Page 10

Chapter 10

Claire

T he stars look so deceptively peaceful above me as I stand in the clearing, bathed in silver moonlight and uncertainty.

They glitter bright and remote, like they haven’t borne witness to everything else: the accidents, the heartbreaks, the nights of silence after Seth died.

Like they haven’t watched me sob uncontrollably in the garden behind my house where we used to spend time together, where no one would overhear the sound of my grief cracking apart in the dark.

Around me, the Georgia night breathes.

Heavy.

Slow.

Alive.

The air is thick with humidity, wrapping itself around my skin like a damp second layer.

It clings to my neck, the hollow of my throat, and the inner curve of my knees.

Somewhere distant, the low buzz of cicadas sings lazy, overlapping songs beneath the canopy of moss-draped trees.

The scent of wet leaves and wild jasmine clings to the edges of the clearing, a haunting sweetness carried on the drifting breeze.

Beneath it, the earthy tang of marsh mud and pine sap grounds me just enough to keep the memories from dragging me under.

The wind combs gently through my hair, a rare cooler current against the flushed heat gathering along my chest and neck.

My dress dances faintly around my ankles, the hem catching on the dry grass with each step.

I stand rigid against the softness around me because my question still rings between us: “Tell me what happened the night Seth died.”

Liam stiffens.

It’s like I’ve just drawn a gun and pressed the barrel between his eyes.

The silence is pressed down by the weight of everything he hasn’t said for a decade.

He looks past me for only a moment, just a flicker of movement in his eyes, like he’d rather study the stars than face the history between us.

A frog croaks from a camouflaged perch nearby, the night-song layering higher, thicker, until it feels like even the woods are listening.

When his gaze finds mine again, it’s not the alpha or the mob boss staring back at me.

It’s a boy dragging guilt like a chain he’s forgotten how to live without.

“I killed him.”

The words rip the breath from my lungs.

“What?” My voice cracks on the single syllable.

I shake my head.

“It was a car accident.”

He doesn’t look away.

“Yeah, but it was my fault. I killed him.”

The chill slices into my skin without warning, cutting through the warm evening.

My hands fist into the satin of my gown.

It anchors me, barely.

“I don’t…” My mouth won’t shape the words properly.

“You need to explain what the hell you mean.”

His nod is mechanical.

He’s unraveling slowly in front of me, and I can’t look away.

All around us, the southern night hums.

A barred owl calls somewhere deeper in the trees with a low, echoing question.

The breeze rustles palmettos, sweetgrass flutters in the damp air along the boundary of the tree line, and beneath it all, the rhythm of coastal life continues, slower and older than anything human.

When he speaks again, his voice is barely more than a breath.

Nothing like the dominant, feral growl of the man who blackmailed me into marriage.

This isn’t that Liam.

This is someone else.

Someone closer to the boy I once loved.

Someone breaking in front of me.

“We were stupid.”

His fists clench at his sides.

He isn’t trying to hide the shame, the horror.

He’s holding it like a punishment he’s long given up trying to escape.

For the first time since I was sixteen years old, I want to reach for him.

I want to scream at him, to hit him, to cradle him, all in the same breath.

“It was a Friday night. Bright moon. Seth was grounded—I don’t even remember what for anymore. Something dumb. But he called me. Said he needed to get out, to breathe before he suffocated in that house. I agreed.”

His lips twitch.

Not a smile.

A ghost of something too grieving to be fond.

“We took the old Mustang. The one he helped me rebuild. He called it the ‘Iron Stallion.’ You remember that?”

The words hit with the force of memory.

Seth’s eager voice.

His laugh.

The way he’d lean into stories like they were campfire legends.

I nod, the motion small, tight.

“We were just being assholes,” Liam says, his voice warping under the strain of what’s coming.

“Taking sharp turns too fast, switching the playlist every five minutes, arguing about which Marvel character would win in a fight.”

A tight line forms at the corner of his jaw.

His knuckles are white.

“There was a car. Out of nowhere. Drunk driver, turned out. I tried to swerve. We slid off the road into the ditch.” He drags in a breath.

