CHAPTER FOUR

KAEL

The moment she was out of my office, I let out a slow breath and leaned back against my desk.

Aria Stone.

I had been searching for that name for months. I didn't have a face, didn't have a location, didn't have anything except a name that kept surfacing in whispers and old intelligence reports that crossed my desk. A girl connected to the Crescent Moon Pack, connected to a bloodline that mattered, connected to something I needed. And now she had walked straight into my territory like fate had personally delivered her to my door and knocked twice.

I wasn't a man who believed in fate. I believed in strategy, in patience, in the kind of calculated movement that other men called luck because they didn't understand the years of work behind it. But tonight had tested that belief.

Because the moment I felt the intruder breach the eastern border of my land, I had gone to handle it myself. A decision that surprised even my wolves. I didn't do perimeter checks. I sent men for that. But something pulled me out of my chair before I had even consciously decided to move, some low-level pull in my chest that I didn't recognize and didn't trust.

I followed it anyway.

And when I found her standing in the middle of my forest, I understood why.

The mate bond hit me like a physical impact. Not slow, not gentle, not the way wolves in old stories described it, like warmth spreading through the chest or the world going quiet. It slammed into me. Hard and immediate, the kind of force that could bring a lesser man to his knees. I felt every instinct I had lurch toward her, felt the pull demand that I close the distance between us, that I say something, that I reach out and make contact.

I did none of those things.

I stood exactly where I was and gave the a command instead.

That was the only way I knew how to function. I locked the bond down in my chest, pressed it behind the wall I had spent twenty-seven years building, and I kept my expression exactly where it always was. Controlled. Unreadable. I was not going to stand in the middle of a forest and let a girl I had never met watch me come undone.

Especially not a girl who didn't feel it yet.

She didn't. I watched her the entire walk back, watched her in the office, watched the way her eyes moved and the way she held herself. She felt nothing. The bond on her side was dormant, most likely because she had just had it severed when Logan rejected her. Her system was still recovering. She was still raw from that, still carrying the dull ache of a broken bond, and she hadn't noticed the new one settling in quietly underneath it.

That worked in my favor.

I sat with that information for a long time after Maya took her from the room. I poured myself two fingers of whiskey and stood at the window looking out at the dark treeline, and I thought through everything carefully the way I always did before I made any move.

Logan rejected her.

I rolled that around in my head and felt something cold settle in my gut alongside it. Not hurt, I was done feeling anything that simple where Logan was concerned, but something harder than that. Something that had been sitting in my chest for four years and had never quite gone away.

Logan had a habit of taking things that weren't his and discarding them when they became inconvenient. I knew that better than most. And now he had rejected his mate, a girl whose name I had been looking for across half a dozen intelligence networks, and he had sent her out of his pack alone on foot like she was nothing.

Like she was disposable.

I drained the glass.

He didn't know what he had given up. He didn't know she was connected to anything beyond whatever surface-level judgment he had made about her worth. And he certainly didn't know she was mine.

I intended to keep it that way for as long as it was useful.

I wasn't going to tell her about the bond. Not yet. There was no advantage in that. She was frightened, displaced, still processing a rejection that had probably broken something in her, and handing her information she wasn't ready for would only make her unpredictable. I needed her to be steady. I needed her close. And I needed the chain between us forged tight enough that by the time Logan found out she was here, there was nothing he could do about it.

I was going to watch him burn for what he took from me four years ago.

And Aria Stone was going to be the match.

---

I waited until morning.

I gave her the full night to rest because she needed it and because I needed to be sharp when I sat across from her. I had made decisions like this before, calculated ones, ones that other people called ruthless. I had never second-guessed any of them. I wasn't going to start now.

When I heard Maya's footsteps in the hall and the quieter, more uncertain ones that followed, I was already seated behind my desk. I had my coffee. I had already reviewed the morning reports. I was composed and ready and entirely in control of the room before she walked into it.

She entered cautiously.

She was trying not to look nervous and failing. Not dramatically, she wasn't shaking, wasn't looking at the floor. She kept her chin up and her eyes forward and she walked into the room like she had decided on the way here that she wasn't going to let me see her sweat. It was a decent effort. Probably worked on most people.

But I watched people for a living. I read the way she slowed just slightly as the door closed behind her. The way her fingers pressed flat against her thigh for a brief second before she relaxed them deliberately. The way she looked at me and then looked at the desk and then back at me like she was trying to figure out which version of this man she was dealing with today.

She was eighteen years old. That much was obvious just looking at her, but I asked anyway because I wanted the specific number and I wanted to watch how she answered a direct question.

"How old are you, Aria?"

She blinked. The directness of it caught her off guard, I could see her recalibrate in real time. "I'm eighteen," she answered.

I nodded once. Nine years. In the grand scheme of what I was about to do, it was not a significant number, and I had long since stopped measuring my decisions by what other people considered conventional. She was old enough. She was the right person. And every second she stood on the other side of my desk without belonging to my pack was a second Logan could find a way to complicate this.

I set down my coffee.

I looked at her directly and I didn't soften what I was about to say because I never saw the point in softening things that were already decided.

"Let's get married.”