LOGIN**Stella's POV** Suddenly Shawn's fingers move. I feel it against my cheek and everything inside me that went completely still when the monitor made that flat sound — releases. All at once. Like a breath that has been held so long the body has forgotten it was holding it. "Shawn." I turn my face toward his. "Shawn." His eyelids move. Then slowly, with the unhurried resistance of a man who does absolutely everything on his own terms — They open. He finds the ceiling first. Then shifts. Then finds me. We look at each other. His mouth moves. I lean in close. "You kissed me," he says. Rough. Barely there. But unmistakably, completely there. I laugh. It comes out wet and wrecked and entirely undignified and I do not care even slightly. "You heard that," I say. "I heard all of it," he says. I sit back and look at him and shake my head slowly. "Of course you did," I say. "Of course you did, you insufferable man." The corner of his mouth moves. Just barely. But
**Stella's POV** "He's gone," Nara says, sounding surprised."No," I say.Nara looks at me."I'm sorry, Miss Stella—""No." I say it again. It is simply a refusal. A flat, complete, total refusal to accept the thing she is telling me. "No. He is not gone.""The moonshade has—""He is not gone."I cross the room.I don't think about it. My body makes the decision and carries me across the floor and I am at his bedside before I have fully processed that I am moving and I am looking down at him and something inside my chest tears open in a way I have no name for and have never felt before and cannot categorize or file away or function behind.I reach out and I take his hand.He is still warm and I hold onto that with everything I have."Shawn." My voice comes out differently than I expect it to. Stripped of everything — the authority, the steadiness, the careful architecture of composure I have been constructing and maintaining since the moment he collapsed on my floor. All of it gone.
**Stella's POV** I last four minutes outside Shawn's room. I know because I count them — standing in the corridor with my back against the wall beside the door, arms folded, jaw tight, listening to the particular quality of the silence coming from inside the room and finding it completely unbearable. Four minutes. Auntie Lisa is seated beside me, hands folded, eyes closed, lips moving. Joe is down the hall. The doctor is at his station pretending to look at something on his clipboard. And I am standing here in this corridor being told to wait while Shawn is in that room and Nara is in that room and I am out here doing nothing and I have never been good at doing nothing, I have never once in my life found a way to make peace with standing still when something is happening that I cannot see or control or affect in any way— I push the door open and walk back in. Nara does not look up. "I said—" "I heard what you said," I say. I close the door behind me quietly. "I can't stay o
**Stella's POV** "Auntie Lisa, talk to me. What happened — to Shawn—" She opens her eyes. They are red and wet like the face of a woman who has been holding something enormous inside a space that was not built to contain it. "He stopped breathing," she says. The words hit me like something physical. I find myself staggering backwards for a few steps. "What?" "A few minutes ago." Her voice is barely holding together, the seams of it visible, straining. "The monitors — they started screaming and the doctors came running and I was right there, I was right beside him, I had his hand and then—" She stops. Presses her fingers harder against her mouth. Breathes through her nose slowly. "They got him back. They got him back but it took—" Another breath. "It took longer than I would have liked." I stand very still. I am aware of my own heartbeat in a way I am not usually aware of it — loud, deliberate, each one a small announcement. "He's breathing now," I say. "He's breathing now
**Stella's POV** Nara looks at me for a long moment. Not the way Kael looked at me — assessing, guarded — but differently. Quietly. The way someone looks at a thing they already know the answer to but want to hear you ask properly first. "So, you said you are Ace Industries's CEO," she says. "Yes." "The big company Ace Industries." She says it again, not as a question but as something she is turning over carefully. "I have heard of them." A pause. "Even up here in the hills." Something in her tone makes me still. "Then you know who I am," I say carefully. "I know what you are," she says. "Which is not always the same thing." She moves to the worn wooden table in the corner of the room and opens a small carved chest sitting on top of it. Inside — I can see from where I stand — are rows of carefully wrapped leaves bound with twine, dark roots coiled like sleeping things, small clay vials stopped with cork, and paper packets folded tight and labeled in handwriting too smal
**Stella's POV** The man is enormous in the way that some Alphas are enormous — not just physically but atmospherically, the kind of presence that arrives before the person does. Broad through the shoulder, dark-eyed, moving with the particular unhurried authority of someone who has never once had to announce himself in a room. He stops at the edge of the grounds and watches the chopper with his arms folded. He does not look surprised. He looks annoyed. I step out. The morning air up here is different — thinner, cooler, carrying the smell of old pine and something older beneath it that I cannot name. The packhouse behind him is exactly what it looked like from above. It's made of tone and timber. A place that has existed long enough to stop being impressed by things. I walk toward him. He doesn't move. "This is Mirae territory," he says, when I am close enough to hear him clearly. His voice is the kind that carries without effort. "You and yhe chopper needs to leave.
**Stella's POV** (Four Days Later) I don't remember much from the hospital only that there were flashes of white walls and the steady beep of monitors. Shawn's voice was present too, low and firm, arguing with doctors about something I couldn't focus on. They kept me for two days. Treated my
**Shawn's POV** I sprint toward Stella before my brain even registers the decision, my heart hammering so hard it feels like it might burst through my ribs. Please let her be alive. Behind me, Konstantin's voice rings out, cold and commanding. "Drop your weapons! All of you! Your boss is fini
**Shawn's POV** "He wanted me to be prepared," I correct. "To know how to protect myself if anything ever happened to him." The irony of that statement burns. "So he took you on a job," Stella says softly. I nod, and suddenly I'm not sitting on a park bench anymore. I'm back there. In th
**Shawn's POV** Stella’s question catches me off guard. I never would’ve come here on my own. Victor asked me to check on her before he left—asked in that way that wasn’t really a request at all. Ever since she lost temporary custody of her son, she’d shut herself away and her father was worrie







