Seraphine had been on that call for a reason. Corvine had worked himself into a full-blown panic and she’d spent the entire drive carefully talking him back from the edge.

She’d been so completely inside that conversation that the rest of the world had simply ceased to exist for her. The trees rushing past the windows, the dark stretch of road ahead, everything outside that car had blurred into background noise she wasn’t tracking.

Which was the only explanation she had for how she’d ended the call, turned her head, and found herself looking at a fully grown, completely naked Alpha male sitting behind the wheel.

The dashboard light was the only thing keeping the car from being pitch dark, and she was grateful for that but still. There was a naked man beside her. That fact alone was doing something loud and uncomfortable to her nervous system, and she hadn’t quite figured out what to do with it yet.

"Funny thing," Voren said, eyes fixed on the road, his voice carrying the easy, unbothered calm of a man who had long since made peace with his own body and her expected discomfort about it. "You didn’t notice the rogue attack."

Seraphine snapped her gaze to the window. Trees. Dark asphalt. Nothing moving out there now. Not a shadow, not a branch. Whatever had happened was already over and already gone. "Rogue attack." She let the words land flat. "Why didn’t anyone tell me?"

His jaw moved once before he answered sarcastically. "You were busy but Ravyn was there, so we handled it." A beat of silence, clean and brief. "We had to shift, and there are no spare clothes in this car, so you’re just going to have to bear with me for a little while."

Seraphine turned firmly back to the window and kept her eyes anchored there. "Find a store," she said. "Convenience store, clothing store, gas station... I don’t care which. Anything. I’ll run in."

"Thank you," he said, and the way he said it made clear he actually meant it.

They rode without talking after that. Not uncomfortably, but just two people keeping to their own corners, respecting the arrangement without having to say so out loud.

Then a small clothing store appeared in the headlights up ahead, and Voren eased off the road and pulled over.

Seraphine already had her hand on the door when his voice came from behind her, quiet, unhurried, carrying no particular edge but landing with one anyway.

"Be careful."

She didn’t turn around. "Sure."

⋆｡°✩°｡⋆

The store was exactly the kind of place you forget the second you leave it. Cramped aisles, shelving packed too tight, that specific smell of fabric and plastic and too much fluorescent light.

It carried a little of everything without being particularly proud of any of it. She moved through it quickly and without hesitation, knowing what she needed before she got there, pulling things off hangers and folding them under her arm with the efficiency of someone who’d done this kind of errand too many times to think much about it anymore.

She was back at the car in under five minutes. Pants, shirts, boxer shorts, all of it tucked neatly together.

Voren took them from her, held them up, and turned the waistband over once, slowly, and then something moved across his face. Not suspicion exactly, but a specific, careful kind of attention. The kind that notices things. "You didn’t ask for my size." He looked up at her. "These are right. Down to the boxer shorts."

The heat that moved up Seraphine’s neck was instant, involuntary, and entirely unwelcome.

She looked back out the window. Kept her voice steady, even if the rest of her wasn’t quite cooperating. "I’m not proud of it," she said. "I used to buy clothes for Ravyn. He never wore any of them so eventually I just bagged all of it up and threw it out. Stopped buying after that."

The pause that followed was longer than necessary, and it said more than the words had. "I grabbed extra in case you need to shift again."

By the time she finished, whatever quiet amusement had been sitting on Voren’s face was gone. He was still, not checked out, not distracted, just genuinely still in the way that means something actually landed somewhere it wasn’t expected.

He’d known, in the distant secondhand way you know things about other people’s lives without really knowing them at all, that Seraphine and Ravyn’s story had its damage in it.

He’d heard enough, picked up enough from the edges of things, to have a rough shape of it in his head.

But hearing it like that wrapped so quietly inside something as small and ordinary as knowing a man’s clothing size made it real in a way the secondhand version never had.

There was something almost unbearably matter-of-fact about the way she’d said it. No bitterness sharpening the edges of it. Just the plain truth of it, sitting there.

"I’m sorry," he said. Simple. Nothing attached to it, nothing reaching for more than it was. Just the words, offered cleanly.

"How much do I owe you?"

He reached back, pulled the seat forward, and got dressed with the quick, unselfconscious ease of someone who’d spent a lifetime doing it fast and without an audience. Seraphine kept her eyes on the middle distance out the passenger window and held them there.

"Nothing. Don’t worry about it."

He didn’t push. He’d read her well enough by now to recognize a closed door when he was standing in front of one. "Thank you," he said again, quieter this time. More personal.

She nodded once.

"You can look. I’m dressed."

The breath she let out was longer than she probably intended it to be. She turned back toward the front, let her eyes settle on him, and something in her face did a small, involuntary thing it absolutely was not supposed to do.

The clothes fit him well. Really well. Like they’d been chosen with him specifically in mind which, in the most roundabout possible way, they had been.

"Looks good," she said, keeping her voice completely neutral, not attaching a single thing to it. She let it sit there on its own and moved on. "So. What was it you needed to talk about?"

The corner of his mouth lifted, not quite a smile, just the very beginning of one, like it was thinking about becoming something more and hadn’t committed yet. "Quite a bit. But I think we should eat first."

Seraphine didn’t argue. After all, she was starving.

⋆｡°✩°｡⋆

A few miles further down the road, Voren turned off the main stretch and pulled up in front of a restaurant sitting at the quiet edge of things.

Warm light came through the windows in long, amber rectangles. The parking lot was half-full but the second they walked through the door together, something in the room changed.

It wasn’t loud about it. Nothing dramatic, nothing that would’ve caught the attention of someone who wasn’t already paying close attention.

Just a quiet ripple moving through the people nearest to them, heads dipping, just slightly, like a reflex they hadn’t fully decided to make. Not theatrical. But enough. Enough to be unmistakable to anyone who knew what they were looking at.

Seraphine clocked it immediately.

She glanced around the room, reading the small adjustments people were making without seeming to make them, and then she looked back at Voren. Something sharpened between her brows. "You’re not their Alpha," she said. "So why are they bowing to you?"