Page 112 of Immune

“Rots,” Fletcher says.

Dakota scoffs. “Wrong, but whatever licks your tip.”

I hear Ewan choke from the shed, but Fletcher’s mouth tightens. “There’s a lot of them.”

Dakota steps past me toward the shed. Her shoulder almost brushes my arm, but not quite. She stops before it does, and the small space between us feels far louder than the kiss did.

She looks up at me from under the brim of her hat. “This doesn’t change anything.”

“I know,” I tell her.

“I still leave when I want,” she reminds me.

“I know.”

“You don’t follow if I tell you not to,” she says.

My Alpha goes deathly still.

That’s the hardest one. The meanest one. The one that reaches a place inside me where instinct has been clawing since the moment I scented her in the school. Since the moment she saved my life and disappeared like a ghost. Since the moment I finally understood she had been surviving alone in a world built to crush her under its weight.

If she tells me not to follow, every single part of me will want to follow anyway. To protect her. To watch. To make sure the city doesn't finally claim her for its own.

But wanting Dakota means protecting her right to leave. Even from me. Especially from me.

I force the words out even though everything in me wants to bottle them. “If you tell me not to follow, I don’t follow.”

Her face changes, and something small breaks through the anger. Fear, maybe? Or confusion? Or it very well could be the start of belief, something too fragile to touch just yet. But then she walks back into the shed, knife in hand, shoulders high, photo hidden, and secrets still hers.

I stay in the rain for one more breath while my Alpha rages, my hands ache, and my mouth remembers her. I let it all burn, then I follow at a distance.

Far enough that she can leave.

Close enough that if the world tries to reach for her, it’ll have to go through me first.

TWENTY

DAKOTA

I avoid Kaito with all the dignity, subtlety, and grace of a raccoon falling through a ceiling. Which is to say, none. Absolutely none.

The problem I’m having is not that Kaito kissed me.

Well, technically, if anyone will be filing paperwork with the ruined city department of really shitty decisions, it would note that I actually kissed him. I grabbed his shirt, dragged my bandana down, yanked him into my personal disaster bubble, and shoved my mouth against his like I’d very recently acquired a brain injury.

Which, honestly, is very possible.

The last few days have included a pharmacy collapse, a Runner in a basement, jumping between roofs, losing Maine’s hat, stealing it back, being tackled by Kaito, looters, Zeds, Vector, a helicopter crash, rain, a failing blocker situation, and the very mind-fucking discovery that my dead father’s research has apparently decided to crawl from its grave and right back into my life with some very ill-timed jazz hands.

A head injury would almost make it cuter.

But Kaito definitely didn’t make it worse, and therein lies the problem.

If he had grabbed me, I could hate him. If he’d growled and pushed and tried to turn one kiss into a claim, I could have put him very neatly into a box with every other Alpha-related threat and nailed the damned thing shut.

Instead, he stopped. Instantly. Hands away, body still, voice low.

Okay.