FAZER LOGINChapter 68: No Version Where I Say NoPOV: OdetteThe sound of it rang louder in my ears than the actual pain, which came a half-second later, blooming hot and sharp across my cheekbone, my whole face throbbing in time with my own pulse.I put a hand up to my face on instinct, not to check for blood, just to hold the ache in place, and stared at my father like I'd never actually seen him before, not properly, not in all the years I'd lived under his roof believing there was some line he wouldn't cross.There wasn't. There never had been. I'd just never pushed hard enough to find it."Sit down," he said, like nothing had happened, like his hand hadn't just cracked across my face in a room with gold-framed portraits watching from every wall.I didn't sit."You hit me.""You raised your voice at me in my own home." He said it flatly, adjusting his cufflink like the whole exchange had cost him nothing more than a minor inconvenience. "Consider it a reminder of whose house you're standing
Chapter 67: NoPOV: OdetteI stared at the sheet of paper in my father's hand, at my own signature sitting there in careful, terrified eighteen-year-old handwriting, and felt something in me go very still and very cold."I'm not signing anything else," I said. "That signature was forced. You know it was forced.""Nobody forced you to hold a pen." My father set the paper down on the side table, unbothered, like the conversation had already been settled somewhere he hadn't bothered informing me of. "You wrote your name. That's all the law requires.""I was eighteen. I didn't understand what I was agreeing to.""You understood enough to run the next morning." His voice stayed level, which somehow made it worse than shouting would have. "That tells me you understood exactly what you were agreeing to, and decided you'd rather be a coward about it than face the consequences like an adult.""Running from an arranged marriage to a man I'd met twice isn't cowardice.""It's exactly cowardice, d
Chapter 66: ConditionalPOV: OdetteIt wasn't Julian.It was a courier, some nervous kid in a delivery uniform holding a leather portfolio he clearly didn't want to be holding, hustled back out the door within thirty seconds by a member of staff before I got more than a glimpse of him. My father took the portfolio without a word of thanks and set it, unopened, on the side table like it could wait.I felt my pulse slow back down, and hated that it had spiked at all."You knew where I was," I said, once the door had shut again. "This whole time."My father didn't even have the decency to look uncomfortable about it. "Of course we knew. Did you think Sinclair security couldn't locate one runaway daughter living under her own first name?"Five years. I'd changed nothing but my scent and my last name, worked jobs that paid in cash, lived in an apartment nobody would ever call safe, and this whole time they'd known exactly where to find me."Then why didn't you come get me?""Why would we?"
Chapter 65: The House I Ran FromPOV: OdetteThe gates opened before we even reached them, some staff member watching for the cars, and I understood immediately that nothing about this arrival had been left to chance.I hadn't seen this house in five years. It looked exactly the same, which felt like its own kind of insult, white stone, three stories, a fountain out front that had probably never once stopped running, not for a storm, not for a funeral, not for a daughter's absence. Money like this didn't pause for anything.The car rolled up the circular drive and stopped at the base of the front steps, and my mother was out before the engine had fully died, already moving toward the house like she couldn't get inside fast enough now that the cameras were gone.I didn't move right away."Odette." My father, from the other door. "Inside."I got out.The foyer hit me the way it always used to, all marble and gold-framed portraits and a ceiling so high it made you feel smaller just stand
Chapter 64: Reassessment POV: Beckett I had the TV on for background noise, not actually watching it, waiting on Clara to finish getting ready so we could hit the restaurant she'd been talking about all week. Some place with a two-month waitlist, the kind Clara loved because it meant she got to watch other people not get in. The remote sat on the arm of the couch. My drink sat in my hand. "You almost ready?" I called toward the bedroom. "Almost." I flipped through channels out of habit and landed on a local news break, some reporter standing outside a college quad with a mic, cameras flashing behind her hard enough to wash out half the shot. I almost changed it. Then I caught the name. "...confirming that Odette Sinclair, previously unknown to the public, is in fact the sole heir to the Sinclair pack fortune, one of the largest privately held wolf estates on the East Coast..." My glass hit the floor before I registered I'd let go of it. "Clara." My voice came out wrong, too l
Chapter 63: On Record POV: Odette I didn't get in the car. I meant to. My mother's grip was already steering me toward it, but my father held up a hand, and the whole procession simply stopped, my mother included, the way everything around him tended to stop when he decided it should. "Actually," he said, "let's do this properly." He turned to face the cameras. I felt the shift before I understood it, some instinct going cold and alert in the back of my skull. He wasn't looking at me anymore. He was looking past me, at the reporters, at the phones held up at chest height, at the small crowd of students that had stopped pretending they weren't watching. "I have an announcement," Alpha Sinclair said, and his voice carried the way it always did, pitched to fill a room without seeming to try. "Dad..." "For five years," he continued, over me, "my daughter has lived outside this family's protection, by her own choice, under circumstances we respected as her right to make." He said i







