***
Midnight had tried to memorize the path down the corridors the hunters dragged her through but it was difficult focusing on anything but standing steadily on her own two feet when all she could think about was the heat pooling between her legs.

Without acquiring a single bit of useful information, she was shoved into another equally dark and tepid room. The moment the door shut behind her, her knees buckled. Without anyone watching her, she lost the will to appear strong and with the will gone all her strength was sapped away.

She let out a gasp, bracing for the inevitable, but didn't crash to the ground like she expected. Instead a pair of arms circled around her and lifted her into a princess carry before setting her gently on the floor.

"Let me help you," Leonardo murmured, then pressed a soft kiss against her jaw.

Despite herself, Midnight leaned into his touch but that didn't stop her from growling, "Get off me."

Technically, she was the one on top of him since he had taken it upon himself to pull her up into his lap the moment she had been thrown into his cell.

He cradled her in his arms and didn't allow her to pull away from him. His hot breath fanned against her neck then his nose grazed her shoulder. "You're covered in blood. What happened?"

They had agreed to lead the hunters away from the pack while she built up the energy to make a pack-wide announcement through their mind link. After encountering another volley of arrows, they had been separated.

Leonardo didn't know that she had forced a shift to fight off the hunters and had managed to kill more than a handful of them while maiming the rest and she didn't know how a slippery scout like him had managed to get captured.

She pulled Robyn's coat tighter around herself but that could hardly change the fact that she wore nothing else beneath it.

"Let go of me," she replied, just as another wave of pain hit her. She bit her bottom lip and buried her face in his chest, only to wish--from embarrassment--that the ground would swallow her whole.

Once the crippling ache disappeared she put more distance between them but couldn't get far because of the arm circled around her waist.

He took her hand and she stared blankly as he intertwined their fingers. Though he had spent half a year out of the country in sunnier lands, his skin was still much lighter than hers but she couldn't help but welcome the contrast.

They didn't need to be the same to fit perfectly together.

But maybe that was just her hormones talking.

She shut her eyes when his apology reached her ears. "What. Are. You. Saying. Sorry. For?"

More than anything, she wanted to shift. Even if the pain would double and she became half-crazed, she wanted to shift again.

She had better control of her emotions in her wolf form and would be able to help her Alpha escape this place when he called for it.

Though she didn't know why the hunters had separated her from the rest of them and thrown her in here, it couldn't be anything good. She needed to be ready to follow any order he had for her but in this state she could hardly stand.

"I'm sorry for being an asshole, a jackass, a moron--"

"Cursing yourself won't make me forgive you."

"You hate me."

He sounded so pitiful and pathetic but she liked him more this way. Stripped of his proud, know-it-all exterior to reveal the soft, mushy person she had met years ago and fallen for.

She let go of the coat and kissed him, sinking her fingers into his hair to force their lips closer together. Having him this close, she almost couldn't help herself.

The reason that she gave herself was that he needed to shut up and this was the best way to make it happen. It did not occur to her then that as his Beta she could simply command him to stand down and he would.

For the first time in hours, she no longer felt like ramming herself into a wooden pole. The fire that had raged so fiercely within her was snuffed out and in its place was a peaceful warmth that swaddled her from head to toe, yet the desire still remained.

"I'm the only one allowed to hate you," she told him, taking in the amber that lit his gaze, "is that wrong?"

Her hands slid down his face to rest on his chest, the furious thumping of his heart tickling the skin of her palms.

His grip slipped from her back to her hips and he looked her in the eye. "I'm sorry," he said again. "I'm stupid and I know it. I spent years looking for a person that had been right in front of me this whole time... just because I believed in a fairytale. Being thrown in here gave me time to think a lot of things through. I think I really lov--"

"Don't," she pressed her fingers to his lips as bits of her soul spilled out in a rush, "make a mistake. I... won't be able to take it if you do. I've watched you for so long that if this. . ." she cut herself off. "This doesn't seem real."

For all she knew, she was still resting under that tree and this was all a lucid dream. The possibility of having a spy for a 'sister' had been mind-blowing enough, now the person she cared deeply about seemed to care about her too. If it all truly was a heat-induced hallucination, she wouldn't be able to handle it.

"I'm not making a mistake." Leonardo grabbed her hand and pressed a kiss to the inside of her wrist. "If I hadn't been so fixated on finding my mate, I would have known it was you all along."

"You're the one man in the pack who openly opposes me," she couldn't help but point out.

He placed her hand on his face. "I oppose you because I'm scared."

Midnight snorted and took her hand back but she wasn't able to ignore longing that rose up in her now that they were no longer having skin contact. "Scared that you'll get your ass kicked by me someday? Sorry. It has already happened."

"I'm scared that one day your bravado will get you killed, and I really don't want you to die."

This is too damn cliché. She wanted to laugh but ended up biting into his shoulder when another bout of pain arrived. Her nails dug into his back, forcing them even closer together.

Her entire being seemed to crave his and it was all she could do not to rip the clothes between them and let flesh meet flesh to satisfy the primal urges coursing through this form.

Leonardo pressed their foreheads together and stared into her amber-hazel eyes. "I'm sorry for making you suffer like this."

"You aren't the one making me suffer." Rather, he was like a drop of water in her barren desert. She wanted and wanted and wanted until she became water itself and soaked the sands.

Because of him, she felt like she could become the ocean.

