Chapter 3: Lover’s secret
The mashed potatoes were concrete in his mouth. A sour, too-sweet acidity rose at the back of his throat. The heat in his ears became a roaring static, drowning out Stiles’ voice, the general clatter of the cafeteria. His focus, sharp as a shard of glass, was entirely on the bell-like sound of her laugh from across the room. And those two words.
_Twice._
Nothing. They were bored.
Across the mess hall, Kate was shrugging, taking a delicate bite of an apple slice, like she’d just commented on the weather. Scott’s gaze flicked to Stiles, who was now miming a chemistry experiment gone explosively wrong, his hands waving. Had he always talked with his hands so much? Had Kate’s hands been on him, like they’d just been on Scott against the tree? Freshman year. Scott had been small then.Human. He’d barely known Kate beyond her being one of the pretty, untouchable girls who drifted through the halls like a rumor. Stiles had known her differently.
The rational part of him knew it didn’t matter.Ancient history. It was before they were together. It was a thread he’d never pull at, because pulling at it might unravel the new, fragile fabric they’d just woven. Knowing felt different than hearing it, though. Hearing it tossed out so casually to her friends. Heard it with supernatural clarity. It wasn’t the act itself. It was the fact she carried this secret, this small piece of intimacy shared with his best friend, while she’d just coaxed the monster out of him in the woods. Did she compare them?
A low, ugly thought began to burn in the pit of his stomach. The scent he’d noticed in her bedroom. The one lingering under fresh laundry and her perfume. Faint, male, distinctive.Stiles. His jaw clicked. Stiles's scent was in the threads of her comforter. He’d been there.Her room. Her bed. More than once. The pieces connected with brutal efficiency.
Stiles finished his weed-killer story and finally looked at Scott’s face. His own humor evaporated.
“Whoa. What’s wrong? You look like you’re gonna hurl.”
Scott stared straight ahead. He didn't trust his voice.
“Dude, seriously. Is it a wolf thing? Smell something bad?” Stiles’ voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper.
Scott slowly swiveled his head to look at him. He looked at his friend’s open, concerned face, his wild eyebrows, the mouth that never stopped moving. He saw a ghost in the lines of his face, a phantom version of him younger, in Kate’s room, in her bed. Twice.He tasted metal.
“Nothing,” Scott ground out. “Just… food’s bad.”
“Tell me about it,” Stiles said, poking at his own tray, the moment of concern passing, replaced by his natural momentum. “Pretty sure the ‘chicken’ is a particle that hasn’t been observed by science. CERN is gonna want a sample.”
Scott watched Kate from beneath his lashes. She stood, laughing, collecting her tray and her bag. She glanced over at his table. Her eyes met his. Her smile didn’t falter, but it changed. For him. It softened at the edges, her gaze holding an intimate knowledge now. It cut through the white noise in his head. He felt a reflexive pull toward her, a counterpoint to the coiling jealousy. This was them. This was now.
She gave him a tiny, almost imperceptible nod and turned to leave with her friends.
Scott’s wolf thrashed against its cage. It wanted to charge across the cafeteria. It wanted to snarl in the face of every boy who looked at her. It wanted to demand to know if it had been different with him in the woods. It craved the anchor of her scent, her touch, to scrub the imagined memory of Stiles’ hands on her from his mind.
He didn’t move.
---
The rest of the school day blurred. He heard nothing from any teacher. He moved between classes like a ghost, his senses tuned exclusively to his environment. He caught Kate’s scent five different places. In each instance, he froze, dissecting it for contamination. A stray strand of Stiles’ hair? A lingering echo of his voice on her skin? His paranoia was a raw, open nerve.
He saw Kate once in the hall between fifth and sixth period. He’d tracked her from the third floor scent-marker near her locker.
“Hey,” she said, her face lighting up as he fell into step beside her. “Where were you after lunch? I looked for you.”
“Had to… go somewhere.” He couldn’t meet her eyes.
“Oh.” Her pace slowed. She bumped her shoulder against his. “Everything okay? You seem weird.”
He stopped, grabbing her wrist. It wasn't rough, but it wasn't the usual gentle hold. Her pulse jumped under his thumb, quick and vital. His wolf settled a fraction, possessive and pleased.
“Just… not great at sharing,” he muttered, the truth smuggled into a half-truth.
She misunderstood. She leaned in close, her vanilla-jasmine scent flooding his senses, wiping away the other, older smells. “I’m yours, Scott,” she whispered, her lips brushing the shell of his ear. “Only yours now. That was just… two dumb kids a million years ago.”
He searched her eyes. They were wide, honest. He believed her. He believed that to her, it meant nothing. But belief was in his head. The wolf lived in his gut. And the knot of jealousy in his gut was immune to logic.
