Chapter: Don't Do MatesChapter Six: I Don't Do MatesI step back the second my balance returns.The movement is sharp, almost violent, my heel scraping stone as I put distance between us. My wolf howls at the loss of contact like something's been physically torn out of my chest. Every inch I put between us costs something, a pull under my ribs that doesn't care what I want. I ignore it. I've spent five years ignoring worse.Kai doesn't chase the distance. He stands there with his eyes still burning red, fangs still down, breathing controlled in a way that tells me exactly how much effort the control is costing him. He looks like a man who spent years bracing for a hit he never fully believed would land, and now that it has, doesn't know what to do with his own hands."Don't."One word. I don't explain it. I don't owe him the rest of the sentence.His voice comes out rough when he finally speaks, testing my name like he isn't sure it still belongs to me. "Rose."I don't answer that either.The terrace doors
آخر تحديث: 2026-08-22
Chapter: Who's More RuthlessChapter Five: Who's More RuthlessThe room goes quiet before I've finished walking through the door.I feel it happen in stages — conversation dying in clusters, glasses stopping halfway to mouths, a hundred heads turning like the air itself told them to look. The gown is custom, black, cut to move with me instead of against me. The diamond at my throat is pink, flawless, and the only one of its kind on this continent. Somewhere to my left a camera flashes. Then another.A waiter puts champagne in my hand before I ask for it. I don't smile at him. I don't smile at any of them.Five years ago these people watched me disappear into a corner of every room I entered, and not one of them noticed the leaving. Tonight they can't stop looking, and I let them look, because there's nothing left of the woman who used to shrink from it.The women glare first. Then their husbands stop pretending not to stare, and the glares sharpen into something uglier. I walk past all of it like weather I've alr
آخر تحديث: 2026-08-22
Chapter: : I Will Think About ItChapter Four: I Will Think About It"Let's talk about your debt."Derek doesn't sit back down. He hangs half out of the chair, one hand braced white-knuckled on the armrest, staring at me like the floor under him has changed shape.It has."Ro—""Ghost."One word. I don't raise my voice to say it. I don't need to. He stops like a leash has caught him mid-stride, jaw still open around the rest of a name that doesn't belong to him anymore.He recovers the way desperate men always do — badly, and too fast."Ghost. I meant Ghost." He drags a hand down his face, and for a second the mask of a man who once owned every room he walked into slips, showing me something closer to the truth underneath it. "I know I don't have the right to ask anything of you. But I'm asking anyway."I open the file on the desk. Let him watch me read instead of watching him talk.He leans forward. His voice drops into that register I remember too well — the one he used when he wanted something and knew charm would
آخر تحديث: 2026-08-22
Chapter: SurprisedChapter Three: surprised The man across the table is sweating through his suit and trying not to show it. He's the CFO of a logistics company worth nine figures, and he's spent the last forty minutes trying to talk me down from the number I opened with. I let him talk. I always let them talk. It's the only kindness I extend anymore — the illusion that they had a chance to change my mind. "That number isn't moving," I say, when he finally runs out of words. "You have until end of day tomorrow. After that the offer drops eight percent, and it keeps dropping every day you make me wait." "You can't be serious." "I don't make offers I'm not serious about." I close my laptop. The sound of it in this glass room lands louder than it should. "Ask around about me before you decide I'm bluffing." Somewhere behind him his lawyer shifts in his seat, and I watch the exact moment the man realizes his own counsel isn't going to back him up on this. That's the part these men never understand wa
آخر تحديث: 2026-08-22
Chapter: What's Left of herChapter Two: What's Left of Her I didn't sleep. I sat on the edge of the bathtub most of the night with the tap running so nobody in the hall would hear me, and somewhere around five in the morning I stopped crying and just sat there, empty, listening to water go down a drain. When the sun comes up I get to my feet because staying on that floor another minute feels like agreeing to something. I walk to the mirror and make myself stand in front of it a long time before I can look at it directly. Frizzy hair pulled back so tight it's given me a headache since seven this morning. Glasses too big for my face, the kind Derek picked out for me himself, said they made me look "respectable." My reflection stares back like a stranger wearing my clothes. I lift my shirt. The scar sits low on my left side, pale and thick, the skin around it puckered where they stitched me back together. I press two fingers against it the way I used to when I needed proof I was still real. I gave a piece of
آخر تحديث: 2026-08-22
Chapter: Cheating scumbagChapter OneThe pain hits before I'm even awake.It rips through my chest like something has torn loose inside me, a sharp, physical wrongness that has no source and no shape — just the mate bond, screaming that the man on the other end of it is somewhere he shouldn't be. My wolf is already up, already at the door, clawing at the inside of my ribs like the house is on fire.I'm Rose Blackwood. Luna of Blackwood Pack. Five years married to Alpha Derek Blackwood — five years of being told, in a hundred small ways, that a woman my size should be grateful he chose me at all — and in five years, the bond has never hurt like this.Derek's side of the bed is empty. Cold enough that he's been gone a while.I know this house better than I know my own hands. Sixty rooms, three floors, a training barn behind the east wing that always smells like sawdust and sweat. You learn a place without meaning to, when it's the only place you're allowed to belong.I walk the east wing barefoot, my wolf hauli
آخر تحديث: 2026-08-22
تسجيل الدخول
