because he was too terrified to trust himself with another person’s safety.
He’d reached the top of Main Street and he hesitated. The sensible thing would be to go home and exhaust himself in his gym. But he couldn’t face the thought of being alone in thesilence with his thoughts spiraling and Hyde demanding that he go to Chloe and make sure she was safe in that isolated cabin in the woods.
The Moonlight Tavern, then. It wasn’t one of his usual nights—he kept a strict schedule, Tuesdays and Saturdays only, two beers maximum—but desperate times called for desperate measures. The town square was quiet as he made his way back through town, most businesses already closed for the evening. When he reached the tavern, light and warmth spilled from its windows, along with the low hum of conversation, but he couldn’t make himself go in. Hyde was still too close to the surface.
He walked around to the porch overlooking the river instead, staring out at the silent river. A few minutes later, a dark head rose from the water.
“Evening, Victor.”
“Sam.”
The kraken’s silver eyes studied him thoughtfully.
“Bad day?”
“Bad decision.” He sighed and rubbed his face. “Multiple bad decisions, actually.”
“The pretty librarian who’s working on the archives?”
“How did you know—” he began, then shook his head. There were very few secrets in Fairhaven Falls.
“So.” Sam rose a little higher out of the water. “What’d you do?”
“Kissed her.”
