The headlights cut right through the tree line, and the rogues took that as their invitation. Voren wasn’t rattled though, if anything, he was almost relieved.

Bloodfang had been coiled up and restless inside him for too long, longing so desperately for blood, and now here was somewhere to get it. Legally, even. He didn’t waste a second.

The two Alphas moved together without discussing it, the way men move when they’ve been doing something long enough that their bodies just know.

Clothes split, fabric dropped away as they shifted, their wolves came surging up through them fast and violent, muscle and bone rearranging itself before the rogues even had time to fully register what was happening.

One of them broke wide and circled toward the passenger side toward Seraphine and got maybe three steps in that direction before Bloodfang’s claws closed around the back of his neck.

There was no warning, no pause, just one clean, brutal arc, and it was done, his head separating from his body.

Across the road, Ravyn had gotten personal about the one who’d nearly scraped his car, which he handled the way Alphas handle things when they’ve stopped being impressed by resistance, which is to say efficiently and without a lot of ceremony.

The rest of the rogues watched, did the math, and decided the woods were a better option than whatever was going to happen if they stayed. They melted back into the trees almost faster than they’d come out of them.

Then it was quiet again. Just the road, the dark, and two Alphas standing in it with absolutely nothing on after shifting back to their human forms.

Ravyn looked down at what used to be a decent outfit and let out a long, colorful string of words that covered the full range of his feelings on the matter. "Fuck. I don’t have clothes in the car."

Voren glanced at him. "Neither do I."

It had been a while since they’d been caught out like this, out in the open, with no pack protocol, no emergency bag tucked under a seat. Just two naked men on a back road in the dark, which was, objectively, a situation.

"But Sera," Ravyn said.

Not an accusation. Just the obvious problem, stated plainly, because neither of them had a clean answer for it.

Voren’s jaw tightened. "Yeah. Right."

He moved to the car window and angled himself just enough to look inside without making it obvious, and what he saw genuinely stopped him in a way the rogue attack hadn’t.

Seraphine was on her phone. Completely at ease — one leg crossed, body turned slightly toward the window, a little smile at the corner of her mouth. And then, softly, she giggled.

She looked like she was in a coffee shop somewhere. Not parked thirty feet from where blood had just been spilled.

’Who is she talking to?’

Bloodfang stirred, low and warm and way too interested, and Voren felt something climbing up through his chest that he absolutely was not naming.

’Stop it,’ he said inward. ’She’s not ours. You know that.’ 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

What came back wasn’t the usual push. No growl, no argument. Bloodfang just... went still. Which was somehow more unsettling.

’You’ll stay close to her though, won’t you?’ He suddenly asked, and the tone of it? goddess, it was nothing like the wolf Voren had been living with since he was fifteen. Raw. Almost small.

’Only if you behave.’

’I will,’ Bloodfang said politely before adding, ’for as long as you’re with her. I promise.’

Voren let out a slow breath and smoothed his face back into something neutral before turning back to Ravyn. In fifteen years through fights and losses and everything in between, his wolf had never once sounded like that. Never that open. Never that close to asking for something.

This suddenly humility of Bloodfang because of Seraphine’s wolf was something he had to investigate. If just being near her did that, then Voren was going to have to figure something out. Some way to bring her around his pack occasionally without making it into a whole thing.

The problem was that Seraphine wasn’t exactly low-profile among the packs because of her relationship with Ravyn. Every pack knew her story from the time she became Ravyn’s Luna.

If anyone spotted her in Voren’s pack, Ravyn would know about it before sundown.

He turned back. "I don’t have a choice. I’ll grab clothes on the way. You can head back."

He was in the driver’s seat before Ravyn had a chance to argue, door closed, done. Ravyn stood in the road for a beat, jaw tight, clearly calculating whether any version of pushing back was going to work here.

He didn’t want to leave, planning to wait in his car until Voren drop off, and then he could continue with the follow. Eventually he walked back to his car but he wasn’t the only calculating one.

Voren waited. Watched the mirror until Ravyn’s headlights swung around and disappeared around the bend, and only then pulled back onto the road.

Seraphine was still talking. Hadn’t noticed a thing.

He drove with one ear on the road and the other on the sound of her voice beside him, relaxed, animated, completely unbothered, and tried not to think too hard about the fact that he was irritated by it.

He wasn’t jealous. That was not a thing that was happening. It was just adrenaline, still working its way out of his system. That was all.

A few miles down the road, her voice trailed off. A soft laugh, a goodbye, and then the quiet click of the call ending. She lowered the phone. Her gaze drifted toward the front seat.

Every muscle in her body locked up at once.

Her eyes did a full sweep, taking in, very clearly, the fact that the man driving the car was wearing absolutely nothing, and her voice, when it came out, carried the full weight of the moment.

"What the fuck is going on here?"