He forced a smile. It felt like breaking skin. “I know.”
She kissed his cheek, a quick, warm press. “Text me later?”
He nodded, a tight jerk of his head. She floated away, and he watched her turn a corner, her hair swinging like a metronome marking time he’d never have with her.
He didn’t text her later. His hands shook too much. He spent the evening at home prowling the perimeter of his room. He replayed the sounds. Her laugh. The phrase ‘twice’. Then it mixed. His own groans in the forest. Stiles’ endless stream of jokes. The wet sound of their coupling against the tree. Did she make different sounds with Stiles?
He smashed a milk glass in the kitchen sink, the sound a satisfying, sharp explosion. He stared at the jagged fragments in the basin, the last dregs white against white ceramic. His mom, watching from the doorway, just sighed.
“Go for a run, Scott. You’ve got more energy than this house can hold.”
He ran. He stripped off his clothes behind the shed and shifted. The world dissolved into scent-trails and silver-edged shadows. He ran until his paw pads were raw, his lungs screaming fire. He ran toward the deep woods, chasing the ghost of last night’s memory—her scent on the bark, the crushed moss, her satisfied sigh on the air. But the wild air was clean now, carrying only the smells of decay and living green. He felt both too powerful and utterly powerless.
The moon was high, nearly full and leaking a cruel, brilliant light, when he finally slipped back onto her street as a human. His jeans and t-shirt felt like a scratchy prison. His skin vibrated with unspent fury. He wasn't calm. The run hadn't bled the poison out. It had distilled it, concentrated it into a single, feral need. Possession.
Kate’s house was dark except for a faint, warm glow from her second-story window.
He didn't walk to the front door. He moved through her neighbor’s yard like liquid shadow, crouched, his eyes already glowing a faint, sickly yellow in the deep dark. He sprang, claws—already extended from the knuckles of his clenched fists—digging into the wooden siding. He hauled himself up with a feral grace that was nothing like climbing. It was an ascension.
Her window was cracked open for the cool night air. He could hear the quiet rustle of pages inside. Studying. The scent of paper, her shampoo, the mint tea on her nightstand. And something else. A cold, metallic thread of alarm underneath it all. His scent.Stiles.
The thought crystallized, became a jagged fact in his mind. She had seen him after school. After him. She was wrapped in things Stiles had touched.
He didn’t tap on the glass.
He hit it.
His claws, a dark crescent moon against the pane, punched through the lower panel. The crack was a sharp, dry splintering in the quiet night. He wrenched his hand sideways. Glass fell inward, sprinkling her carpet with diamonds. He hooked his fingers into the wooden frame of the lower sash and lifted, the wood groaning in protest before it gave way with a tearing shriek. He hauled the entire window up in one brutal, upward heave.Kate screamed. A short, sharp sound of pure shock.
She was at her desk, a textbook open. She froze, her eyes huge, her body arrested in the act of pushing back from the chair.
He was inside before the scream had fully faded. His eyes, now molten, radioactive gold, fixed on her. He smelled the adrenaline flood her system. It was sweet. It was fear. It fed the animal riding his spine.
“Scott?” Her voice was a shattered thing.
He didn’t speak. He moved. In two quick strides, he crossed the space from window to bed. His intention was a solid, physical thing in the room. He reached for her as she scrambled back, the wheels of her chair catching on the rug. He snagged the strap of her thin, silk camisole with one claw-tipped finger and pulled.
It tore. The sound was like ripping skin. It wasn't delicate.
“I need to forget,” he growled. The words were thick, guttural, pushed past canines that were too long.
“Forget what? Scott, stop! What are you—”
He pushed her.Not hard. But it was a motion that contained absolute inevitability. She landed on her back on her neatly made bed, the breath knocked from her lungs. He was over her in the next heartbeat. One clawed hand pinned her wrist to the mattress above her head. He felt the frantic bird-beat of her pulse through his palm. His other hand grabbed the waistband of her flannel pajama shorts and the cotton underwear beneath them and pulled. They didn’t unbutton.They tore. The shredded fabric came away in his hand, tossed aside to land on the broken glass.
He was barely aware of opening his own jeans. He was just a conduit for the heat, the pressure, the desperate, snarling need to claim. To own this space, this body, this moment so completely that it would annihilate every other memory, every phantom scent, every ‘twice.’
He was not gentle. He didn't line himself up. He was all blunt force and burning intent.
When he entered her, she was not ready. She cried out, a choked sound of pain and shock. He drove deep, his hips hammering against hers, the bedframe slamming into the wall with a rhythmic, violent thud that matched the storm in his head. His claws sank into her pillowcase on either side of her head, tearing goose feathers loose that spiraled up like snow in the muted light. Her face was pale. Her mouth open. Not in pleasure. In stunned, frightened awe. And beneath the fear, beneath the initial hurt, he could smell it, that traitorous, involuntary bloom of arousal her body produced in answer to his violence. It choked him with rage and triumph.