“Flipped, slammed into a pine. Seth didn’t have his belt on.”

The damp in the air is finally cold enough that my gown clings to my calves.

The fabric brushes against wet ferns, soaking up pale beads of condensation glinting like frost on the tree line.

“He was halfway out the window,” Liam says quietly, his voice thick.

“Laughing about the wind in his face like we couldn’t fucking die.”

I wrap my arms around myself even though my skin’s already cool, goosebumps prickling along my arms beneath the delicate fabric.

“I crawled out through the windshield, bleeding everywhere, screaming for him. When I found him he was?—”

His voice chokes off.

His lips move, but no words come out.

The only sound breaking the pause is the high-pitched whine of night insects and, faintly, the slosh and drone of marsh water shifting over roots somewhere nearby.

“There was no way to save him.”

My stomach clenches.

The world tilts.

Salt bites behind my eyes.

“I should have forced him to wear the belt. I should never have picked him up that night. I should have—” He cuts himself off, looking away like the sky might forgive what he cannot.

“You were twenty-three” I manage.

“You were barely an adult, both of you.”

“I was his best friend,” he spits.

“I’m a fucking werewolf, for fuck’s sake. I was stronger, smarter, faster. I was supposed to protect him.”

“That doesn’t make you a god,” I whisper.

“You were just a boy doing his best.”

He turns to me slowly, and what I see in his face makes my throat close.

It’s despair, and something worse: resignation.

His voice drops.

“That’s the night I stopped being a boy, Claire.”

A bat zigzags past above us, its shadow flickering against low clouds that press like heavy cotton across the canopy.

For a moment, the clearing pulses with the press of memory and heat.

Tears spill down my cheeks without permission.

“I was still in the hospital when your dad came by,” he says.

“Told me I’d done enough to hurt you and your family. He said that if I tried to come to the funeral or see you, he’d press charges. Or worse.”

My hand is shaking at my side.

“I didn’t know,” I whisper.

My voice is threadbare, weak.

“All this time... I thought you didn’t care.”

His lips curve into something broken.

“I cared so much I let myself rot.”

“You let me rot too,” I snap, the words ripping from my chest before I can stop them.

“You let me sit there with nothing but silence and funeral songs and a box of ashes that used to be my brother. With parents who made his death a political performance.”

His breath catches, but I barrel forward, unable to stop the flood breaking loose inside me.

The pain is too sharp, too old, too wild.

“You were supposed to be there for me, Liam. Even if you hated me. Even if looking at me reminded you of him. You were supposed to show up.”

“I couldn’t,” he croaks, jaw clenched like he’s swallowing down glass.

“Claire?—”

“Yes, you could,” I say, louder now, trembling as I speak.

“You could’ve figured out a way. You could’ve met me somewhere or sent a damn text message, or a goddamn carrier pigeon. Instead, it was like you both died that night.” My voice cracks hard on the last word.

Liam exhales sharply, like the accusation steals the wind from him.

He looks away, one hand gripping the back of his neck so tightly I see the muscles flex along his forearm.

“I wanted to see you.”

“Then why didn’t you?!”

“Because I was drowning!” he bursts out, his voice rough, shaking at the edges.

“Because every time I closed my eyes I saw his grin before the crash, or the way his body looked after. Because I had his blood under my nails and in my fucking teeth. And then your dad tells me I’ve ruined everything, and I believed him. I didn’t deserve to stand beside you after that.” He turns to face me fully again, and for once, there’s no hardness to hide behind.

Just something stripped bare, wounded.

“And because I was being pulled deeper into the family,” he continues lowly, like each word costs him.

“Into the criminal side. For me, the O’Reilly name isn’t just a birthright, but a fucking crown of thorns. My father made me underboss three days after we buried Seth. Said it was time I stopped running from commands and learned to rule.”

I stare at him, stunned as the weight of those words drags silence between us.

“I didn’t want to drag you into it,” he says after a beat.

“You still lived in the light. You still had pieces of your innocence left. And I... I had nothing but rot and teeth.”

Something twists violently in my chest.

Part of me—stupid, still soft—understands.

