Chapter 2: One Night

ELLA’S POV

Hunger had a way of reorganizing a person’s priorities.

Three weeks after the ceremony, I was living in a cramped rented room that my only remaining friend, Delia, had quietly paid for without ever making me feel like a charity case.

The room had one window that didn’t quite close, a mattress that dipped in the middle, and a radiator that clanked more than it warmed anything. I hadn’t asked her to help me. She’d simply shown up with a key and told me not to argue, and I’d been too broken to do anything but accept it, too proud to say thank you the way I should have.

Going from Luna of the Hawkson pack to a woman who counted coins for bread should have felt like the end of the world. Some nights, it still did — I’d lie awake listening to the radiator clank and think about the house I used to live in, the staff who used to make me up, the husband who’d made a spectacle of discarding me in front of everyone who mattered. But when the restaurant down the street posted a notice for a night-shift waitress, I applied before I could talk myself out of it, and when they called me back, I cried from something that wasn’t quite grief and wasn’t quite relief either.

I was grateful. That was the strangest part. Grateful for an apron and a name tag and the ache in my feet by the end of a twelve-hour shift, because it meant I was still standing, still surviving, still mine.

Near midnight, three weeks into the job, another waitress came sprinting out of the back hallway, white-faced and quite panicked, nearly colliding with a tray of empty glasses on her way past me.

“The VIP suite needs service and I can’t — I just can’t go back in there. I have something else to do.” She thrust a tray into my hands before I could ask why, her fingers trembling around the edges of it. “Please. I’ll cover your tables for a week if you take this one.“

I didn’t have the luxury of turning down favors that came with promises attached, not when every extra shift meant one more week I could afford the rent on my cramped little room. I nodded, straightened my apron, and pushed through the door she’d fled from.

The man inside was easily the most striking person I’d ever seen — dark hair, sharp jaw, an expensive suit that fit him like it had been sewn directly onto his body. But something was wrong. He sat gripping the edge of the table, jaw clenched, sweat beading along his hairline despite the room’s cool air.

“You should leave.” His voice came out strained, almost apologetic, like the effort of speaking cost him something. “Something’s wrong with me tonight. I don’t — I don’t trust myself right now.”

I set the tray down carefully. “Sir, are you unwell? I can call someone —”

“Please. Just go.” He squeezed his eyes shut.

I turned toward the door, already reaching for the handle, and found it wouldn’t budge. Locked, deliberately, from the outside.

The air in the room felt different than it should have — heavy, sweetened with something I couldn’t name, curling low and insistent through my chest. My pulse quickened without my permission. His eyes met mine across the room, dark and glassy, and I understood, with dawning horror, exactly what had been done to both of us.

Neither of us had asked for this. Neither of us had chosen it.

But there was no fighting a locked door and a chemical neither of us could name, and somewhere beneath the fear was something else entirely, something that pulled us both toward each other despite every instinct screaming otherwise.

We spent the night together, both of us certain, in whatever fractured way either of us could still think clearly, that we’d never see each other again once the sun came up.

…

Jason woke to an empty room.

The chair by the window sat vacant. The sheets on her side had already gone cold, the pillow still holding the faint indent of where her head had been.

Sunlight streamed through the gap in the curtains, and for one disoriented moment, he reached across the bed before his mind caught up to what his hand already knew.

His head ached with the last traces of whatever chemical had been pumped into that room, and for a moment he couldn’t tell which parts of the night had been real and which parts he’d imagined in the haze of it.

She was gone.

The only trace of her left behind was a small plastic name badge, half-tucked beneath the pillow. He picked it up, turning it over between his fingers, studying the small, unremarkable photo pinned beneath the laminate.

Ella.

That was all it said. No last name, no number, nothing that would ever let him find her again, even if some reckless part of him wanted to.

He checked his jacket out of habit, and his jaw tightened when his fingers found the inside pocket empty. His wallet was gone. Every bill he’d been carrying, vanished along with her.

A slow, disgusted breath left him. Of course. She’d looked so composed, so out of place behind that apron, and he’d let himself wonder, for one foolish second, if there’d been something real in the way she’d looked at him. Instead she’d taken exactly what she came for and disappeared before he could even learn her face in daylight.

Fat little gold digger, he thought bitterly, tossing the badge onto the nightstand. He’d expected more from someone who carried herself the way she had. Mannered. Careful. It had all been an act.

Somewhere low in his chest, beneath the anger, something else stirred — a single word, quiet and insistent, rising up from a part of him he rarely listened to.

Mate.

He dismissed it instantly. His wolf had terrible timing, and worse judgment. Whoever she was, wherever she’d gone with his money, she wasn’t his problem anymore.

He told himself that twice, and didn’t quite believe it either time.