chapter 4

Cassian

Mate.

I sat on the edge of that hotel bed with her note in my hand and the word ringing in my head like a bell.

'That's impossible,' I told my wolf.

'Lycan Kings don't get mates. Not in two hundred years. You know that.'

'I know what I smelled,' he growled.

'I know what I felt when she touched us. She is ours.'

'She's human.'

'She is OURS.'

I closed my eyes. I could still feel her. The weight of her in my lap. Her nails in my back. The way she said my name when she broke apart under me, soft and surprised, like nobody had ever made her feel good before. Nobody had. I was the first. And I had slept through her leaving.

I picked up my phone and called Rhys. My Beta answered on the first ring.

"My King. You didn't come back to the hotel last night. The council meeting is at noon..."

"Cancel it."

Silence. In over a hundred years of serving me, Rhys had never heard me cancel anything.

"Is something wrong?" he asked carefully.

"I need you to find someone. A woman. Her name is Elara."

"Elara what?"

"I don't know." There was a long silence on the line.

"My King," Rhys said slowly,

"with respect, there must be a thousand Elaras in this city."

"Human. Twenty-two. Brown hair, green eyes. She left the Imperial Crown Hotel before dawn." I closed my hand around the note. "Pull every camera. Every street. Every bus station. And find out who booked the suite on the sixteenth floor last night."

"What happened on the sixteenth floor?" I looked down at the paper. Please don't look for me.

"Something that should never have happened," I said. "Just find it."

The cameras showed her leaving at 5:12 in the morning.

I stood in the security room and watched it on the screen. She was wearing my shirt and my sweatpants, rolled at the waist so many times they looked like a donut. Barefoot. Her hair a mess.

She walked a few steps down the hallway. Then she stopped and turned around and stared at my door. She stared at it for almost a full minute.

"Play it again," I said.

The security guard played it again. And again. The fifth time, Rhys cleared his throat.

"My King, I think we've seen..."

"Again."

He didn't argue. The lobby camera showed her walking out the front doors with her head down. The street camera showed her turning left toward the old part of the city.

And then nothing. No cameras. No trace. She walked into the morning and disappeared. The suite on the sixteenth floor was a dead end too.

It had been booked by a company called Silverline Holdings. Rhys spent two days digging. Silverline had no office. No phone number. No owner anyone could name. The money had come from a bank account that was closed the same morning.

The old man had checked out an hour after I threw him out. Nobody at the front desk could remember his face. The manager swore he had never seen him before in his life, and he was sweating so much when he said it that I knew somebody had paid him a lot of money to say exactly that.

"Somebody covered their tracks very fast," Rhys said.

"And very well. That's not a small man, my King. That's somebody with power."

I didn't like that. I didn't like it at all. That night I went back to the city alone. I let my wolf rise just enough to use his nose, and I followed her scent from the hotel door through the empty streets. Vanilla and rain and me, still on her skin.

It led me to the central bus station. And then it was gone. Fifty buses had left that morning, going fifty different directions, and it had rained again at noon and washed everything away.

I stood in the middle of that dirty bus station at two in the morning with my fists clenched.

My wolf made a sound I had never heard him make before. A whine. Like a hurt dog.

'We lost her,' he said.

'No,' I said. 'We'll find her.'

'How? We don't even know her name.'

'We know her name.'

'Half of it.' I didn't have an answer for that.

Days turned into weeks.

My people checked every hospital in the city. Every shelter. Every train station. They checked the cities around it and the cities around those. Her picture went to every pack in every territory I ruled. Nothing.

I went back to the palace because I had to. There was trouble on the eastern border. Rogues attacking villages. The council was fighting about the human treaty again. I sat on my throne and listened to old men argue and gave orders in all the right places.

But at night, I didn't sleep. At night, I lay in my bed and stared at the ceiling and thought about her.

I thought about her lips, soft and unsure at first and then hungry. The little gasp she made when I first slid inside her. How she blushed when she caught me looking at her, and then didn't look away. The way she said, "Don't you dare stop now," with her legs wrapped around my waist.

I thought about it until I was hard and aching and angry, and then I got up and stood under a cold shower until my skin went numb. It didn't help. Nothing helped.

'You should go yourself,' my wolf said one night.

