What do I feel like to you?

Selina’s POV

I didn’t need a report from Vera or a photo on a screen to know that Lucas had seen them—I didn’t require confirmation because the moment it happened, I felt it ripple across the bond that still flickered between us like a dying signal, distant and muted but never truly silent; I felt it in the way the air around me shifted, subtly and yet unmistakably, like the universe itself had exhaled and then gone still.

Lucas saw them.

Jonathan and Damon.

He saw them together in public, the perfect image of domestic peace—a human man guiding a bright-eyed little boy across a city street, holding his hand, nodding politely to passersby, the kind of ordinary scene that meant nothing to most but meant everything to him.

Because that boy, that four-year-old with soft curls and a wide grin, was never supposed to exist—not for Lucas, and certainly not with another man.

But Lucas watched anyway.

And more importantly, he didn’t act.

He didn’t burst into the café. He didn’t unleash fury. He didn’t rip the truth from someone’s throat.

He watched. He waited. And he left.

And that silence told me everything I needed to know: Lucas believed the lie.

He looked at Damon and, for the first time, saw nothing. No connection. No pull. No instinct. Just a child—a stranger’s child. And that meant I had done my job.

I stood in my penthouse office that evening, bathed in soft shadows and golden lamplight, a glass of red wine in hand, Vera standing across from me like a soldier awaiting orders but silently watching the edges of me, the edges where my composure thinned in places I never let anyone see.

“He stayed in the car,” she said, eyes on her tablet. “Twenty minutes. No interaction. No tail. We believe he’s accepted it.”

I didn’t answer right away because I was still playing the memory in my head—Jonathan gently placing his hand on Damon’s shoulder, Damon laughing at something ridiculous like sparkly sneakers or caramel foam on a milkshake, and Lucas somewhere across the street, likely clenching the wheel of his sleek imported car so hard his knuckles turned white.

“He needed something to believe in,” I said finally, not to Vera but to myself, to the cold part of me that had kept my son alive and invisible all these years. “So I gave him a reality easier to accept than the truth.”

“And what if he changes his mind?”

Vera’s voice was steady, practical, always the right balance between respect and bluntness, and I appreciated it more than I admitted.

“Then I’ll burn everything he touches,” I replied. “Again. Lucas can never know the truth; he has to believe the boy he saw today is my son. I doubt he will still look; the boy has no wolf scent, so he kind of believed everything he saw.”

That night, after I’d reviewed reports, cleared schedules, signed off on two corporate kill shots, and refused to let the tremor in my chest become visible, I walked down the hall barefoot, silent, and careful, and peeked into Damon’s room, where my entire world slept beneath a pile of cartoon-patterned sheets and plush wolves he pretended not to like anymore.

He stirred when I brushed the hair from his forehead and whispered, “What do I feel like to you?”

His eyes didn’t fully open, but his voice was the kind of half-sleep honesty children specialize in.

“Armor,” he murmured.

And I smiled, because that was exactly what I was—cold steel around soft truth.

The next morning, the quiet remained—no movement from Lucas, no calls, no pressure, just… nothing, and that nothing was louder than a scream.

Lucas doesn’t do nothing.

Lucas plans in silence.

He lurks in shadows and counts down the seconds between his rage and his retribution.

But this time, I had preempted him. I had taken away the only weapon he had left—the truth.

And so I let the world keep turning. I showed up to the boardroom in heels that could kill a man, signed contracts that shifted market power by nine percent, and made three men cry without raising my voice.

When I returned to my office, Vera was waiting.

“They’re digging again,” she said, her voice quiet. “Grant’s team. Lucas’s people. Your medical files.”

I closed my eyes for a beat—just long enough to imagine the threads fraying beneath my control.

“Scrub them again,” I said. “Buy the clinic if we have to. Move the nurse out of state. Bribe the IT manager. Burn anything with a date or a name.”

Vera nodded and turned to go but paused with her hand on the door.

“Are you sure this is worth it?”

I didn’t look at her. I just whispered, “He’s my son. That’s all that matters.”

Because what I didn’t say—what I didn’t need to say—was that I’d already lost everything once.

And this time, I wouldn’t just protect Damon.

I’d ruin anyone who tried to take him from me.