Chapter 4: Who was she?

Chapter 4 — Nikolai's POV

"I'm not going."

Dante didn't look up from his tablet. "It's a courtesy invitation. You don't have to stay long."

"I don't have to go at all." I signed the last of the shipment approvals and pushed the folder across the desk. "Damon's spent a year trying to buy his way into a partnership he hasn't earned. I'm not interested in watching him perform for a ballroom full of people he's bribed to be impressed."

"Fine. I'll send your regrets." Dante made a note, unbothered, the way he was about most things that didn't involve numbers or security detail. He'd worked for me long enough to know when an argument was worth having and when it wasn't. This one, apparently, wasn't. He stood, gathered his own folder, and made it halfway to the door before he stopped.

"His Luna will be there. Ofiura."

I looked up.

"That's her name," Dante said, watching me now with the particular patience of a man who already suspected he'd said something useful. "Word going around is the marriage isn't happy. There's talk about his assistant."

I didn't answer right away. I thought about the woman from the club three nights ago, dark hair, a wedding ring she kept touching like it burned, gone from the room before I'd made it back from a four-a.m. call I couldn't ignore. I'd meant to come back and find her still there. I'd meant to ask her name properly instead of learning it secondhand from my own beta, standing in my own office, days later.

"Say that again."

"Ofiura." Dante's eyes narrowed slightly. "You know her?"

"I met her." I didn't elaborate, and he didn't ask, though I could see him filing the omission away for later the way he filed everything away. "Tell them I'll attend."

"You just said you weren't interested."

"I changed my mind."

"Clearly." He didn't push it further, which was one of the reasons I kept him close instead of the dozen other betas who would have asked three more questions before writing anything down. He made the note, closed the folder, and left me alone with a decision I hadn't examined closely enough to defend out loud.

I told myself, once he was gone, that it was strategic. Damon had been chasing this partnership for over a year, and showing up to finally give him an answer….yes or no…was reason enough on its own. I had a company to run and a rivalry with his family that went back further than either of us liked to talk about, and neither of those things had anything to do with a woman whose last name I still didn't know.

I told myself that the whole drive to his estate that evening.

I was still telling myself that when I walked into the ballroom and found her standing near the far wall, spine too straight, dressed like she was bracing for a blow before anyone had thrown one.

I recognized her from across the room before I'd fully registered why. It took a moment to place her—hair pinned back now, dress buttoned to a respectable height, nothing like the woman who'd walked up to me three nights ago and asked if I'd buy her a drink like she had nothing left to lose. Then she turned enough to catch the light, and there was no more pretending I didn't know exactly who I was looking at.

Damon noticed where my attention had gone and steered toward her immediately, eager and oblivious, ready to hand me exactly what I wanted to know for free.

"Ofiura." He said her name like an afterthought, his hand finding the small of her back. "This is Alpha Nikolai. Alpha, my wife."

His wife.

I understood, in that single moment, more than a week of Dante's investigating would have told me. The fear in her eyes the first time she'd turned and seen me at the club. The reason she'd been there at all, drinking like she needed to forget something, offering to pay a stranger just to feel something other than whatever she'd been carrying in with her. It wasn't difficult to do the math. A husband like Damon, and a wife who looked at her own wedding ring like she wanted to set it down and walk away from it.

"We haven't met," I said.

It wasn't quite a lie. We hadn't, not with names, not with any of the context standing in front of me now. I watched her decide whether to correct me and watched her choose not to, and something about that the speed of it, the instinct to protect herself even before she understood how much danger she was actually in told me more about the last three years of her life than Damon's introduction ever could.

I intended to keep my distance for the rest of the evening. I had a partnership to close and a man I intended to keep exactly as far beneath me as he deserved.

I lasted less than an hour.