Alpha Xander's Undoing Chasing my Unknown Mate Back novel Chapter 65

Chapter 65

Chapter 65

*Rory*

I didn’t go back to my old room.

I didn’t remember why I even wanted to go there. I just knew I needed to talk to Xander.

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I sent Dharra a text, telling her she can restore the field when she can, as I headed to the familiar door.

My feet took me there out of habit.

I slid the phone away and cut back toward the west wing. The stairwell there is quieter at night. I counted out of reflex. Nineteen steps to level two, twenty-one more to the floor where Xander’s room sits behind a door with a trivial lock and a very serious idea of privacy,

I didn’t knock. He never made me.

The room was low-lit-just the lamp on the nightstand. Xander was propped against the headboard, bare feet under the sheet, a book open in his hands. It was the same one from the archives.

I hadn’t seen him go back for it.

He looked up before I could speak, the focus in his face casing when he saw me.

“You’re late,” he said, but there wasn’t any censure in it. Just a line that meant ‘were you safe?’

“Vallin grabbed me in the hall,” I said, shutting the door with my hip.

“That’s never the way you want a sentence to start.”

I kicked off my boots and crossed to the bed. He set the book facedown on his stomach and lifted his arm in the same motion; I went straight into the space he made, my cheek to his chest, his chin to my hair. His skin was warm from the lamplight, his heartbeat steady enough to drown out the drum in my own.

“What did he want?” he asked into my hair.

“He says there’s a way to fool the circle,” I said, and felt his whole body sharpen under me. “To… ‘cloud’ what it reads. Make it uncertain.”

“And the price?” Xander’s voice went careful. Not soft-controlled. He knew these types of things came at a price.

“The bond with Zerina,” I said. The word tasted like ash. “He said we can temper the bond with Zerina temporarily, but it can sever the link between me and Zerina. Permanently, The last wolf who tried nearly died.”

He didn’t speak right away. His hand slipped from my shoulder to the center of my back, smoothing once, slow. He’s a hard line in almost any room-alpha stance, sharp edges where everyone can see-but there are these small touches he gives me that nobody else would recognize as the way he begs me to breathe.

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Chapter 65

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“I’m not doing it,” I said into his shirt. The cotton smelled like cedar and soap and something that was just him. “I won’t risk her. Not after-”

I broke off. I was suddenly right back to the first time my father forced that poision down my throat.

“Not after the last two years,” I finished. “Not after everything I did to her because everyone said it was ‘for my own good. I’m not putting another knife between us on purpose.”

“I know,” he said, and I could tell by the way he said it that he’d already arrived at the same answer. “I didn’t have to know her to hate what that drug did to you. I don’t need a circle to tell me where I stand on anyone who tries to rip you from yourself.” His breath skimmed my forehead. “We’ll hear him out in the morning. Together. Then we decide. Not him.”

My shoulders loosened a fraction. “Okay.”

“Okay,” he echoed.

We lay like that until the edges of me stopped shaking. He lifted the book again with his free hand and pretended to read; I pretended not to notice that his eyes didn’t move on the page.

My phone buzzed once against the nightstand-ok from Dhara-and then the room went quiet again. The kind of quiet that doesn’t press.

I must’ve drifted, because the next thing I knew the lamp was off and the room belonged to the deep of night. My cheek had slid to his shoulder; his arm had not moved.

“You still awake?” I whispered into the dark.

“Yeah.”

“Thinking?”

“Always.” The word came with a low huff. “About lines and circles and how to make them behave. About you.” A beat. “About how we keep you whole.”

Whole.

I swallowed. “Stay.”

His arm tightened. “Try and make me leave.”

We didn’t need more words than that.

***

Morning came faster than I’d like.

Xander was already watching when I opened my eyes. There’s a particular look he gets when he’s not guarding it for anyone else-unguarded is the closest I can come to naming it, but that still doesn’t land. It’s open heat, and a question, and a vow all in one.

13:12 Wed, Sep 17

Chapter 65

“Hi,” he said, a little rough.

I smiled without thinking. “Hi.”

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We didn’t talk about the week or the circle or the hundred ways this morning could be the last easy one we got for a while.

We didn’t talk at all.

He rolled onto his side, pulled me with him, and the kiss was slow at first-unhurried, thorough, a kind of language that says I’m still here when you’ve run out of other ways to prove it.

His hand slid under the hem of my shirt, palm to skin, heat on heat. My breath hitched. He felt it. Answered it.

The world narrowed in a way that didn’t feel like loss, but like focus-like finally saying yes to the thing you’d been circling forever.

I climbed over him and he made a sound that came from somewhere old. The sheet tangled at my hip; he pushed it away, palms bracketing my thighs, mouth finding the line of my jaw, then lower.

My hands weren’t steady when I traced the cut of his shoulder, the notch at his throat where his pulse kicked against my thumb. His name sounded different when I said it like this-less like a defense, more like a home.

We didn’t rush. And yet it still felt like we were racing something we couldn’t see.

He kissed me like prayer and promise and please, and when I answered, it was with everything that had lived in my chest since the first time I saw him hold a line in front of me and refuse to let it break.

He took me right there like he did countless times, and yet it felt like the first. His lips, his hands, his fingers, his breath… it all made me quiver and shake as he moved in a slow, almost reverent rythm as he took me inch my inch.

I whispered his name and left my fingernail marks in his back as he thrust deeper–harder–until I was completely and utterly his.

We moved together, breath and heat and a rhythm that didn’t belong to the Academy or the Council or anyone with a title.

There was a point where the bond hummed so loud under my skin I thought it might split the room, where the place where I ended and he began went bright and indistinct, where the idea of edges stopped making sense entirely.

After, we lay tangled and quiet, the window brightening by degrees. His hand traced lazy shapes on my ribs; 1 caged his wrist with my fingers and held it there like it might otherwise float away,

“I needed that,” I confessed to the ceiling.

“I know,” he said. “Me too.”

“Do you ever feel like we’re stealing?” I asked after a beat. “Like… moments. From what’s coming.”

13:12 Wed, Sep 17

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