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“I know it’s not.” I stepped around the island, slow and careful, keeping distance between us. “I know it feels like there’s a leash on you that runs all the way back to that house. But, Phineas, you walked out last night. You already did the hard part once.”

“That was the beer.” A wet, broken laugh escaped him. “Sober me is a coward.”

“Sober you left that house and drove to a bar.” His eyes widened, and I softened my voice further. “You’re not a coward. You’re a man who’s been living in a minefield so long he’s forgotten fields can just be grass.”

His breathing hitched. For one second, one beautiful second, I thought I’d reached him. Frustration and fear and hope were all warring across his face, and I raked a hand up through my hair, needing somewhere to put the restless energy crawling through my arms—

Phineas dropped.

He didn’t step back. He didn’t stumble. He folded, fast and practiced, shoulders curling inward, both arms flying up to cover his head, elbows tucked tight against his ears, chin driven down toward his sternum. He made himself small against the wall of my hallway with the terrible efficiency of a body that had done this many, many times.

My hand hung frozen in my hair.

Nothing in my life had ever stopped me the way that did. Not a crash on the highway, not a bad night in a worse bar, nothing. My lungs simply quit working. He’d seen my arm come up, and his body had made a decision faster than thought, a decision built from repetition, from a hundred raised hands that had all come down.

Motherfuck. My mate thought I was going to hit him.

The rage that tore through me was unlike anything I’d ever felt before. It was silent, enormous, and it had a name attached to it now.

Ben.

My wolf went eerily quiet inside me, the stillness of a predator that had stopped pacing and started hunting, and for a heartbeat, I understood exactly how a man could dig a hole in the woods and sleep just fine afterward.

But none of that could show on my face. None of that could reach my voice. My mate was crouched against my wall with his arms over his skull, trembling so hard I could see it from six feet away, and the only thing in the world that mattered was the next thirty seconds.

I didn’t approach. Every instinct screamed at me to close the distance, to gather him up, to put my body between him and everything, and I overrode all of it.

Instead, I lowered my hand slowly, intentionally open, and then raised both palms where he could see them, fingers spread, empty.

“Phineas,” I murmured. “I’m not going to touch you. My hands are right here. Both of them. I was just pushing my hair back. That’s all it was.”

He didn’t uncurl. His breath came in fast, ragged pulls, audible across the room.

“I’m going to stay right where I am,” I continued, keeping the words slow and even, a rhythm he could hold on to. “Nobody in this house is going to hurt you. Not now. Not ever. I would cut off my own arm before I raised it at you. I need you to hear that, even if you can’t believe it yet.”

A tremor ran through him, hard enough that his shoulder knocked against the wall. His fingers stayed laced over the crown of his head, knuckles white.

Moving with exaggerated slowness, I lowered myself to the floor right where I stood, folding my legs and settling my back against the wall opposite him, a full body-length of hardwood between us. The floor was cool through my sweatpants. From down here, I was smaller than him if he stood, smaller than everything. I rested my forearms on my knees and kept my hands loose and visible.

“I’m just going to sit here,” I said. “You don’t have to look at me. You don’t have to talk. Take all the time you need.”

Phineas breathed, and I breathed, and I made sure mine was slow and loud enough for him to sync with if he wanted to.

After a long stretch of silence, I realized talking might help. Not about what just happened, the bruise or the flinch, or the bastard whose name I was already carving into a mental tombstone. Something normal that would let him remember he was just a man sitting on the floor of a house, not a prisoner awaiting sentence.

“My brother Blade once tried to make friends with a moose,” I said, keeping my voice conversational, like we were back at Jawbones discussing the spider. “We were up north, tracking through some backcountry. I don’t even remember what we were hunting. Deer, maybe. Didn’t matter. Blade spots this bull moose standing in a clearing, just enormous, antlers like a rack of twisted bone, and he decides—I swear on my life—he decides the thing looks lonely.”

Phineas didn’t respond, but his breathing hitched then slowed a fraction. Listening. Good. I’d take listening.

“He starts walking toward it. Slowly, hands out, making these soft clicking sounds with his tongue like he’s calling a horse. I’m standing at the tree line hissing his name, trying to get him to stop, and this idiot looks back at me and whispers, ‘He just wants a friend.’”

A small sound escaped Phineas. Not a laugh. Not quite. But his shoulders dropped by maybe half an inch.

“The moose did not want a friend.” I let my head fall back against the wall, the memory pulling a crooked grin out of me. “That moose wanted violence. It charged him so fast he didn’t even have time to turn around. Just lowered its head and plowed into him like a freight train made of fur and angry steam. Blade went airborne. I’m talking both feet off the ground, arms windmilling, the whole cartoon. Landed in a blackberry bush about ten feet away.”

“What happened?” The question came out muffled, Phineas’ face still buried against his knees, but he’d asked. He’d actually asked.

“He came up covered in thorns and moose slobber, spitting out leaves, and the first thing he says—the very first thing—is ‘I think I startled him.’” I shook my head, letting the old exasperation color my voice. “Not ‘I almost died.’ Not ‘that animal is a menace.’ Just concern that he’d been rude to the moose.”