Chapter Three

Aria’s POV

"You're doing it again," Lucas said.

"Doing what?"

"Staring at nothing like it owes you an apology."

I pulled my eyes away from the window and looked at him across the kitchen counter. He was leaning against it with his arms crossed, watching me the way he always did — steady, unhurried, like he had all the time in the world and planned to use most of it making sure I was okay.

Three years ago, I wouldn't have known what to do with that kind of loyalty.

Three years ago, I had nothing.

The night I walked out of Cross Industries, I took the bus to my apartment, packed one bag, and left. I didn't cry until I was on a midnight train heading south with no destination decided. Then I cried for four hours straight, silent, with my forehead against the cold window, while my wolf sat broken and still inside me like a candle that had been snuffed out mid-flame.

The pain of the rejection had been physical. That was the part no one told you. It wasn't grief the way humans described grief — it was something that lived in the body. A tearing, like something essential had been removed without anesthetic. I couldn't eat for three days. Couldn't sleep properly for two weeks. I would wake up at two in the morning with my chest heaving and reach for something that wasn't there and never had been.

But I didn't disappear the way Damien Cross expected me to.

I got angry instead.

Lucas found me six weeks after I left Seattle. He showed up at the door of the cheap motel room I'd been living in with coffee in one hand and a folder in the other, and I had no idea how he'd tracked me down and didn't ask. He sat across from me on the edge of the bed and opened the folder without preamble.

"There's a development project in Portland," he said. "Early stage. The lead investor is looking for an architectural consultant to shape the concept from the ground up. It pays well, but more importantly, it would give you a portfolio piece that doesn't need Cross Industries attached to it."

I stared at him. "Who are you?"

"Someone who saw your presentation before Cross tore it apart," he said simply. "And someone who thought it was the best work submitted to that board in five years."

That was how it started.

Lucas Storm became my Beta before either of us had the language for it. He found the opportunities, managed the logistics, handled the people who tried to dismiss me, and stood at my back when I walked into rooms that didn't expect me. I rebuilt slowly, then faster, then with a momentum I hadn't anticipated.

The Portland project led to three others. Those three led to a partnership offer. The partnership led to the founding of Silvermoon Enterprises — a name Lucas had suggested and I had resisted until it felt right in a way I couldn't explain.

Within eighteen months, we were competing on contracts I hadn't dared look at a year before.

Within two years, we were winning them.

I found Kai fourteen months into the rebuild. I wasn't looking for a child. I wasn't looking for anything except a coffee shop near a client meeting, and I turned a corner and saw a little boy sitting alone on a cold sidewalk with no shoes on, holding his knees, looking at the ground with the particular stillness of a child who had learned that crying didn't bring anyone.

I sat next to him on that sidewalk in a three-hundred-dollar coat and asked him his name.

He looked at me for a long moment with eyes that were far too old and said, "Kai."

"Where's your family, Kai?"

He shook his head.

I called Lucas. The formal adoption process took seven months and every ounce of legal leverage we had, but Kai came home with us and called me mama within a week like he had always meant to and was just waiting to find the right person to say it to.

He changed everything. Not in the way people said children changed you — softly, gradually. It was more immediate than that. The morning after he slept in our house for the first time, I woke up and something in me had realigned. The broken place where the mate bond had been severed still ached, but it no longer defined the edges of who I was.

I had something worth protecting now.

And I had built something worth protecting it with.

That evening, Lucas set a formal invitation on the kitchen counter in front of me. Heavy cream paper, embossed lettering.

The Pacific Northwest Business Leaders Gala.

Cross Industries was listed as a headline sponsor.

I looked at it for a long time without touching it.

"You don't have to go," Lucas said. He wasn't looking at me. He was rinsing a glass with the focus of a man carefully not influencing a decision.

"He'll be there."

"Yes."

"And the whole industry will be there."

"Also yes."

I picked up the invitation.

Silvermoon Enterprises had grown large enough that not attending would itself be a statement. We were beyond that now. We didn't make statements by hiding. We made them by walking in and making everyone in the room recalculate.

I thought about a navy blazer with thinning elbows. I thought about a boardroom and twelve faces and a man who had looked at me like I was something he needed to remove from his shoe.

I thought about what he was going to see when I walked through those doors.

"RSVP us," I said.

Lucas nodded, still not looking up.

"And Lucas." I set the invitation down. "Get Kai a babysitter for Friday. I need him nowhere near this."

He paused.

"Aria. Is there something about this gala I should know before we walk in?"

I looked at him steadily.

"There's something about me," I said, "that you're all about to find out."