He fucked her in a furious, wordless rhythm. He was exorcising a ghost. He wanted her sore. He wanted her marked. He wanted to be the last, the only thing her body remembered. His growls were low, continuous, resonating in his chest and vibrating into hers. Hers were sharp cries, punches of air, mixed with his name uttered not as an endearment, but a fractured plea.
He felt her stiffen, her body finally catching the brutal pace, and she came with a gasping sob that was torn in two. The sensation of her clenching around him pulled him over an edge that was more cliff than slope. His release was a convulsive, possessive flood. He threw his head back, a ragged roar tearing from his throat, aimed at the ceiling, the moon outside, at Stiles’ ghost in the fucking room.
He collapsed onto her, slick with sweat, his breath sawing in and out like it came from broken bellows. Slowly, the gold bled from his eyes. The claws retracted. The awareness of the sharp feather quills poking his hands returned. The shattered glass on the floor. The ripped clothes.
Kate lay perfectly still beneath him.Silent. He lifted his head to look at her face.
Tear tracks gleamed on her temples, sliding into her hair. She was staring at the ceiling, blinking slowly. Her breath shuddered. He could feel her heart hammering against his sternum, beating in triple-time chaos. He was a crushing weight on her small frame.
He was empty. The ugly, jealous fury was gone. In its place was a cold, spreading horror.
He opened his mouth. No sound came out. He’d told her he was a monster. And then he’d shown her, not as some wild thrill in a forest, but as an invader, a berserker in her sanctuary.
She turned her head. Her eyes, those striking blue eyes that could be so soft, so knowing, were blank. A flat, glacial lake.
“Get off me,” she said, her voice devoid of everything. It was dead air.
He scrambled off her, clumsy. He turned his back, fastening his jeans with shaking hands. He heard her sit up, the rustle of torn fabric.
“Scott.” His name from her lips again. No plea now. It was a sentence.
He turned. She had pulled the corner of her torn comforter over her lap. Her face was stone.
“You need to leave.” She didn't gesture to the window.
He stood there, his form blocking the moonlit window. The gold was gone from his eyes, leaving only the human brown, wide with dawning horror. He looked at his hands, ordinary now, but he could still feel the phantom imprints of claws, the resistance of the pillowcase. He opened his mouth, but the words were ash.
"Get out," she repeated, her voice a hollow scrape. She wasn't crying anymore. She was just staring through him.
He moved backwards, his steps unsteady on the glass-littered carpet. The ripped window shade fluttered in the night breeze like a ghost. He turned and clumsily climbed back through the jagged frame, a tangle of limbs and shame. He dropped to the lawn below, the impact jolting his knees. He didn’t look back up.
Inside, Kate listened to the soft thud of his landing. She waited, perfectly still, until the sound of his running feet faded into the suburban night. Then she moved.
Her body was a map of aches. A sharp pain bloomed between her legs, a deeper bruise was forming on her wrist where he’d pinned her. She swung her legs off the bed, her feet finding the cold floor among the glittering shards. She didn’t feel them cut her soles. She found a pair of sweatpants balled on her chair and pulled them on, then a hoodie from the floor. The fabric was coarse against her skin, a welcome distraction.
She didn’t think. Thinking would let the shaking start. She stuffed her feet into unlaced sneakers, grabbed her phone and keys from her desk with numb fingers, and fled her room.
The house was tomb-silent. Her parents’ door was shut. She took the stairs two at a time, her breath hitching. The front door closed behind her with a too-loud click. The night air was cool, shocking against her face. She started to run.
Her neighborhood was a blur of darkened windows and silent porches. The slap of her sneakers on the pavement was the only sound. Her mind replayed the splintering glass, the gold of his eyes, the visceral, claiming violence of his body. A sob clawed its way up her throat, but she swallowed it, forcing it down with a gulp of air. She couldn’t break yet. She needed walls.
Stiles’s house emerged from the shadows, a familiar shape at the end of the cul-de-sac. A single light was on upstairs—his room. Her lungs burned as she stumbled up the driveway. She didn’t use the doorbell. She pounded on the front door with the side of her fist, a frantic, uneven rhythm.
The porch light flicked on, blinding her for a second. The door opened.
Stiles stood there, hair mussed, wearing a t-shirt and plaid pajama pants. He held a half-eaten Pop-Tart. His confused, sleepy expression morphed into alarm as he took her in—wild-eyed, shoelaces trailing, shivering in a hoodie pulled over torn pajamas.
“Kate? What the hell—”
She didn’t let him finish. “He’s not human.”
