CHAPTER TWELVE

RILEY

The coffee shop on my corner does a very good almond flat white and plays music at a volume that allows you to exist near other people without having to interact with them, which is why I go there every Tuesday morning before the shop opens and sit in the back booth and drink coffee and read or think or just exist quietly for forty-five minutes before the day starts.

She sat down across from me on a Tuesday.

I hadn't seen her come in. That was the first thing I noticed afterward — that she'd moved through a busy coffee shop without triggering the low-grade awareness I'd been running since Knox arrived, the way you learn to notice things when your nervous system has decided that unexpected visitors are a category of event worth tracking.

She was beautiful in the specific way of women who have been told so their whole lives and have organized their presentation around it without being obvious about it. Dark hair, dark eyes, a camel coat that cost more than my first car. She set her coffee down across from mine like we'd arranged to meet.

"Sorry to bother you," she said, smiling. "I recognized you from — we have mutual friends. Selene Voss. Mind if I sit?"

I had the feeling. Just the edge of it — something in the back of my neck, something animal and instinctive that said *wrong* without being able to explain why. But she was warm and polished and perfectly calibrated to the exact setting of acceptable-stranger-being-friendly, and I didn't have a specific reason, so I said sure.

She asked about the shop. Asked about the twins — just how old, how sweet, are they in preschool yet, in the way that people ask about children they don't actually know. She seemed charmed by my answers. She told me she was in Seattle for a few days on business, that it was a beautiful city, that she'd heard good things about the custom bike scene here.

It was benign. All of it was completely benign.

I relaxed slightly. This was the second thing I noticed afterward — that she was very good at the moment when you relax.

She stood up to leave, shrugging on her coat, and said it very casually. Like it was a small thing, a throwaway, just a friendly footnote to a friendly conversation.

"Knox was almost promised to someone else before you, you know. For quite a long time after the wedding I thought maybe things would... realign." She smiled. Warm and slightly rueful, like she was sharing something that barely hurt anymore. "Anyway. It was lovely to meet you, Riley. Your shop sounds wonderful."

She left.

I sat with that sentence.

*Almost promised to someone else.* For quite a long time. Thought things might realign.

I told myself it was nothing. I told myself it was exactly the kind of thing someone says when they want to plant something and don't want to be seen doing it. I was too smart for it to work. I went back to the shop, put on a playlist, laid down three hours of base coat on a Ducati restoration that needed my full attention, and did not think about it.

I googled Selene Voss at eleven that night.

The first result was a society page photo from a pack gala in Manhattan — black tie, chandelier, everyone in the kind of clothes that cost more than my rent. Knox in a dark suit with his hair pushed back looking expensive and closed-off and heartbreakingly good-looking. Selene beside him in something red, one hand near his arm, looking at the camera like the photo was hers.

The caption said: *Knox Blackthorn, Alpha of the Blackthorn Pack, with long-time family associate Selene Voss at the annual gathering. Sources suggest Ms. Voss remains a leading candidate for the Luna position.*

I scrolled.

There were more. Events, galas, pack announcements. Always near him without touching him, always photographed in proximity, always referred to in the same language: *leading candidate. Expected to assume her rightful place. Long-time family associate.*

She'd been waiting. Not patiently — strategically. There's a difference.

I read a quote she'd given to a pack society magazine six months after my wedding: *"These things take time. The right match for an Alpha is a matter of politics as much as personal feeling, and Knox has always understood that."*

I closed the laptop.

Sat in the dark for a moment.

Then I got up, put on shoes, and went upstairs.

I didn't know exactly what I was going to say. I knew that I'd sat with half a picture for too long and that half pictures had already cost me enough, and that I was done making decisions based on information that was deliberately incomplete.

I knocked on his door.

He opened it like he'd been expecting me.

"Tell me everything," I said.