chapter 8

~ Killian’s POV ~

In eight hundred and forty-three years of living, I had never been told no.

Not by kings, not by queens, nor by warlords who had built their thrones on the bones of their enemies. Not by women who had sworn they would never look at me twice and then spent the rest of their evenings unable to look away.

I was Killian Voss. Ancient and Untouchable. The supernatural being that other supernatural beings crossed entire continents to avoid antagonizing.

And Mira Wyrmblood had looked me dead in the eyes, said no, and walked away.

Three times.

I sat in the back of my car as my driver moved through the Philadelphia streets, my elbow propped against the window, two fingers pressed to my lips, thinking about it with so much seriousness.

She had walked away from me three times.

The gala, the corridor outside her office when I had attempted to arrange a meeting. And yesterday, when I had sent her a bottle of 1787 Château Margaux, a wine older than most countries, with a note requesting dinner, she had sent it back unopened with a single line from her PA.

Ms. Wyrmblood does not accept unsolicited gifts.

I had stared at that note for a long time.

Then I had done something I hadn’t done in approximately four centuries.

I had laughed. Actually laughed, alone in my penthouse, at the audacity of it.

“Mr. Voss.” My driver’s voice came through the partition. “We’re approaching WyrmTech.”

“Park across the street,” I said. “I’ll walk.”

I didn’t need to be here, I had a meeting in two hours with the Eastern Vampire Council that I was already mentally absent from. I had a stack of correspondence from three different coven alliances requesting audiences. I had, by any reasonable measure, better things to do on a Tuesday morning than stand outside a woman’s office building hoping to accidentally-on-purpose cross her path.

And yet.

I stepped out onto the pavement, straightened my jacket, and looked up at forty-two floors of glass and steel with the WyrmTech logo catching the morning light.

Wyrmblood.

The word moved through my mind. I had known what she was the moment I caught her scent at the gala. It had stopped me cold in the middle of a conversation with the Danish Prime Minister, my champagne halfway to my lips, every ancient instinct in my body snapping to attention at once.

A Wyrmblood, Alive and Hidden in plain sight, wrapped in the identity of a billionaire CEO, standing in a ballroom full of people who had absolutely no idea what she was.

I had spent three weeks since the gala quietly, carefully confirming what I already knew. The bloodline markers were unmistakable to someone old enough to remember when the Wyrmblood Clan had still existed. When they had walked openly, and the world had parted around them like water.

The massacre had been before my direct involvement, I had been in the Eastern territories when it happened. But I knew what had been done. I knew who had ordered it.

And I knew, with the particular clarity of someone who had lived long enough to see history repeat itself with nauseating regularity, that if the wrong people identified her, history would not hesitate to try again.

That was the reason I was here, I told myself.

A Wyrmblood alive and unprotected was a variable that needed managing. My interest in Mira was entirely rational, purely for protection.

I repeated that to myself as I crossed the street and I almost believed it.

She came out of the building at precisely 12:47 PM. I knew her schedule well enough by now to know she took lunch at her desk on Tuesdays except when she had external meetings, in which case she left through the east entrance.

She came out of the west entrance, which meant she wasn’t expecting anyone.

She had a phone pressed to her ear, a sleek black coat over a deep burgundy dress, and she was walking at the particular pace of someone whose time had a different value than everyone else’s. Her PA trailed two steps behind, tablet in hand, firing information at her in rapid bursts that Mira absorbed without breaking stride.

I fell into step beside her.

She didn’t look at me and didn't slow down.

“You’re following me,” she said into a brief pause in her PA’s report.

“I prefer to think of it as coincidence,” I said.

“You don’t strike me as someone who believes in coincidence.”

“You’re right. I don’t.”

She glanced at her PA. “Give us a minute, Zara.” The young woman walked away without question and Mira finally turned to look at me not stopping walking, just turning her head, fixing me with that dark level gaze that I was becoming uncomfortably familiar with.

“What do you want, Killian?”

My name in her mouth made me want to own her. I had heard my name spoken by empresses but it had never particularly moved me.

“Lunch,” I said. “There’s a restaurant two blocks from here that does exceptional things with black truffle. I’ve reserved the private room.”

“You reserved a room before knowing if I’d agree.” she fired back at me but I wasn't backing down.

“I reserve rooms the way other people carry umbrellas,” I said. “Preparation, not presumption.”

The corner of her mouth moved.

“No,” she said.

I had expected it. That didn’t make it land any softer.

