Alpha Xander's Undoing Chasing my Unknown Mate Back novel Chapter 78

Chapter 78

Chapter 78

*Rory*

It wasn’t lust.

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We’d done the frantic burn already, nights when the world was too loud and the only way to quiet it was to swallow each other whole.

This was different.

This was heat in slow circles, his hand at the nape of my neck, my fingers hooked in his shirt, our noses. bumping as we smiled into each other’s mouths without meaning to.

He breathed me in. I breathed him out. The bed didn’t creak. The room didn’t blur. It sharpened-the lantern ring on the nightstand, the nick in the headboard, the scratch his belt had left in the floorboards weeks ago.

He kissed my throat and I went still because the mark answered him-one bright pulse, then a hum like a cat settling on a lap. Zerina stretched and draped herself around my spine, a living weight. Azrien pressed back from his side, steady, the brush of his presence like fur across the bond.

I lifted my face and he cupped my jaw in both hands, thumbs smoothing the skin there like it was something precious.

“Say it,” he whispered, not demanding, inviting.

“I’m not alone,” I said. The truth of it made my throat sting. “Even if they try to make me. Even if they circle me in chalk and call it mercy.”

“Especially then,” he said, and kissed me again.

Time did the thing it does when you stop asking it to behave. It uncoiled.

We didn’t rush. He tucked my hair behind my ears like he’d been waiting all morning to do it.

I traced the line of his shoulder, the curve of the scar at his bicep he got when he was twelve because he was too stubborn to know his limits.

He made a noise when my fingers passed it-small, fond, surprised. I rolled onto my back and he followed, elbow braced so his weight didn’t press my ribs. The care of it made my eyes go hot again. He kissed those, too, because he is infuriating that way, because he notices.

“Tell me what to do,” he said, forehead resting against mine.

“Don’t let me run,” I said. “If I panic out there. If the circle pulls. Don’t let me run to meet it.”

“Done.”

“And if I… if I fall-”

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Chapter 78

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“I’ll catch you,” he said. “I already did.”

“And if I burn.”

“I’ll burn,” he said. “With you.”

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He didn’t say it like a hero. He said it like a man who had measured the cost and set down a line and would not cross it alone.

We lay there with our noses touching like children telling secrets under a blanket. I told him the small ones I hadn’t had room for in the past week-how the greenhouse glass sounds at night when the wind pushes it around, how the old library smells like cloves when it rains because the wood sweats, how I still forget sometimes that he is mine, not because I doubt it but because the idea is too big to hold all at once.

He told me things I didn’t know I needed-the exact creak the fifth stair makes at the west tower landing, the code Rana uses when she doesn’t want the administration to understand her notes, the way Mona had slapped his shoulder when she left last night and said don’t let her carry it alone, dumbass and how he’d said I won’t and meant it with his whole mouth.

“Azrien says to tell Zerina he respects her restraint,” he added, and I laughed into his chest, a sudden bright sound that startled the room.

I snorted. “They’re still fighting? I’ll tell her to unblock him.”

‘He’s learning,’ Zerina said, amused. ‘and I will when I’m good and ready?

I simply rolled my eyes.

‘We all are,’ I told her, and she huffed against my ribs in what might have been agreement.

Outside, the academy moved in a different rhythm. No bells yet. The hush before a crowd decides to sing or

to scream.

My fever had settled into a steady warmth. The ache under my skin wasn’t as sharp. The ember at my throat pulsed less like a warning and more like a metronome.

We dozed and woke, drifted and anchored, mouths and hands and breath. He didn’t push me past the edge of the moment. I didn’t ask him to. The day was too heavy for the kind of surrender that disconnects you from your body. I needed the opposite. A way to stay. A way to be here.

When hunger finally nudged, he slid out of bed and returned with toast and honey, tea steeped so dark it looked like river water at dusk. I ate because he made me. He ate because I glared until he did. He licked honey from his thumb and looked at me like he was memorizing something practical-a map, a lock-rather than my mouth.

“Do you think it’s really about me?” I asked when the tea was gone and the tray was back on the desk. “The Solstice. The timing. The way they’re pushing it no matter what we do.”

“I think,” he said, choosing each word like it mattered, “that people with power will always pretend that what they want is what the world needs. And I think some of them want you to be the answer to a question they don’t even understand.” He rubbed his lower lip with his thumb, thinking. “And I think it’s about more than the Council. The way Durnham moved in that chamber… it wasn’t just his arrogance. It was permission.”

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Chapter 78

“From who.”

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“We’ll find out,” he said. “And when we do, we’ll set it on fire.”

“Careful,” I said softly. “You’re starting to sound like me.”

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“I take that as a compliment,” he said, deadpan, and I let my head tip back and laughed again because some things deserve blessings.

The room dimmed around the edges as the morning wore on and clouds stacked over the sun. The kind of gray that makes candles look brave.

He brushed my cheek with the back of his fingers and then slid down so our bodies fit in that perfect way they learned with practice-knee to knee, ankle hooked around calf, my palm settled flat over his heart, his over mine. Our breathing matched without us trying. The bond hummed, slow, sure. Not words-weight.

He kissed my knuckles. “One more thing,” he said, too light to be casual, too steady to be anything else. “If the circle pulls something I can’t break, you say my name.”

“Xander,” I said, and he smiled because I’d sprung his trap early.

“Good,” he said. “Say it again.”

“Xander.”

“Again.”

“Xander,” I repeated, and the way his eyes went dark had nothing to do with lust and everything to do with the part of him that melts when I let myself need.

He pressed his mouth to my pulse and stayed there, counting, maybe. Or praying. Or promising.

The window breathed a colder draft across the room. Somewhere far off a door slammed, the kind of sound people make when they’re setting their shoulders for a thing they’ve already decided to do.

I wanted to be brave the way stories say it looks-chin up, eyes fierce, mouth set. I wasn’t. I was a girl with burns under her skin and a sister’s ghost in her ear and a wolf curled around her spine and a whole school waiting for a bell that would tell them who they were.

I was also this: a body warmed by another body, a hand held, a breath shared, a vow spoken and believed.

I could go into a circle with that.

We lay there until the room’s corners sharpened again, until the light off the window frame edged from silver to steel. He turned his wrist to look at the face of the watch he wore when he wanted to pretend time didn’t own him.

“Soon,” he said.

“I know,” I said.

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