His Voice

POV: Imogen

Same number.

It lit up the screen, insistent, and her body responded before her mind caught up. Her heart rate spiked. Her palms went damp. Her wolf fell into the held-breath stillness it reserved for moments when danger was closing in and running was no longer an option.

Cooper looked at the phone, then at her face. Whatever he saw made him straighten slowly, as though he had realized without warning that the conversation had shifted.

"Do you know that number?" he asked.

She didn't answer.

"Imogen."

"I don't know the number," she said, which was technically accurate. The number itself was new. She knew the city it came from. She knew the dread climbing through her ribcage with both hands.

The phone kept ringing.

Her wolf broke its silence and made its displeasure clear in the wordless, blunt way it always did when she was stubbornly ignoring what was obvious.

Answer it. Know what you're dealing with. Running blind is worse than running scared. At least fear with a face has edges you can plan around.

She picked it up. Pressed answer. Said nothing.

Breathing on the other end. Measured. Controlled. The steady sound of a man who had expected voicemail and found a live person instead, taking exactly as long as he needed to adjust.

Never flustered. Just assessing the circumstances with the cool efficiency of a man who treated surprises as minor logistical inconveniences rather than anything capable of rattling him.

Then his voice.

Low. Unhurried. The kind of voice that carried without effort because it had never needed to fight for attention. The world had always made room for it.

"Imogen Hartley."

Not a question. Not quite a greeting either. Just her name, spoken like a memory he'd kept in a drawer for years and finally decided to take out and examine.

Five years collapsed into nothing.

She was twenty-two again. Standing in a room full of Nightshade Pack members, who all knew exactly what was happening, and not one of them was going to intervene. The man in front of her watched her with steel-grey eyes that gave nothing away, while his words rewrote every version of her future she had ever allowed herself to imagine. Methodically. Without hesitation. The way you demolished a structure once you'd decided it had to come down and sentiment no longer mattered.

She had loved him.

That was the part that had taken the longest to forgive herself for.

Not the rejection. Not even the humiliation of it happening publicly, in front of people who would remember. It was the fact that she'd loved him completely, and he'd looked directly at that love and decided it wasn't worth the inconvenience of keeping.

She pressed her free hand flat against the kitchen table, grounding herself against its solid surface.

"We need to talk about the rogue problem in Sydney," Lachlan Pierce said. "I'm arriving tomorrow."

Click.

Gone.

No question attached. No acknowledgement that five years had passed, that she'd built a life while he had apparently spent that time not thinking about her at all. No recognition that arriving tomorrow in her city, on her pack's territory, without warning or permission was the sort of decision a reasonable person might discuss first.

Just a statement of intent, delivered with the absolute certainty of a man who had never once needed to wonder whether his arrival would be welcome.

The kitchen was very quiet.

Cooper was watching her with an expression she had never seen on his face before. His gaze had turned careful and urgent, questions waiting behind it for permission to be spoken.

"Who was that?" he asked.

Imogen set the phone face-down on the table. Looked at it for a moment. Then at her own hands, which were steadier than she had any right to expect, given that her entire nervous system had just received information it had been dreading for five years.

She could hear the twins in the next room. The television. Declan's laugh, sudden and bright, the laugh of a boy who found the world genuinely funny and had no reason yet to hide it. Hayley's quieter response, more breath than sound.

Her children.

They had their father's eyes. His jaw. Even that particular stillness he carried. In Hayley, it had become emotional intelligence. Declan had an early dominance that made grown wolves step back without knowing why.

Both had inherited those traits from a father who was probably already arranging tomorrow's trip with the same efficient brevity he applied to everything.

A man coming to Sydney to investigate rogue activity.

Not for them. He didn't know they existed. The schoolyard footage was being handled. There was no reason for him to connect the rogue activity in Sydney to the woman he'd discarded five years ago in Melbourne.

She knew this.

Her wolf did not find it comforting.

"Imogen." Cooper's voice was quiet, but there was weight behind it now...the weight of a man who had been patient for a long time and had reached the limit of what patience alone could accomplish. "Talk to me."

She looked at him across the kitchen. At his honest, open face. At the steadiness he offered without condition, the kind she had built her entire life in Sydney around...the quiet knowledge that someone reliable was close by and asking nothing unreasonable in return.

She thought about telling him. The words formed in her mind, ready to be spoken.

Lachlan Pierce. Nightshade Alpha. The man who rejected me the night I found out I was carrying his children.

Her wolf snarled so sharply she felt it in her back teeth.

"I need to think," she said instead.

Cooper held her gaze for a long moment. Then he nodded once, slowly, and reached past her to turn the kettle back on.

He was Cooper. When he couldn't fix the problem, he made tea and stayed. He didn't need to say he wasn't going anywhere.

Tomorrow, Lachlan Pierce would land in Sydney.

And he had absolutely no idea what was waiting for him here.