"I should have marked you as my mate on our first full moon." His thumb brushed against her lips and they parted at his touch. "You always knew, didn't you?"

Midnight's face flushed and she kissed him again, not willing to admit to something as shameful as spending years secretly lusting for her direct subordinate. She tasted his lips, collided with his teeth, tasted her blood then tasted his tongue against hers while loving every single moment of it. She felt his love course through her and fill out all the cracks that novels and dramas could hardly touch.

The emotion made her heart pound.

Yes, she could finally admit to herself, you're my mate.

What she didn't know, was how to handle that revelation. 'We're mates. We're meant to be together' sounded like a death trap.

"You don't really hate me, do you?" He pulled away, lips red and swollen, and eyes so bright and hopeful.

I never said I did.

Before she could answer, he was kissing and nibbling a path down her neck, reminding her that he could still read her thoughts.

When he dragged his tongue down the hollow of her throat to the dip between her breasts, Midnight felt something in her quiver with delight. She wove her fingers into his hair and pulled his head up.

He stared at her with cloudy eyes, looking every bit as much in heat as she was. Pressed together like this, she could tell how much of that lust was just her wishful thinking--none.

"I don't think its right for us to have our first time here. Do you?" She whispered by his ear, and that was when he seemed to remember that they were both captives trapped in an unknown location with a clueless pack to protect.

Leonardo apologized and pulled the coat tighter around her, even going as far as doing the very last buttons at the top. "I couldn't control myself."

Midnight pressed a kiss to his forehead then melted against him. "Stop saying sorry. We're mates, aren't we?"

"Y-You've forgiven me?" he whispered into her hair.

"There is nothing to forgive you for. You've always put instinct over logic or emotions. If you couldn't scent me, no matter what you thought about me, you wouldn't accept me as your mate. You wouldn't want to accidentally steal someone else's mate or find your mate one day and break her heart by being in love with someone else."

She looked up at him. "Why should I forgive you for being kind?"

"People say that those who chose their mates themselves are cruel and will never end well," he said.

"If it's so bad, so many shifters wouldn't choose that option. Even if the souls were mates in their previous lives, a shifter is more than just a soul. Are you going to pretend like their haven't been many traditional mate pairs that ended in tragedy?"

Leonardo said nothing to that because it was true.

Midnight sighed and patted his thigh to console him.

"Are you feeling better?"

She nodded and smiled when he laced their fingers together. "The Alpha is here."

Leonardo perked up immediately. "What? Here where?"

She straightened up too. "Here as in, in one of the cells beside us accompanied by a spy from S.H.A.S.H.I.MA."

"What?!" Leonardo got up and headed for the door.

"Wait," Midnight stared at him in surprise, "where are you going?"

"These hunters are also from S.H.A.S.H.I.MA. The alpha is in danger."

"Wait." Midnight grabbed the wall and pulled herself to her feet.

Before her knees had a chance to buckle again, Leonardo was back at her side.

"How did you know?" She grabbed him by the arm. "How did you get captured?"

His eyes flashed with a hint of red as he gritted his teeth to answer. "After I was separated from you, I rushed to one of the lookouts on the outer perimeter, brief them on the situation and asked them to warn the pack. I tried tracking you and trailing the hunters, but I ran into a human woman instead. She was the one who captured me."

"A human woman," Midnight repeated, a bad feeling suddenly creeping up in her heart, especially upon seeing his aggrieved look. "Did she... look like me?"

Leonard's expression became unreadable. "How did you know?"

Midnight could only curse in her mind, lacking the energy to do so out loud. There are actually two lookalikes on this mountain!

She had no choice but to give Leonardo a quick briefing of the situation. From Slade running away from home to be with his 'love at first sight' to her orphan self somehow acquiring two new relatives, she didn't leave the slightest bit out.

A look of understanding slowly replaced her mate's blank features, but there was still a trace of confusion.

Before he could say a word, Midnight held her fingers to his lips. There was no time to fumble through questions she probably had no answers to. "They didn't chain you up. That means you didn't shift."

"They assumed I was human because you got shot with the arrow and didn't change... and I was with you."

Midnight couldn't help but snort. "Sloppy."

Leonardo grinned, canines growing to rest on his bottom lip. "I know, right?"

"There are wards all over this place." She tried to stop him from hurting himself unnecessarily by shifting while weakened by spells.

"And when have I ever been afraid of those?"

She watched his eyes flash red and remembered that he was the only member of their pack who escaped from the facility he had been held at alone and without outside aid.

He might have been weaker than her when it came to physical strength but she still lost to him when comparing other attributes.

Under her watchful gaze, a grown man silently transformed into a man-killing wolf with fur the color of honey.

She couldn't help but run her fingers through it and he impatiently rubbed his snout against her, the message in his actions clear.

He wanted her to ride him.

It was the most sensible arrangement since the close contact would prevent her from crumbling into a ball of pain but the corners of her mouth quirked up in amusement. "How about after you're done ramming the door open?"

Leonardo let out a pitiful whine and licked her palm thrice before setting his gaze back on the heavy metal door.

Midnight rubbed the drool back into his fur and grinned. "That's a good boy."

***
S

o. I wrote the majority of this chapter before the last one. What do you think? Was this too rushed or just meh? So the pack has been warned! And all the necessary people have kissed at least once! I think I can manage to wrap everything up in the last chapter.