Chapter 5

Ava had noticed that about the rooms Ryder chose — he preferred walls, controlled space, exits he could account for. The dinner table was set for two. No staff lingered. Whatever this was, he'd cleared the floor.

She sat across from him and picked up her fork and told herself this was simply the next item on the contract's list.

*Public affection. Pack appearances.*

This was practice.

"You're not eating," he said.

"I'm eating."

"You're moving it around."

She took a deliberate bite and chewed it without tasting a thing.

He watched her the way he watched everything — like he was solving a problem that had more variables than he'd initially expected. It was aggravating. It was also, in the privacy of her own skull, something else she didn't have a name for yet.

He reached across the table and poured water into her glass.

"The Whitmore Alliance is hosting a function Friday," he said. "They'll be watching us. If the bond doesn't read as genuine, we'll have three neutral packs question the contract's validity by the end of the night."

"I can be convincing."

"Prove it." He pushed his chair back from the table. "Come here."

"Excuse me?"

"You said you can be convincing." He settled back in his chair and looked at her with absolute calm. "Come here."

She could argue. The version of her from four months ago — standing in that hotel corridor with shaking hands and a heat she hadn't asked for — that girl would have argued.

She stood up and crossed to his side of the table.

He pulled her down onto his lap without ceremony, one arm settling around her lower back, hand resting at her hip bone — low enough to make her breath snag but positioned at the edge of the coat, not beneath it.

*Good.* She could manage this.

"Relax," he said, very close to her ear. "You look like you're about to be interrogated."

"You're not making it easy."

"Then close your eyes."

"I'm not—"

"I'm not going to do anything you don't want." A pause. His thumb traced the curve of her hip through the fabric — slow, unhurried. "I'm going to put my mouth on your neck, and you're going to lean into it. That's all. That's the lesson."

She hated that her body was already leaning.

He pressed his lips to the soft spot below her ear.

She stopped breathing.

His mouth moved slowly down the line of her neck — not teeth, not yet, just warm pressure and the cedar-iron scent of him wrapping around her until her grip tightened on his shoulder and her eyes closed without permission. His hand slid along her side, tracing the edge of the coat, drifting toward—

He stopped.

His entire body went still.

Ava felt the change move through him before she heard anything — a shift in his posture, a sudden tension in the arm around her back. His nose pressed against her hair. He inhaled. Long. Slow. The deliberate inhalation of a wolf who had caught something that didn't belong and was making absolutely certain of what it was.

She couldn't breathe.

She couldn't move.

His voice, when it came, was barely above a whisper — but the danger in it was quiet in the way a blade is quiet before it's drawn.

"You're carrying my pups."

Not a question.

She opened her mouth.

His head lifted and his eyes found hers and for one suspended second the world was only that — his crimson eyes blazing and her heart trying to break out of her chest.

He moved, ducking toward her throat, canines dropping, his body grinding against her—

The window exploded.

Glass. Silver. Cold night air.

Three figures in black dropped through the frame with weapons leveled — silver-tipped bolts already flying before they hit the floor.

Ava threw herself sideways off his lap on pure instinct.

Something cracked open inside her.

She'd felt the pull of her wolf before — soft nudges, quiet pressure against the inside of her ribs. Never anything like this. This was a door blown off its hinges.

She rose off the floor and her eyes were gold.

*Gold.* Not the amber of a shifted omega. Not the dark amber-brown of an Evergreen wolf. Gold — the color of fire seen through glass, blazing and absolute.

The first assassin swung toward her.

She closed the distance before he finished the turn.

Her hands moved without thought. The world narrowed to one clear, brutal point.

When she stepped back, the man was down.

Her palms were wet.

Her chest was heaving.

The other two attackers had stopped moving — not because the fight was over but because something in the room had changed. One look at her eyes and they'd both stepped back. She could feel the power in her veins, warm and rolling like current, pushing outward through her skin.

The golden aura crept from her shoulders in visible waves.

Ryder killed the second attacker in the space between two breaths. The third tried to run. He caught him by the collar and drove him into the wall with a sound that ended the fight.

The room filled with smoke and the chemical smell of silver residue.

Ryder stood in the wreckage.

He was looking at Ava.

He'd been in wars. She could see it in the total steadiness of him — no shock, no fear, the practiced calm of a man who'd seen dozens of bodies and never once stopped moving. But right now he had stopped moving completely.

His eyes tracked the gold still flickering at the edges of her.

His jaw was loose.

She watched him process it — the glow, her hands, the body at her feet, the rounded shape beneath the coat that he'd finally touched and finally understood.

"What the *f*—" He caught himself. The room shook with the restrained weight of what he hadn't said. His voice dropped to something raw and barely contained. "What are you?"

From the corridor, the sound of boots. His security, flooding the floor.

And Ava stood in the broken glass and the golden light, both hands over her belly, breathing hard, eyes blazing—

Giving him absolutely no answer at all.