The Biker Alpha Who Became My Second Chance Mate

The moonlight spills across his bedroom floor in silver sheets, and I am drowning.

Not in grief , I know what grief feels like. Grief is cold. Grief is standing at a graveside while the October wind cuts through your coat and the dirt is still fresh and your throat won't work right. Grief is the drive home in silence and the way the house smells exactly the same when you walk in, as if nothing has changed, as if they're just in the next room.

This is something else.

Liam's hands move down my spine, slow and deliberate, like he's memorizing the shape of me. Each point of contact burns away another second of today. Of this morning. Of the black dresses and the white lilies and the sound of the pastor's voice saying committed to the earth while the sky overhead was an indifferent, cloudless gray.

I let it burn.

"Ava." His voice is low, a warning or a question , I can't tell which, and I don't want to know. I press my face against his neck, and he exhales like something inside him has given up fighting.

Don't think. Don't think. Just this.

His shoulders are broader than I remembered. His jaw is sharper. The boy I grew up next door to has been replaced by something rawer and heavier, and under any other circumstances I would have catalogued that change with careful, aching attention. But tonight, the only thing that matters is that his hands are warm, and warmth is the one thing in the world I cannot find on my own.

I am drowning in sensation, and I am doing it on purpose.

We laid our parents to rest this morning.

The thought surfaces without permission, and I press it back down, but it leaves a mark , the image of two graves, side by side, with matching headstones. Reed. Donovan. Best friends since their own childhood. Alpha of the Silverbluff Pack and Alpha of Moonstone, who ran their territories as neighbors and allies for three decades and died together in a single night because a truck ran a red light on Route 9 at 11:47 PM.

They would have wanted to go together, someone said at the reception. Like that was a comfort.

Owen stood on my left. Liam stood on my right. Between us, the weight of everything we'd collectively lost was so enormous I couldn't parse the individual shapes of it. I just stood there and breathed, and told my wolf Luna to stay quiet, and waited for it to be over.

It wasn't over.

Afterward, I can't remember which one of us moved first.

I think it was me. I think I knocked on his door, and he opened it, and he looked at me the way you look at someone when you already know why they're there, and neither of us said a single word. I think I walked in. I think he closed the door behind me.

I think we both needed to feel something that wasn't loss.

Now I lie in the gray quiet of his room, and the warmth I chased is already starting to cool, and I watch the way the moonlight draws a line across the ceiling and try to hold onto the feeling , just a little longer. Just another minute.

Liam sits up.

The change in him is instantaneous. I feel it before I see it , the tension that threads through his shoulders, the way he rolls to the edge of the bed and puts his back to me, both feet flat on the floor, like he's preparing to stand up and walk away and never look back.

"This can't happen again."

Three words. Four syllables. And just like that, the warmth is gone.

I sit up slowly. My fingers curl in the sheets. "Liam,"

"I mean it." His voice is flat, deliberate. Controlled in a way that tells me he's working very hard to keep it that way. "This was a mistake. We were both , today was," He stops. Tries again. "We weren't thinking straight."

I was thinking perfectly straight. "Liam,"

"Ava." He turns his head, just slightly, just enough that I can see his profile , jaw set, eyes forward, not looking at me. "You're like a sister to me."

The words land like something physical.

"You know that," he continues. His voice doesn't crack. It doesn't waver. It is utterly, perfectly steady. "That's all you'll ever be. I don't know what we were thinking, but , Owen would kill me. You know that. He'd kill me."

I don't move. I don't breathe. I wait for the rest of the sentence, the part where he says but, the part where the sentence turns into something survivable.

It doesn't come.

"A sister," I repeat.

"Yes."

The word is so quiet it barely exists. And yet it fills the entire room.

I get dressed in the dark. He doesn't watch. I find my shoes by the window, and my jacket near the door, and I don't say anything else, and neither does he, and I walk out into the hallway and pull his bedroom door shut behind me with the most careful, the most controlled, the most painfully precise click I have ever made in my life.

Because the alternative is slamming it, and I will not let him hear what that costs me.

All you'll ever be.

All you'll ever be.

All you'll ever be.

The next morning, I drive home before the sun is fully up.

I don't cry. I sit at my kitchen table with a cup of coffee I don't drink and stare at the wall, and something inside me quietly rearranges itself into a shape that I don't recognize.

Three days later, I open my laptop.

I type flights to London into the search bar.

I book a one-way ticket for two weeks from today, and then I sit back and look at the confirmation email for a long, long time.

Owen calls that evening. He wants to check in, he says. He's worried about me. He thinks I should come stay at the pack house for a while , it would be good for both of us, being around people, being around the pack.

"I need some space," I tell him. "I just , I need to be somewhere different for a little while. To process."

A pause. "How long?"

"I don't know yet."

Another pause, longer this time. I can hear him trying to find the right question to ask, the one that will open me up, and I keep myself locked so tightly that there is nothing to find.

"Okay," he says finally. "Okay. Call me when you land."

I will, I tell him. I promise.

I hang up the phone and sit in the silence of my apartment, and look at my reflection in the dark window across the room, and think about the word sister until it loses all meaning. Until it is just a sound. Until it is nothing at all.

Some secrets are too dangerous to speak aloud.

I finish packing that night.