'Stop sending others. They don't know her scent the way we do.'

'I can't leave the kingdom for months to chase one woman.'

'She is not one woman. She is THE woman.' I didn't answer him. Because he was right, and I was a coward.

Two hundred years. I had lived two hundred years and been with more women than I could count. Beautiful she-wolves. Princesses. Women who wanted my crown and my bed and would have done anything to be my Luna.

None of them had ever stayed in my head past breakfast.

And one human girl in a borrowed shirt had ruined me in a single night.

"Where are you, Elara?" I said into the dark. Nobody answered.

Elara

"Elara! Table six wants more coffee!"

"Coming, Mrs. Dawson!"

I grabbed the pot and ran. My feet were killing me. I'd been on them since five in the morning. But I wasn't complaining. This job had saved my life.

Three months ago, I walked out of that hotel in Cassian's clothes with nothing but my handbag. I got on the first bus I saw. I didn't even read where it was going. I just sat at the back and pressed my face against the window and cried until the sun came up.

The bus stopped in a little town called Millbrook. Mrs. Dawson found me sitting on the steps of her diner the next morning, still in a man's shirt and sweatpants. She looked at me for a long time. Then she gave me a cup of tea and a grilled cheese sandwich and said,

"You can start tomorrow. Six sharp."

She never asked me what happened. I think she knew I couldn't tell her.

Now I had a tiny room above the diner, a job, and a boss who called me "honey" and slipped extra pie into my lunch.

It wasn't a big life. But it was mine. And every single night, I thought about him.

I hated it. I told myself it was one night. That he'd forgotten me already. That a man who looked like that probably had a different girl in his bed every week. That thought always made my chest hurt.

I still had his shirt. I slept in it. It didn't smell like him anymore, but I slept in it anyway.

'You're pathetic,' I told myself. 'Totally pathetic.'

"Miss?" The old man at table six was holding up his cup.

"My coffee?"

"Oh! Sorry!" I poured it so fast I nearly spilled.

"Sorry. I was somewhere else." He chuckled.

"Thinking about a boy?"

My face went bright red, and he laughed so hard he had to wipe his eyes.

I was walking back to the counter when the bell over the door jingled.

I looked up with a smile. The smile died. Two men. Big ones. Leather jackets. One of them had a snake tattoo curling up the side of his neck.

I knew that snake. Every month for three years, that man had banged on our apartment door and screamed at my father for money.

He worked for Dutch Morello. Not Victor Crane. Another man my father owed. There were so many of them. The coffee pot shook in my hand.

Snake Neck looked slowly around the diner. At the old man. At the couple by the window. At me. He smiled with all his teeth.

"Well, well, well. Thomas Hart's baby girl. You know how long we've been looking for you, princess?" The whole diner went silent.

"I don't know where my dad is," I said.

"I swear. I haven't seen him in three months."

"That's okay." He walked toward me. "Dutch says you can pay for him."

"Hey!" Mrs. Dawson came storming out of the kitchen waving a metal ladle. She was sixty-four and barely five feet tall.

"You get out of my diner right now or I'm calling the sheriff!"

"Go ahead, grandma. The sheriff owes Dutch money too."

He grabbed my arm. I threw the coffee at him. He screamed. I dropped the pot and ran through the kitchen and out the back door. Mrs. Dawson's old blue car was parked there with the keys in it, like always, because Millbrook was the kind of place where nobody stole anything.

I'm sorry, Mrs. Dawson, I thought as I started the engine. I'm so sorry. I drove until the sun went down.

I stopped at a gas station two hours north. I sat in the car with my hands shaking on the wheel and cried so hard I couldn't breathe.

'Why me?' I kept thinking. 'What did I ever do?'

When I finally looked up, there was a paper taped to the gas station window.

NOW HIRING. Household staff. Private estate, Northern Territory. Live-in. Room and meals included. Good pay. No experience needed.

At the bottom was a little silver symbol. A crescent moon with a wolf's head inside it. The Northern Territory.

Everybody knew what lived up there. Werewolves. Lycans. Humans worked for them sometimes, but most people were too scared to even drive through.

I stared at that wolf symbol for a long time. No debt collector on earth would follow me into wolf country. I wiped my face on my sleeve and went inside.