“Dinner, then,” I said.

“No.”

“Breakfast.”

“Killian.”

“I have an exceptional chef. He trained under…..”

“Killian.” She stopped walking. Turned to face me fully, and I stopped too, the morning crowd parting around us like a river splitting at a stone. Her eyes met mine with absolute steadiness. “Look at me.”

I was already looking at her. I hadn’t stopped since the gala.

“Compel me,” she said quietly.

I went still.

“Go ahead,” she said, and there was something in her voice now. “You’ve been trying to since the gala. I felt every attempt, so stop dancing around it and just try, one more time, properly.”

I studied her for a long moment.

Then I let it out. I pushed it directly at her.

She blinked once and then looked at me with an expression that was, unmistakably, almost pitying.

“Are you done?” she asked.

The compulsion dissolved against her like smoke against a wall.

Something shifted in my chest that I hadn’t felt in centuries. I was in Awe of her.

I had met supernatural beings who could resist compulsion with effort and training. I had never met one it simply didn’t reach.

“You can’t be read either,” I said slowly. It wasn’t a question. I had tried that too, in the quieter moments at the gala, a gentle brush against her mind, the way I could skim the surface thoughts of almost any being within twenty feet.

With Mira there was nothing. Like reaching for a door and finding open sky.

“No,” she confirmed. “You can’t.”

“That shouldn’t be possible,” I said.

“A lot of things about me shouldn’t be possible.” She tilted her head slightly. “That’s rather the point.”

I looked at her, past the coat and the composure and the empire she wore like armor, and felt the mate bond pull with a force that made eight hundred years of careful emotions creak.

Mine, something ancient in me said. Mine and no one else’s.

“You’re not going to make this easy,” I said.

“I’m not going to make this anything,” she replied, turning to walk away. “I don’t want a mate, Killian. Least of all one with secrets older than my bloodline.”

She had taken four steps when my voice stopped her.

“I know what happened to your clan,” I said quietly.

She stopped.

The morning noise continued around us, traffic, footsteps, the city’s indifferent pulse but between us the air went absolutely still.

She turned back slowly. Her face was composed. Her eyes were not.

“I know who ordered it,” I continued, keeping my voice low. “And I know there are people who would finish the job if they found out you survived.” I held her gaze. “I am not one of them.”

The silence stretched.

“Why should I believe that?” she asked, and her voice was steady but something underneath it was not.

“You shouldn’t,” I said honestly. “Not yet. But you’re going to need allies, Mira. Whether you want them or not.” I paused. “And I have eight hundred years of knowing exactly who your enemies are.”

She stared at me for a long moment. Something moved behind her eyes, calculation, fury, and underneath both of them, buried deep, the particular grief of someone who had been carrying a very heavy thing alone for a very long time.

Then she looked past my shoulder and something in her expression shifted, colder, sharper.

I turned.

Kaiden leaned against a black SUV parked at the curb twenty feet away, arms folded, amber eyes fixed on me with the particular patience of someone who had been waiting for me to finish and was running low on that patience fast.

And beside the building entrance, partially obscured by shadow, Ares stood with his hands in his coat pockets watching both of us.

The three of us locked eyes in a triangle of mutual, wordless acknowledgment.

Rivals, all three of us, circling the same woman who wanted none of us.

Mira looked between all three of us slowly. Something that might have been exasperation crossed her face, and if I wasn’t mistaken, the very faintest trace of something else she was working hard to suppress.

She pulled out her phone, typed something rapidly, and slipped it back into her pocket.

“I have a meeting,” she said to no one in particular.

And walked back into her building without looking at any of us again.

Kaiden pushed off the SUV and crossed toward me, stopping close enough that his voice wouldn’t carry.

“Back off, vampire,” he said pleasantly. The pleasantness didn’t reach his eyes.

“After you, Lycan,” I replied, with equal warmth.

We stood there for a moment, two of the most powerful supernatural beings on the continent, squaring off on a Tuesday morning pavement over a woman who had just dismissed us both without breaking stride.

Ares stopped beside us both, looked at the building, and looked at us.

“She’s not going to choose either of you if you spend your time posturing at each other,” he said mildly, and walked away.

I watched him go.

Then I looked back up at the thirty-eighth-floor window, where just for a moment I thought I caught a shadow moving behind the glass.

Eight hundred and forty-three years, I thought, and she is the first thing I have ever wanted that I cannot simply have.

I straightened my jacket.

Excellent.