Part of me wants to reach across the space between us and pull him back from wherever he’s been drifting these last ten years.

But most of me is splintered.

Split down the seam of heartbreak he left behind.

“No,” I whisper.

“You don’t get to say that. You don’t get to decide what I could or couldn’t handle. You didn’t protect me, Liam. You abandoned me.”

He flinches.

I see it.

The truth slices him open the same way it split me a decade ago.

“You were my friend,” I say, my voice shaking.

“Beyond the crush, beyond all the stupid fairy-tale shit in my diary—before any of it—I thought we were friends. And friends don’t disappear without saying goodbye.”

“I was trying to protect you,” he says again, but it sounds thin now.

Desperate.

“Then you don’t know what love is!” I shout, breath hitching as I take a step back.

“Love doesn’t leave. Love stays and grieves with you. Love doesn’t just walk away when it gets hard.”

The air crackles.

Instead of sagging like he did before, something in Liam snaps.

The tension that had been coiled tight between us ignites.

He crosses the distance between us in a prowling blur, hands on my face before I can suck in another breath.

Then his mouth crashes over mine.

The kiss is rough, desperate, edged with something feral and furious.

My breath catches as his teeth drag across my bottom lip, mouth claiming mine like it’s a war he intends to win only by surrendering everything.

I should shove him away.

I should slap him for daring to touch me like this after what he did, after what he said, after how he left.

Except I don’t.

Because my body responds before my heart can shut it down.

Because some traitor part of me has been waiting for this damn kiss since I was sixteen years old.

Because the girl who fell in love with Liam O’Reilly never truly stopped loving him, no matter how tightly I buried her.

He pulls back just enough to speak, his eyes wild and storm-bright, his breath ragged across my cheek.

“You want a fairy tale? You want Prince Fucking Charming? Then you don’t want me.”

“Then what are you?” I whisper, throat tight, heartbeat a thunderclap in my ears.

His hands shake where they cradle my jaw.

“I’m the kind of man who loves like a fucking curse. Who will fucking carve my name into your skin, Claire. Who watched you from the shadows because I knew I couldn’t have you, but I couldn’t let anyone else have you either, goddammit.”

My breath stutters.

He leans in, voice low and cold and holy.

“I wasn’t there where you could see me, but I was always there. Always. I watched over you. Protected you. Every man who harmed you that night? I learned their names. Their habits. Their routine and lives.”

His eyes flare with something black and glittering.

“I hunted each of them down.”

My stomach twists.

My pulse trips.

I can barely move.

“I made sure they never laid their goddamn hands on another girl again,” he says, his voice dipping to a rasp.

“That’s my love, Claire. Not poems or roses. But vengeance. Rage. Obsession. I’d dig a hundred graves just to make one point, that no one touches you but me.”

I should be backing away.

My mind wheezes that this man is dangerous, obsessive, twisted.

But my heart is fluttering inside my chest like it recognizes the beast it always belonged to.

Like no matter the horrors, he was always meant to be mine.

“I don’t give a fuck what the world thinks,” he growls, pulling me tight against his chest.

“I will spend the rest of my life proving it to you.”

I tilt my face up, my mouth barely brushing his, our breath caught between us.

Everything inside me screams this is chaos, this is dangerous.

But it’s also real.

He’s not the boy I used to dream about.

He’s fury and darkness now—obsession shaped into flesh.

And maybe, maybe I’ve always wanted that.

Not the prince.

The wolf.

But I won’t make it easy.

My palm presses to his chest, the thud of his heart a match to mine.

My other hand curls into the back of his neck.

I watch his eyes, dark with restraint, and I let myself smile.

“If that’s the kind of love you offer,” I breathe, “then I want it. I want you.”

He trembles against me, fingers tightening at my waist like chains about to snap.

“You left me once,” I whisper, “so if you want me now, you’ll have to earn every jagged edge you left behind.”

I retreat a single step, chin up, daring him.

He looks wrecked.

Ravenous.

“I’ll run, Liam. And if you catch me, you’d better be ready to never let go again.”

And God help me, I’ve never wanted anything more.