Page 120 of Unmarked
For a moment, the hallway stretches quiet again.
Then I mutter, “You always talk this much, or is this a new affliction?”
Kai smirks. “You bring it out in me. Like a rash. Or poetry.”
I snatch the hoodie off his shoulder and shove past him down the hall.
“Tell her I said hi!” Kai calls from behind me.
Every step feels like I’m grinding my bones into dust, and underneath it, something worse is rising. Something deeper, darker.
A rut.
The signs are there, clawing up through me. My blood too hot, every scent slicing me open like a blade. My skin itches for contact I can’t allow myself to take. My fists are twitching like they’re waiting for a throat to find. I’m pacing like a caged animal, and I hate that I know what I look like: one unprovoked comment away from reenacting a scene from my deeply repressed boarding school years.Again.
I’ve fought it before. Forced it down. Starved it until it broke.
It almost killed me.
It might still.
Because this time, it’sher.
I stop at the end of the hall - the one that would take me to where she is.
And I try to think.
Try to remember who I am.
Lucian Vale. Heir to a dynasty of cold-blooded alphas and terrifying wine cellars. A man who once fired an executive for wearing novelty socks - not some panting idiot vibrating out of his skin because a gorgeous omega thought about him too loud.
But what the fuck am I supposed to do now?
My father - if he ever found out about this - wouldn’t just disown me. He’d fly in personally to deliver a monologue about legacy, blood purity, and social deviance masquerading as instinct.
He’d probably bring a presentation. Full slides. Maybe a graph.
And then he’d personally burn this entire estate to the ground for allowingpack dynamicsunder its roof.
Because to a man like him, packs aren’t just strange - they’re grotesque. Unnatural. Proof of emotional instability and moral decay; an indulgent experiment for alphas who’ve lost their edge and omegas too soft to demand better.
He’d call it regression. A shameful throwback to some half-feral past that should’ve been bred out generations ago.
He’d ask me if I’d taken up interpretive dance. Or group therapy.
And the worst part?
He might be right.
Not about her. Not about what I feel -
But about what this means. About what I’m becoming.
Because I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing anymore.
I’m standing in my family’s ancestral home - on land that’s passed from alpha to alpha for six generations - and I’m thinking about a world where I might not be the only one. And that? That’s not just rebellion. That’sheresy.
And if he knew what I was evenconsidering…
