CHAPTER 4

SOMETHING DIFFERENT

Rain had always been a little strange.Not in any way she could point to directly. Nothing dramatic enough to name or explain away. Just small things—quiet things that she had learned over the years to chalk up to overactive instincts or an overactive imagination or just being, as her father had always said with a tight, uncomfortable smile, a sensitive girl.She felt things before they happened. Not always. Not reliably enough to call it anything real. Just sometimes—a prickle at the back of her neck before someone walked into a room, a sudden inexplicable certainty that she needed to leave somewhere before she could explain why. A warmth in her chest when she was in the woods outside the city that felt so much bigger than just enjoying nature that it sometimes frightened her.She had stopped mentioning these things to people a long time ago.Her father especially.Marcus Calloway was not a man who tolerated things he couldn't explain. He was sharp and controlled and precise in the way that people are when they are frightened of disorder—when they need the world to stay exactly where they've put it. He had raised Rain alone since her mother died when Rain was six, and he had raised her quietly and carefully in a very small and very managed world.No late nights. No strange neighborhoods. No wandering.You're too trusting, Rain. You don't understand how dangerous people can be.She had heard that her whole life. She had believed it her whole life. It was only in the last two years—since she'd moved out, since Paige & Prose, since the small ordinary life she'd built for herself—that she'd started to wonder if her father's protectiveness had less to do with danger and more to do with control.She was thinking about this on her lunch break, sitting on the back step of the bookshop with a cup of tea going cold in her hands, when she felt it.That prickle.The back of her neck. Sharp and immediate, like a finger pressed against her spine.She looked up.The street behind the shop was empty. A narrow service lane, grey in the midday light, bins lined up against the opposite wall, a cat picking its way along the top of a fence at the far end. Nothing alarming. Nothing there.And yet.She stayed very still, the way she had learned to stay still when the feeling came—not moving, just listening with something that wasn't quite her ears. The feeling pulsed once, twice, and then shifted from warning into something else entirely. Something almost like recognition.Like whatever was out there wasn't a threat.Like whatever was out there was known to her.That's ridiculous, she told herself firmly. There's nothing there.She went back inside.She didn't see the man in the grey jacket step out from the shadow of the doorway at the far end of the lane, press two fingers to his earpiece, and say quietly, "She felt the watch. Alpha was right. Her instincts are already active."Across the city, Damien was in a board meeting he was not listening to.This was unprecedented. Damien Wolfe ran his meetings the way he ran everything—with total focus, total command, and zero tolerance for inefficiency. His executives knew better than to waste his time. The agenda was always followed. The decisions were always made.Today he had read the same quarterly projection three times and retained nothing.Cole, sitting two seats down, was watching him with the carefully neutral expression he used when he was deeply entertained and trying not to show it.Damien set the projection down."Finish without me," he said, standing.Twelve executives stared at him.He walked out.Cole caught up with him in the hallway, falling into step beside him with the ease of long practice. "The Harrington deal—""Will close regardless. Chen knows what to do." Damien hit the elevator button. "Report from the lane watch."Cole's expression shifted to something more serious. "She felt them. D. sat on the back step for three minutes just—sensing. Didn't know what she was picking up, but she felt it. " He paused. "Her instincts are active. Which means the suppression is wearing off."The elevator doors opened. They stepped in."How long?" Damien asked."Hard to say without knowing what Calloway used. If it was an herbal compound, maybe weeks before it clears her system completely. If it was something stronger—" Cole exhaled. "Could be triggered by proximity. To the pack. To you."To him.Damien stared at his own reflection in the elevator doors. The controlled, ruthless, put-together reflection of a man who had everything managed.Marcus Calloway had suppressed his own daughter's nature. Had kept her small and contained and completely blind to what she was—not to protect her, Damien understood now with a cold, settling clarity, but to control her. A wolf who didn't know she was a wolf couldn't run. Couldn't fight. Couldn't choose.The rage that moved through him was quiet and absolute."She's going to start noticing things," he said."Yes.""Heightened senses first. Then the instincts will get louder. Then—""Then she's going to need someone to tell her the truth," Cole said quietly. "Before it happens on its own and terrifies her."The elevator opened on the penthouse floor.Damien stepped out and stood for a moment looking at nothing in particular, his jaw tight, his hands still at his sides.He thought about Rain on a back step with a cup of tea, feeling something she had no name for, alone with an instinct her father had spent her whole life teaching her to distrust.He thought about what it would feel like to be told that everything you were had been hidden from you. That the strange, persistent sense of being almost yourself but not quite had a reason. That you were more than you'd ever been allowed to be.He thought about who should be there when that happened."Set up a meeting," he said.Cole blinked. "With who?""With her." Damien moved toward his office. "Somewhere neutral. Somewhere she feels safe." He paused at the door. "The bookshop closes at seven. She walks home after.""Damien." Cole's voice was careful again. That careful voice meant he was about to say something Damien wasn't going to like. "If you get closer to her—if the bond develops any further—pulling back is going to become—""I know.""I'm not sure you do. Because you're already—""I know, Cole." He looked at his Beta over his shoulder. Something in his expression made Cole stop talking. "I know exactly what I'm doing."He went into his office and closed the door.He stood at the window again—his window, his city, his empire—and pressed one hand flat against the cold glass and breathed.He did not know what he was doing.Not even slightly.At seven fifteen, Rain locked the front door of Paige & Prose, tucked her keys into her bag, and turned up her collar against the evening cold.She took the main roads home.She told herself it was just common sense.She didn't ask herself why it felt like following an instruction.She didn't ask herself why, halfway home, she had the sudden overwhelming feeling that she wasn't alone—and why, instead of frightening her, it made her feel inexplicably, infuriatingly safe.

‎