Chapter 4

[Killian]

The door clicks shut.

I'm still holding the bills. She shoved them into my chest, the whole stack, didn't even count it, and walked out before I could get a word in. Barefoot, carrying her shoes, like I was the one being dismissed.

A wolfless Omega who can't afford shoes that fit just threw a thousand dollars back in my face. I almost want to laugh.

I fold the bills into my wallet. Done. She's gone. A bad night, a lapse in judgment, the kind of story that disappears because no one who matters will ever hear it.

I pull out my phone.

"Liam. Suite 412. Bring a change of clothes. And have housekeeping gut this room. New carpet, new upholstery. Bill it to my personal account."

I hang up before he can ask questions.

The room is a disaster. Chaise wrecked. My shirt on the floor next to a toppled wine glass, red bleeding into carpet. My wolf hijacked my body, did whatever it wanted for six hours, and left me to clean up. Chalk it up to the whiskey, the crowd, a sensory overload that cracked the door just enough for instinct to shove through.

Won't happen again.

I move to the window. The city below is gray and waking up. Delivery trucks, traffic lights, a jogger crossing an empty intersection. Ordinary things. My kind of things.

My wolf is silent. Not the comfortable kind, more like the silence after a fight, when the other person's still in the room but has stopped talking. I can feel it behind my sternum, dense and hot, curled in on itself. Sulking, probably. Tough.

I go to button my cuffs and realize I'm in last night's dress shirt, wrinkled, half-open. There are marks on my chest, thin pink lines across the collarbone. I button the shirt to the throat and stop looking.

The room smells. Not bad—that's the problem. Something warm and layered underneath the champagne and leather, the kind of scent that finds its way into your lungs before you decide to breathe it in.

I open the window. Good enough.

Liam shows up in twenty-eight minutes. Garment bag, two coffees, and the look I've known since we were twelve. I have questions, and I'm going to make you suffer by not asking them.

He scans the room. Eyebrow goes up a quarter inch.

"Don't," I say.

"I was going to say good morning." He sets the coffee down. "But sure. Let's skip pleasantries."

I take the garment bag into the bathroom. Shower. Quick, scalding, too much soap. Charcoal suit, white shirt, black tie. I check the knot, adjust the collar, step back out.

Liam hands me the coffee. He's perched on the desk, the only clean surface, arms crossed, studying me with the easy patience of someone who's waited me out a thousand times.

"You look like shit," he says.

"I look like I closed a $14 billion deal on three hours of sleep."

"Uh-huh." He sips his coffee. "You've been missing since eleven. Victoria came looking twice. I covered with a migraine." He shrugs. "She didn't buy it. Probably filing it for later interrogation."

"She can file whatever she wants." I set the cup down. "You going to ask, or not?"

Liam just looks at me. Patient. Waiting.

"A server," I say. "My wolf fixated on her at the gala. I had her reassigned to a different station, stepped out for air around eleven, and lost the next six hours. Blacked out. Woke up here. She was here."

Liam is quiet. The real kind, not the professional kind. The kind he saves for conversations that actually matter.

"Your wolf fixated on a caterer," he says carefully. "And marked her."

"I rejected her. Twenty minutes ago, in this room. She accepted. It's done." I drain half the coffee in one go. "Find out who hired the catering company. I want to know how a wolfless Omega ended up on the guest floor. Housekeeping within the hour."

Liam doesn't move.

"You rejected a mate bond," he says. "And your wolf is, what, fine with that?"

"My wolf doesn't get a vote."

He watches me. That look. The one I've been dodging since we were kids, since his father drove us to school and Liam would study me through the rearview mirror on the bad mornings, the ones where I showed up with bruises I didn't explain.

"Let me call Eva," he says quietly. "Just a check-up. She's dealt with bond disruptions before."

"I don't need a pack elder poking around in my head."

"A forced rejection can affect the wolf long-term, Kill. If there's damage—"

"There's no damage. The bond was barely formed. It'll dissolve on its own."

He holds my gaze a beat longer than comfortable. Then exhales and stands.

"Fine." He grabs the ruined clothes from the floor. At the door he pauses, one hand on the frame, without turning. "Eva's door is open. Whenever."

