Page 151 of The Werewolf’s Wrong Mate

I waited because she had more to say.

“She asked for you once,” Sava said.

The wolf went quiet.

Sava saw that too. “I didn’t tell her I was waiting to speak to you first.”

“Why?”

“Because she deserves one night without me turning every feeling in her body into a symptom.” Her gaze lifted to mine, sharp enough to cut through every defense I still had. “Now I am speaking to you as her physician, and I need you to hear me before you go through that door.”

I said nothing.

“The mark is moving toward heat response. You are moving toward rut. Neither of you is fully there, but if you stand in the same room with her right now, every wolf within a generous radius is going to know exactly what you want.”

Despite everything, the shape of the sentence almost pulled a laugh from me. Almost.

Sava didn’t smile. “Do not look amused. I am annoyed at both of you professionally.”

“I have control.”

“You had control this morning because she was visible, supervised, and thirty feet away. Tonight she is clean, frightened, angry, alive, and wearing her own skin again. You need to be much more honest about what that will do to you.”

The wolf listened. So did I.

Sava stepped closer. “Consummating the bond may strengthen it before the hunt.”

My breath stopped.

She continued before I could speak. “I am not ordering it. I am not recommending it in any official capacity, and if you tell Ronan I said anything this specific, I will deny it with conviction. But if she chooses you, and you refuse because you are afraid of what wanting her makes you, do not pretend you are protecting her.”

My throat tightened.

“She needs strength,” Sava said. “She needs a reason to fight that is not only terror and spite. She needs something that belongs to her before a room full of wolves turns her survival into sport.”

Her gaze moved briefly to the closed door.

“And she likes you,” she said quietly. “Against reason, injury, and several medical recommendations.”

That struck harder than it should have.

Sava’s mouth tightened. “Do not make me regret telling you that.”

“I would never force her.”

“I know,” she said. “That is why I am saying the harder part. Do not make refusal another way of deciding for her.”

There it was, what Cassie had said. Stop taking my answer.

Sava put one hand on the door handle, then paused. “If you go in there, go in as a man. Not as guilt. Not as law. Not as the wolf trying to seal what it already thinks is true.”

She opened the door and stepped aside.The suite was dim, washed in low lamplight and salt air from the open balcony. The curtains moved softly against the night, and beyond them the ocean was a dark line of sound beneath a moon that was nearly full.

Cassie stood by the balcony in a small blue and white sundress.

For a moment, everything Sava had said vanished under the sight of her. Bare legs. Bare arms. The bandage high at one shoulder, stark against soft skin. Damp hair loose around her face. Color in her cheeks that had not been there that morning. She looked less like a patient, less like a prisoner, and more like the woman she must have been before my world put teeth in her shoulder.

Her eyes met mine and the bond warmed. So did she. This time I felt it clearly, her want began quietly, then strengthened when she saw me notice the dress, her skin, the shape of her against the open night.