The Night Before

The car ride was not quiet.

She wasn't sure who reached for whom first—only that somewhere between the ballroom and the first turn onto the highway, his hand found her jaw and her mouth found his, and after that neither of them managed much restraint. He kissed like a man who'd been holding something back for a very long time and had finally stopped trying. She kissed him back like the city outside the windows had ceased to exist. Somewhere in the blur of it his jacket ended up around her shoulders, her fingers curled into his collar, his low, unsteady voice murmuring something against her temple that might have been her name if either of them had still been using words. By the time the car slowed beneath the glass tower he called home, she'd forgotten entirely what she'd been running from.

His house sat dark and quiet above the city when they arrived—glass and clean lines and silence, a private elevator, a wall of windows holding the skyline like a painting. She barely registered any of it. Not the elevator, not the view, not the careful, deliberate way he set her down once they reached the bedroom and then pulled back from their steamy kiss, giving her room—watching her with an intensity that managed to be both starving and painfully restrained at once.

"Last chance," he said, hands visibly fisted at his sides like it was costing him everything not to close the distance between them. "Say the word and I'll have a car waiting downstairs in five minutes. No questions."

"Don't," she breathed, and closed the distance herself.

Afterward, she would remember it in fragments rather than any single coherent scene. The low, unsteady sound he made when she finally kissed him, like something in him had been waiting a long time and could barely believe it was allowed. The careful way his hands moved over her despite whatever wildness was clearly clawing beneath his composure, checking, again and again, that she was still choosing this. The moonlight falling blood-red through the windows, painting them both in it. She would remember the particular, devastating gentleness of a man who could have taken anything he wanted from her tonight and instead spent the whole of it making sure she knew she was choosing him back.

She would remember, much later, that she never once thought to ask his name.

---

She woke to sunlight and the unfamiliar comfort of sheets that smelled like cedar, and for one disoriented moment—stretched warm and loose and entirely unbothered—she let herself simply exist in it before the previous night came crashing back in pieces. Darius. Naomi. The stairwell. The moon. The stranger who had held her like something precious in the dark and asked for nothing she hadn't already decided to give.

She sat up slowly. The room around her was enormous, austere in the particular way that suggested unimaginable wealth. She was still tangled in unfamiliar sheets, casting around for her dress, when the bedroom door opened and a man in a dark suit stepped halfway through it, clearly expecting to find the room's owner and not an overnight guest wrapped in his bedsheets.

"My apologies." He retreated a step, professional and unbothered, already redirecting his attention further into the suite, toward someone she couldn't see from the bed. "I didn't realize you had company, sir. The morning briefing can wait if you'd prefer, Alpha King."

The door clicked shut behind him.

Amara sat very still in the sudden quiet, sunlight pouring gold and merciless across the sheets, turning those two words over in her mind so obsessively that she felt dizzy.

"Alpha King?" she muttered, gasping at the realization, one hand pressing flat against her own sternum as if she could hold herself together by force. Not a stranger. Not some nameless man she'd fallen into in a hallway out of grief and moonlight and desperate, unthinking need. The Alpha King. The most powerful wolf in six kingdoms. The man whose blessing Darius had wanted more than anyone's, the one she'd heard about a hundred times over the last year and never once managed to picture clearly enough to recognize in a dim corridor with her whole world falling apart around her.

What have I done? she thought. I just slept with the Alpha King. My fiance's godfather?!

The bathroom door opened right in front of her.

Kael stepped out with a towel slung low around his hips, skin still damp from the shower, beads of water tracking slow paths down his chest and over the hard lines of his abdomen before disappearing beneath the towel's edge. Steam curled around him in the morning light, and for a moment he didn't seem to notice she'd raised up her head, now staring in a daze—watching as he dragged a hand back through wet, grey-streaked hair, unhurried, at ease in a body built like it had been carved for exactly this kind of quiet, ordinary morning.

Amara's mouth went dry. She swallowed, slow and helpless, a want moving through her sharper and hungrier than anything a human woman would have recognized in herself—the particular, unreasonable lust that lived somewhere in the wolf rather than the mind, immune to logic, immune to the fact that she'd only just learned his title hours after falling into bed with him under a blood moon and engaged in a steamy series of lovemaking the night before.

The slow, confident curve of his mouth made her realize he’d caught her staring. It was the smirk of a man who knew exactly what his own body was doing to her and had decided he didn't mind one bit.

"Finally awake, beautiful?" he said.