CHAPTER THREE

LEVIATHAN’S POV 

The Man Who Should Not Want Her

I saw her before she turned around.

That's the thing nobody would believe if I said it out loud.

 I walked into my son's house with my mind already on the evening ahead, the quiet irritation of being summoned to a social event I hadn't agreed to. Caleb was two steps behind me. The room was full of exactly the kind of people I expected.

And then something pulled.

Not a sound or a movement but something I hadn't felt in thirty-eight years of discipline.

 My wolf, Zevrik, who had been silent for so long I sometimes forgot he was still in there, lifted his head.

'Her.' His voice was low and almost disbelieving.

I stopped just inside the doorway. There was a woman standing near my son with her back to me, her spine was straight and her shoulders squared in the particular way of someone holding themselves together through will alone.

She had dark hair, she wore a dress that was understated in a room full of performance. And something about the stillness of her, the way she stood completely motionless while everything around her moved, reached into my chest and grabbed without asking.

Then Kieran said, "Dad," and she turned around. I kept my face exactly as it was.

'Found her.' Zevrik said.

Years of leadership train you for moments like this. You learn to receive information without letting it show, to let shock move through you internally while your expression stays perfectly empty. I'd held that discipline through negotiations that could have ended lives, through losses that nearly ended mine.

I was not going to break it in my son's living room. But inside, everything went quiet in a way I didn't like.

The woman from the hotel looked back at me with those dark eyes and I watched the color leave her face in real time.

'Ours.'

I moved my gaze to Kieran and let the evening continue.

"You're late, Father," Kieran said, in that tone he used when he was trying to sound easy and landing somewhere near reproachful instead.

"I had a call." I scanned the room, nodding at two of his friends who had the sense to look slightly intimidated. "Introduce me."

He turned. "This is Evangeline. My fiancée."

The ugly word landed and just sat there, refusing to mean what it was supposed to mean.

‘She’s not his.’ Zevrik's voice came out low and flat, less like a reaction and more like a correction of fact.

I looked at her. She held out her hand with the practiced composure of a woman trained to meet people and give them nothing real. Her grip was firm. Her eyes met mine directly, and I felt the effort it cost her to keep them there, that almost imperceptible tension in the jaw, the restraint around the mouth.

"Alpha Greymark," she said.

"Miss Nightmoor." I took her hand.

'Touch her again.'

I released it.

"I've heard about you."

A flicker. Gone in under a second. "Good things, I hope."

"Mostly political things," I said. Something shifted behind her expression. Not quite relief. Closer to the careful exhale of someone who has just cleared one obstacle and knows there are others ahead. I moved past her into the room.

Caleb fell into step beside me at the bar.

 "You know her."

"Get me a drink."

"Lev."

"Caleb." I looked at him once.

He stopped pressing. Eleven years as my Beta and he could read the difference between me being closed off and me being done with a conversation.

 He handed me the drink and I turned to greet an old business associate and kept myself exactly where I needed to be.

Across the room, Evangeline stood alone near the window for a moment. Then she pulled her shoulders back and moved toward a group of women and reinserted herself into the performance of the evening with a smoothness that would have fooled almost anyone. It didn't fool me.

'She's not pretending.' Zevrik observed.

I know. I watched her the way you track something your instincts have flagged without permission. Her composure was remarkable. Whatever she was feeling about standing in a room with me, about the ring on her finger and the man who'd given it to her, none of it reached her face. 

She laughed at the right moments. She held her glass at the right angle. She was performing flawlessly and she looked exhausted underneath it in a way only someone paying close attention would notice.

I was paying close attention.

Zevrik had never once in his life cared about a woman's exhaustion. He reacted to strength, to challenge, to the particular charge in the air before a fight. This quiet, controlled attentiveness he'd fixed on Evangeline Nightmoor was something I had no category for.

 It was unfamiliar in a way that warranted examination. The kind I preferred to do alone. After the third drink I told Caleb to run a background check.

"On who," he said, already knowing.

"Nightmoor. Evangeline. Everything. By morning."

He didn't comment. That was why I kept him. I stayed another hour. I conducted myself exactly as expected. I spoke to the right people and said the right things and left without speaking to her again, which was the correct decision and one that Zevrik registered with a displeasure he made no effort to conceal.

'Leave?'

Yes.

'Why?'

Because that's what we're doing.

He went quiet. But he didn't settle. That was new.

In the car home I looked out at the city in the dark and turned the evening over once, then put it down. The file would tell me what I needed to know. Until then there was nothing to act on.

By morning I had her full name, her bloodline, her family's political position, and the fact that her wolf had been sealed since she was twelve years old.

I stayed with that last detail longer than the others. Sealed! Someone had looked at this woman and decided the most strategic thing to do with her power was silence it. He/she locked her wolf away at twelve years old and handed her to the world as a well-behaved daughter with a clean bloodline and a quiet mouth. I set the file on my desk.

Mine!

I looked at the ceiling.

'She belongs to us!'

No.

'Leviathan!'

I picked up the file again and closed it. Then I set it aside.

Then I leaned back in my chair and thought about the way she'd held out her hand in that room. She was composed, formal, giving me absolutely nothing. And underneath it, that current of something contained so tightly it had nowhere to go.

I knew what I was going to do. I'd known since the moment she turned around in that room and I felt Zevrik wake up for the first time in years.

I didn't rush it. I never rushed anything.

But Kieran's fiancée or not, the woman was already in my orbit.