Chapter 3

Not the temperature — the heating worked fine, the kind of expensive, invisible warmth that costs more per month than most people earned. Cold in the way a room gets when no one has ever laughed in it. Black marble floors. Floor-to-ceiling windows running the full length of the east wall. The city spread out below, a grid of orange and white light sixty stories down, indifferent and distant.

Ryder's bedroom looked like a war room that had been given a bed as an afterthought.

The bed itself was enormous. King-sized, black-framed, pushed against the far wall with a precision that suggested it hadn't been moved an inch since the day it was delivered. A single lamp burned on the left side. The right side was bare.

Ava stood in the doorway with her bag at her feet and forced herself to take a full breath.

"You'll sleep here," Ryder said from behind her.

She turned.

He'd already shrugged off his coat. He stood at the foot of the bed in a black shirt, fingers working the buttons from the collar down. The shirt dropped onto the chair at the corner.

She looked away.

She looked back.

She couldn't help it.

Old battle scars ran across the left side of his torso — three diagonal lines, healed white against brown skin, the kind of marks left by silver blades, not ordinary weapons. His body was built the way a weapon is built: no excess, no softness, everything calibrated for use.

"Appearances," he said, without looking at her. He pulled on a pair of black shorts from the dresser and turned to face her. "The staff reports. The cameras are in the common areas only, but pack members talk. We share a bed. That's it."

"I understood the contract."

"Then stop looking at me like I've suggested something offensive." He moved to his side of the bed and pulled back the sheets.

Ava crossed the room, set her bag down, and sat on the right edge of the mattress. She kept her coat on. He noticed — she saw it in the small pause before he settled against his pillow — but he said nothing.

She reached for the lamp on her side.

"Leave it," he said.

She left it.

For a moment neither of them moved. The city hummed sixty stories below. Somewhere in the penthouse a vent sighed.

Then Ryder shifted, and the mattress moved beneath her, and he was sitting up behind her — not touching, just close — and the warmth of him at her back sent a pulse of heat down her spine she did not ask for and could not stop.

"The summit," he said.

Her fingers went rigid in her lap.

"You left," she said. "You said what you said. We don't need to revisit it."

"I'm not revisiting." His voice dropped, slower now, deliberate. "I'm reminding you. The sounds you made. The way you—"

"Don't."

"—said my name when I—"

"*Ryder.*"

He stopped.

She felt him look at her — the weight of it on the back of her neck.

Then he was moving, and before she could shift away his hand curved around her shoulder and she was on her back, wrists pinned above her head against the headboard, his body a wall of heat on either side of her. Not crushing. Not frantic. Measured. Like a man who had done this before and knew exactly where all the edges were.

She should have twisted free. She had the angle. She knew how.

She didn't.

His hips pressed against her thigh — hard, unmistakable, absolutely deliberate — and her body answered with a rush of warmth that pooled low and immediate and humiliating.

His crimson eyes moved across her face slowly.

"There she is," he said, voice rough at the bottom edge.

"Let go."

"Tell me you don't still ache for me, little omega." He dipped lower, lips hovering over the curve of her jaw, not touching, just breathing. "Because I can smell—"

The lamp cut out.

Not just the lamp. Every light in the bedroom — the hallway glow, the city-light bleed through the windows — everything dropped to black at exactly the same moment.

Ava's heart slammed.

Ryder stilled above her.

A beat of absolute silence.

Then his voice, quiet and controlled, tight in a way she hadn't heard before:

"That wasn't a power outage."

He was off her in a single movement. She heard him move across the room in the dark — no fumbling, no hesitation, a man who had navigated danger in worse conditions.

Ava pressed herself upright, one hand flat against her belly beneath the coat, the other searching the darkness beside her.

Her fingers found the edge of the mattress.

Her ears found something else.

Below the sound of the ventilation. Below the building's distant, mechanical breathing.

Footsteps.

Three sets. Coming from the service corridor.

Her wolf lifted her head in the dark and opened her eyes for the first time in four months.

Ava sat very, very still — and let her hear.