Chapter: Chapter 7The rooftop garden didn't look like something Ryder Kane would own.That was the first thing she thought when he pushed open the door and the warm amber glow of string lights hit her face. Raised wooden planters ran along both sides. Lavender grew in dark clusters. A pergola framed the far edge, overlooking the city, and below it sat two chairs and a small table with a pot of tea already waiting.Ava stepped out.The evening air smelled like the plants and the city and the last heat of a setting sun. She turned once, slowly, taking it in."I didn't have you down as a gardener," she said."I'm not." He came to stand beside her. "The previous Luna designed it. I kept the plants alive."She looked at him sideways.He was looking at the lavender."How long ago?" she asked."Eight years." A pause. "She died in the border campaign. Year three of the war."Ava turned that over carefully."I'm sorry," she said. And she meant it.He gave a short nod — not dismissing the sympathy, just acceptin
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-04-16
Chapter: Chapter 6Ava sat in a high-backed chair at the edge of the ruined dining room and didn't move. Glass crunched underfoot as Ryder's men dragged the surviving assassin toward the service corridor. Cold air poured through the shattered window in steady waves. Nobody had offered her a coat.She didn't ask for one.Ryder stood ten feet away with his back to her, speaking in low, clipped sentences to Marcus. She couldn't hear the words over the ringing in her ears. The gold had faded from her eyes — she could tell because Marcus had stopped shooting her sideways looks — but the warmth beneath her skin hadn't gone anywhere. It sat in her palms like banked coals.She pressed them flat against her knees."Clear the room."Ryder's voice. Short. Final.Marcus and the remaining security filed out without a word. The door closed.The silence pressed in from every direction.Ryder turned.He crossed to her slowly. Not the measured, deliberate walk of a man approaching a negotiation. The walk of a man decidi
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-03-25
Chapter: Chapter 5Ava had noticed that about the rooms Ryder chose — he preferred walls, controlled space, exits he could account for. The dinner table was set for two. No staff lingered. Whatever this was, he'd cleared the floor.She sat across from him and picked up her fork and told herself this was simply the next item on the contract's list.*Public affection. Pack appearances.*This was practice."You're not eating," he said."I'm eating.""You're moving it around."She took a deliberate bite and chewed it without tasting a thing.He watched her the way he watched everything — like he was solving a problem that had more variables than he'd initially expected. It was aggravating. It was also, in the privacy of her own skull, something else she didn't have a name for yet.He reached across the table and poured water into her glass."The Whitmore Alliance is hosting a function Friday," he said. "They'll be watching us. If the bond doesn't read as genuine, we'll have three neutral packs question the
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-03-25
Chapter: Chapter 4Ava dropped to her knees on the cold marble and gripped the sides of the toilet, body heaving, eyes watering, one hand pressed flat against the floor for balance. The marble was icy against her palm. The morning light through the frosted window was thin and grey.She stayed there until it was over.Then she sat back against the cabinet beneath the sink, pulled her knees up, and pressed her forehead to them.*Nine more months.* No — five. Roughly five more months of this. Werewolf pregnancies were shorter than human ones, and triplets moved faster still. She didn't have the luxury of a slow timeline.She flushed, rinsed her face, brushed her teeth, and stared at herself in the mirror for a long moment.The woman looking back at her had dark circles pressed beneath her eyes, a mouth that had stopped trusting easily, and a bump she was running out of ways to hide.She'd managed it last night. The coat. The dim light. The way Ryder had pinned her wrists, pressed against her thighs rather
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-03-25
Chapter: Chapter 3Not the temperature — the heating worked fine, the kind of expensive, invisible warmth that costs more per month than most people earned. Cold in the way a room gets when no one has ever laughed in it. Black marble floors. Floor-to-ceiling windows running the full length of the east wall. The city spread out below, a grid of orange and white light sixty stories down, indifferent and distant.Ryder's bedroom looked like a war room that had been given a bed as an afterthought.The bed itself was enormous. King-sized, black-framed, pushed against the far wall with a precision that suggested it hadn't been moved an inch since the day it was delivered. A single lamp burned on the left side. The right side was bare.Ava stood in the doorway with her bag at her feet and forced herself to take a full breath."You'll sleep here," Ryder said from behind her.She turned.He'd already shrugged off his coat. He stood at the foot of the bed in a black shirt, fingers working the buttons from the col
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-03-25
Chapter: Chapter 2The limo smelled like leather and his cologne.Ava sat pressed against the far door, one hand resting in her lap, the other flat against her abdomen beneath the cover of her oversized coat. Outside the tinted windows, Seattle slid past in streaks of amber and wet asphalt. Inside, the silence was the kind that had weight.Ryder sat across from her. One ankle crossed over his knee. Both arms loose at his sides. He looked like a man who'd just closed a business deal and was already thinking about the next one.He reached into the breast pocket of his coat and pulled out a folded document.He didn't hand it to her. He set it on the leather seat between them and pushed it forward with two fingers — the way you'd slide a contract across a boardroom table.Ava looked at it without touching it."Read it," he said.She picked it up.The paper was thick, expensive. Twelve pages of clean black type. Her eyes moved fast — she'd grown up watching her father negotiate pack agreements, had learned t
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-03-25
Masuk