"Goodbye, Liam."

"You're welcome for the coffee."

The door shuts. I finish my coffee, check my watch. 7:43. Henderson's ratchet clause. The Thorn lunch. Seventy-seven minutes to the board meeting.

The scent is still in the room. Fainter with the window open, but there, curling underneath the cold air like something that knows it's being evicted and doesn't care.

I walk out. Close the door.

---

 

Six days later.

Penthouse study. City lights through the windows, Meridian files on my desk, whiskey untouched. Everything in its right place.

I've been reading the same earnout clause for five minutes.

The past six days have been productive. Closed Meridian ahead of schedule. Two board meetings. Quarterly projections. Dinner with Victoria on Wednesday at Aurelius, her favorite. She talked about her Paris gallery and I gave her what she needed: attention, the occasional smile. She reached across the table and touched my hand, and I laced my fingers through hers, because that's what you do.

It's just that my sleep's been off. Waking at four for no reason. Lying in the dark, wide-eyed, listening to nothing. And my wolf's been quiet, not a sound since that morning. Just a dense, still presence behind my ribs, like a stone sinking through water that still hasn't hit bottom.

I don't think about her. That's not a declaration; it's a fact. She's an incident. Handled, behind me. CCTV footage destroyed, catering audit signed off. Every loose end tied.

No reason for my focus to slip. Probably the full moon, tomorrow night. I can feel it already, a low hum in my joints. Nothing I can't handle. Grandfather made sure of that when I was fourteen. Three months in the estate cellar, silver-lined walls, until I could hold my shift through sheer will. By sixteen I didn't flinch.

I pick the pen back up.

Keep your money, Mr. Voss.

The thought surfaces without permission. Not her face. Just broad strokes. Brown eyes. Something stubborn in the set of her jaw. Hands that shook but didn't drop a single bill.

I've had board members twice her age fold under less pressure. She was barefoot, wrapped in a bedsheet, standing in front of a man who could end her with a phone call.

She threw the money back.

I close the file and head for the bathroom.

Cold water. Toothbrush. Phone on the counter, tomorrow's schedule glowing on the screen.

I unbutton my shirt and pull it off.

The marks are still there.

Six days. I've healed cracked ribs faster. Thin pink lines across my collarbone and chest, faded but present. One runs from the left collarbone down to just above my heart, a clean line, the kind left by someone gripping, not scratching. Holding on.

I splash cold water on my face. In the mirror: dark hair, gray eyes, the face Grandfather said was the only worthwhile thing my father ever gave me. Nothing wrong.

I reach for the towel.

My wolf hits like a wall of concrete.

No warning. One second I'm reaching for Egyptian cotton, the next something detonates behind my ribs, a wall of force, raw and animal and furious, slamming through my chest so hard my vision whites out. My hand locks mid-air. Every muscle from jaw to calves seizes at once, rigid, vibrating, like a live wire touched to wet skin.

Two seconds. Three.

Something floods in. Not thoughts, not words, but sensation. Warm skin under my mouth. A pulse under my tongue. A scent that buckles my knees, and underneath it all, a name, ripping through me from somewhere deep and primal and completely beyond my jurisdiction.

Then it snaps shut. Gone. Door slammed in my face.

I'm gripping the sink. White-knuckled, arms locked. My breath fogs the mirror. I can hear my heartbeat in my skull.

Ten seconds. Twenty. The shaking fades.

My wolf withdraws, slow and deliberate, and what it leaves behind isn't silence. It's a dare. A line drawn between us, patient and absolute, and for the first time in fifteen years I'm not certain which side I'm standing on.

I straighten up. Dry my face. The mirror is still fogged. I wipe it with one palm, a single clean stroke across the glass.

And stop.

The man looking back has my face. My jaw. My wet hair pushed back from my forehead.

But his right eye is gray.

And his left eye burns gold.

Not a flicker. Not a trick of the light. Steady, molten gold, bright enough to throw a faint amber glow on the skin beneath it. My wolf's color. Staring back from my own reflection like a stranger who's been living in my house and just decided to stop hiding.

I don't blink.

It doesn't fade.

Tomorrow is the full moon.

My hand finds the edge of the sink. Grips.

The gold doesn't waver.