The words fell between them, stark and impossible. Stiles froze, the Pop-Tart forgotten in his hand. His eyes darted past her into the night, then back to her face, searching for a punchline. He found none.
“What?” he managed.
“Scott,” she gasped, the name a fracture. She hugged herself, her arms tight across her ribs. “He… he came through my window. His eyes… they were… and his hands…” She held up her own, clean, ordinary hands, shaking violently now. “He broke my window. He…”
She couldn’t say the rest. The violation was too fresh, too big for words. It lived in the soreness of her body, in the terror still buzzing in her veins.
Stiles’s face went pale. The Pop-Tart dropped to the floor, frosting-side down. All the usual sarcasm, the hyperactive energy, drained away, leaving something cold and grim in its place. He knew. She saw the awful understanding click into place behind his eyes. He knew something she didn’t.
“Jesus,” he whispered. He reached out, not to hug her, but to gently guide her inside by the elbow. His touch was careful, afraid she might break. “Okay. Okay, come in. You’re safe here.”
He pulled her into the dim hallway and quickly shut the door, locking it and throwing the deadbolt with a solid thunk. The sound of it sliding home was the first semblance of safety she’d felt in an hour. He turned to face her, his expression a mixture of panic and a terrible, resigned guilt.
“Kate,” he said, his voice low and urgent. “What exactly did you see?”
“He forced himself on me.” The words were flat, dead things dropping into the still air of the hallway. She watched them land on Stiles, saw his face rearrange itself from wary concern into something like physical sickness. “He hurt me. And his eyes were… they were gold, Stiles. Like an animal’s. And his hands… they changed.”
She started to cry then. Not sobs, but a silent, desperate leaking of tears she seemed powerless to stop. Her body began to shake, a fine tremor that started in her hands and radiated outwards until her teeth chattered. “I’m really scared.”
“Oh, god. Kate.” Stiles’s voice cracked. He looked utterly lost, his eyes darting around the hallway as if the answer might be written on the walls. The guilt on his face was a living thing. He knew. He knew everything, and he hadn’t told her. He took a step toward her, hands hovering. “Okay. Okay, come here.”
He didn’t try to hug her. Instead, he moved carefully, as if approaching a spooked animal. He slid one arm under her knees and the other behind her back. He wasn’t strong like Scott, and the lift was awkward, straining his lanky frame. But it was gentle. Deliberate. He carried her the short distance down the hall to his bedroom, his socked feet shuffling on the hardwood.
His room was a familiar chaos of lacrosse gear, textbooks, and half-built model kits. He carefully lowered her onto the unmade bed, the sheets still warm from where he’d been lying. The comforter smelled like him—faint sweat, cheap fabric softener, and the ozone of his computer. He pulled the blanket over her, tucking it around her shoulders.
“I’m going to go get you some water, okay? And maybe an ice pack or…”
Her hand shot out from under the blanket, gripping his wrist. Her fingers were ice cold. “Don’t. Don’t leave. Please.”
The ‘please’ undid him. He looked down at her, at the tear-streaks on her pale face, the bruise already blossoming on her wrist in the shape of fingerprints. His best friend’s fingerprints. He nodded, a quick, stiff jerk of his head. “Okay. I’m right here.”
He kicked off his slippers and climbed over her, settling against the headboard. He didn’t ask. He just opened his arms. She shifted, turning her back to his chest, and folded herself into the space he made. He wrapped his arms around her, over the blanket, and held on. Her whole body was rigid at first, a rod of tension against him. Gradually, minute by minute, the shaking subsided. Her breathing, which had been fast and shallow, deepened into something ragged but slower.
They lay like that for a long time. The digital clock on his desk changed from 1:17 to 1:43. The house creaked around them. A car passed outside, its headlights painting a slow stripe across the ceiling.
“He’s a werewolf, isn’t he?” Her voice was small, muffled by the blanket.
Stiles’s arms tightened around her. He let out a breath he felt like he’d been holding for months. “Yeah.”
She didn’t react for another full minute. “And you knew.”
“I found out after.” He hated the defensiveness in his tone, but it was true. “It wasn’t my secret to tell.”
“You’re my friend too.” It wasn’t an accusation. It was a fact, stated with a quiet, exhausted hurt that was worse than anger.
“I know.” He pressed his forehead against the back of her head. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Kate.”
She didn’t reply. She just shifted closer, until her whole back was flush against his chest. He could feel the steady, too-fast beat of her heart through their layers of clothing. He held her, staring into the dark, listening to her breathe. He thought about Scott, out there somewhere in the night, lost to the monster. He thought about the broken window, the ripped clothes, the fear in her eyes.
He thought about freshman year, the two times that meant nothing, and how they somehow meant everything now.