008

The pursuit 2

~LUNA POV~

At six PM, my driver took a route I didn't recognize.

"This isn't the way home."

"Mr. Craven asked me to take the scenic route, Ms. Ashford."

We drove through Times Square, and I looked up through the car window and completely stopped breathing.

The largest digital billboard in the city — the one that runs fifty thousand dollars a day — was showing my face. A photo from the gala, me in the red dress, looking like a woman who owns every room she walks into. And beneath it, in letters large enough to read from a block away:

‘To Luna Ashford: The woman who conquered the world and stole my heart. Dinner? — Draven Craven’

My phone went absolutely insane. Notifications stacked faster than I could process them. #DravenAndLuna was trending everywhere, burying the attack campaign like it had never existed. Every platform was flooded with photos of the billboard, of me, of him, of the two of us at the gala.

My phone rang. Draven.

"Are you completely out of your mind," I said, and it wasn't even a question.

"Insanely in love with you." He said it like it was just a fact, like he was telling me the weather.

"You put us on a billboard. In Times Square. For the entire city."

"I wanted everyone to know."

"Know what, exactly?"

"That you're mine." His voice dropped into something low and possessive that settled in my bones. "That I'm coming for you. That any man who so much as looks at you too long will have to answer to me personally." A beat. "See you at eight, mate."

He hung up.

I sat in the back of that car with my heart doing something completely unacceptable against my ribs, staring out at the city lights, thinking about a man who was either the biggest mistake I'd ever almost made or the most honest thing that had come into my life in years, and I genuinely could not tell which.

****************

I told myself I wasn't going.

I was in my closet fifteen minutes later trying on dresses.

I rejected five before landing on midnight blue silk — elegant, clean, the kind of dress that says I made an effort but I'm not admitting it.

The ruby necklace against the neckline looked like it had been designed for exactly this outfit, which was infuriating.

I looked at myself in the mirror for a long moment.

"It's just business," I said to my reflection.

My wolf laughed so hard I could feel it in my teeth.

At exactly eight, a black limousine was waiting outside my building like it had never considered the possibility I might not show.

I took one breath. Squared my shoulders, and got in.

Black roses covered the back seat, filling the air with something dark and sweet. Champagne chilled in a bucket. A handwritten note on cream paper: ‘For the woman who's already taken my breath away. — D’

I folded it once and set it in my lap and watched the city slide past the windows, telling myself my pulse was high because of traffic, or the champagne, or literally anything else.

The car stopped at the marina, and I looked out at the yacht — huge and glowing and lit with fairy lights along the deck, a table set for two near the railing like something out of a dream someone else was having.

I stepped out onto the dock and my heels clicked against the wood, the harbor breeze pulling at my hair, the city glittering on the dark water behind the boat like the whole skyline had shown up to watch.

A crew member appeared at the gangway. "Ms. Ashford. Mr. Craven is waiting for you on deck."

I walked aboard.

And there he was — standing by the railing in all black, the light catching the sharp angles of his face, the particular quality of stillness in his eyes that meant he was thinking things he hadn't decided to say yet. When he saw me coming toward him, he went completely, utterly still.

He didn't move. Didn't speak. Just looked at me the way people look at things they've been waiting a long time for.

I kept walking. Didn't let my pace change, didn't let the nerves show, didn't give him the satisfaction of knowing that something about the way he was watching me made my whole body feel like a live wire.

He crossed the deck to meet me halfway.

"Luna." He said my name like it meant something — quiet and deliberate, like a word he'd turned over in his mouth a hundred times.

He took my hand and raised it to his lips, kissed my knuckles slowly, never once looking away from my eyes. "You are the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life."

My breath caught. I let it, just barely. "This is business."

His smile was slow and a little dangerous and completely unimpressed with my self-control.

"Keep telling yourself that, mate."

He pulled out my chair. I sat. The yacht began to move — a quiet, decisive slide away from the dock, the marina falling back, the city lights spreading wide across the water.

I watched the shore grow smaller and realized, with a calm that surprised me, that I was alone with the most dangerous man I'd ever met, on his boat, in the middle of the harbor, with exactly nowhere to go.

No exits. No escape routes. No polite way out.

And the worst part — the part I had absolutely no plan for — was that somewhere between the billboard and the black roses and the way he'd said my name, some quiet, traitorous piece of me had already stopped looking for one.