Chapter 1: The Substitute

•Lisa•

Sasha shoved the outfit into my arms before I could even set down my tray.

“Please, Lisa. Please.”

The fabric was barely enough to call clothing.

A scrap of black lace that wouldn’t cover half of what it needed to. I stared at it, then at her, and my stomach dropped.

She was wearing long sleeves in July. She always wore long sleeves now.

“Sasha, what happened to your legs?”

“Nothing.” She pulled her cardigan tighter around herself, like that would hide the wince every time she shifted her weight. “I just can’t dance tonight. That’s all. I need you to cover for me.”

“I’m a waitress. I don’t dance. I’ve never danced a day in my life.”

“You don’t have to be good.” Her voice cracked. “You just have to show up. If Marcus finds out I skipped a shift…” She stopped herself, but I’d already heard enough. Marcus. Her boyfriend. Her boss. The man who owned this club and, apparently, owned her too, in whatever twisted arrangement had started as a relationship and turned into something else, something that left bruises she covered with concealer and long sleeves and lies.

“He’ll hurt you again,” I said quietly. It wasn’t a question.

She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.

I should have said no. Every part of me knew I should say no. But then she said the thing that killed the “NO” in my throat before it could form.

“It’s the VIP booth tonight. Whoever’s back there tips big. Like big enough for a surgery, big enough kind of big.”

Milo.

My son’s face flashed behind my eyes, five years old, too thin, his lips going faintly blue every time he laughed too hard or ran too fast. The cardiologist’s voice from three weeks ago, gentle and clinical in the way doctors get when they’re delivering something they’ve said too many times before: the valve isn’t going to hold much longer. He needs the surgery. The sooner, the better.

The sooner, the better. And no insurance in the world was going to cover the difference between “eventually” and “now.”

I looked down at the outfit in my hands like it might bite me.

“Fine,” I said. “Fine. Show me where to put this thing on.”

The mask came last. Sasha pressed it into my palm like it was the most important part of the whole costume, and maybe it was. Black, simple, covering just enough of my face that a stranger wouldn’t recognize me on the street tomorrow.

I needed that more than she knew.

Because the moment I stepped into that hallway, into the outfit that left nothing to the imagination, something under my skin woke up and started pacing. My wolf. Restless. Alert. She hadn’t stretched her legs in this world in years not since I’d buried her under human clothes and human routines and a human life I’d built brick by brick specifically so no one would ever look twice at me.

Not here, I told her. Not tonight. Stay down.

She didn’t listen. She never really did.

I made my way down the corridor toward the VIP room, heels unsteady, mask heavy against my cheekbones, and with every step my skin prickled hotter. By the time I reached the door, I knew.

Every man on the other side of it was a wolf.

My hand hovered over the handle. This was a human club, in a human city, three states from the last place my old pack had ever set foot. What were they doing here? Why now? Why this booth, tonight, the one night I’d let myself be talked into something this stupid?

There was no version of this where I could turn around. Sasha’s legs. Milo’s heart. I pushed the door open.

The room smelled like whiskey and cologne and, underneath it, unmistakably, like them that low, earthy thread that only another wolf could catch. Four men lounged across the leather seating, jackets open, watching me the way men watch something they’ve already decided they own.

I didn’t dance. I’d said I couldn’t, and I’d meant it, and the first few shuffling attempts I made were exactly as humiliating as I’d feared.

“This is what we paid for?” one of them said, laughing into his glass.

“If you can’t dance, sweetheart, just take it off already.”

“We paid good money. Give us something worth watching.”

My wolf snarled somewhere behind my ribs, but the human part of me, the part that had learned to go quiet and small a long time ago, kept my spine straight and my mouth shut. I took a step back anyway, some instinct screaming not this, not like this, and that was when hands started reaching for me. For the flimsy lace. For the mask.

“Don’t move.”

The voice cut through the room like a blade drawn from its sheath low, cold, absolutely certain of being obeyed. And it was obeyed. Instantly. The hands dropped away from me like they’d been burned.

I turned toward the sound before I could stop myself, and the floor seemed to tilt under my heels.

He was sitting in the corner booth, half in shadow, one arm draped along the back of the seat like he’d been carved into that pose and left there for centuries. I hadn’t seen that face in five years as i froze at the sight of it.

Ronan, my stepbrother or should I say my lover had just found me and I really wanted to disappear. I hadn’t let myself think about that face in five years. And yet here it was, unchanged in all the ways that mattered, the same sharp jaw, the same eyes that used to look at me like I was the only person in any room he’d ever been in.

My wolf howled inside me, a sound of pure recognition that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with a bond I’d spent five years trying to convince myself had died.

I touched the edge of my mask. Thank God. Thank God for the mask.

The other men straightened like soldiers called to attention.

“Alpha.”

Alpha. Not just a wolf. Not just any wolf in this room by accident. He’d become Alpha. Which meant…

What happened to your father?

He hadn’t looked away from me once.

“She’s my pick,” he said, like it was already decided, like it had never been a question.

Before I could so much as breathe a protest, hands lifted me – not unkindly, but without asking and set me down on his lap like I was a package being delivered to the right address.

Up close, this near, there was nowhere left to hide. His eyes moved over the mask, over what little of my face it left uncovered, and something flickered there. Calculation. Memory. Recognition, maybe, fighting its way up through five years of silence.

Does he know it’s me?

His phone buzzed against my thigh, muffled beneath the lace, insistent.

One of the men glanced toward the sound, then toward him, something careful entering his voice.

“Alpha. It’s Luna calling.”