Chapter 6

Damien

Damien didn’t answer right away. He walked back to the bed and 

sat on the edge of it, close enough that I caught his scent again, warm and grounding in a way that made no sense given everything.

“He was already gone by the time I got to your room,” 

Damien said finally. “Someone must have alerted him, I still don’t know who. But when I found your father’s men blocking the entrance to the west corridor, Dante was standing in the middle of four guards, and none of them looked like they were winning.”

I stared at him. “That’s not possible.”

“Why not?”

“Because Dante Hamilton doesn’t know I exist,” I said, hearing how ridiculous it sounded even as I said it. “I met him for maybe thirty seconds in a hotel lobby. He looked at me like I was a fly that perched on his expensive suit” Damien’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile. “That’s just his face. He looks at everyone like that.”

“He didn’t fight guards for an inconvenience.”

“No,” Damien agreed. “He didn’t.”

I pulled my knees up to my chest, suddenly very aware of how thin his shirt was and how exposed I felt in every sense that mattered. None of this fit into anything I understood about the world. Mates were supposed to be a gift, a certainty, the one thing in this life that couldn’t betray you. I’d believed that once, with Lucian, and look how that had gone. Now I was supposed to believe it again with a stranger who’d looked at me like I was something unpleasant stuck to his shoe.

“He didn’t even speak to me,” I said quietly. “Not really. He touched his head like it hurt him and then he just… left. Guards or no guards, that’s not someone who cares, Damien. That’s someone who has decided to not want me.”

“Maybe,” Damien said. He was watching me with an expression I couldn’t place, it looked almost like guilt. “Or maybe you don’t know my brother well enough yet to tell the difference.”

“There’s nothing to know. He rejected the bond the second he felt it.”

“Did he say that?”

I opened my mouth, then closed it, because he hadn’t. He hadn’t said anything at all. He’d just stood there with his jaw tight and his eyes dark like moonless night, and then he was gone, and I’d been too busy running from my own life to think much more about it.

“He didn’t have to say it,” I muttered, but the certainty had gone out of my voice, and Damien noticed. Of course he noticed. Twins probably learned early how to read the smallest cracks in a person.

He stood before I could ask him anything else, smoothing invisible wrinkles from his shirt in a way that felt more like an excuse to look somewhere else. “Get some rest. Eat something if you can. I’ll check on you later.”

He left, and I sat there in a bed that wasn’t mine, in a house that wasn’t mine, wearing the shirt of a man I’d accidentally slept with, thinking about his twin brother instead. There was something wrong with me, clearly. Some deep structural flaw that made me keep hoping for men who only knew how to hurt me in new and inventive ways.

DANTE

Three miles away, in the east tower of the Hamilton estate, Dante Hamilton was doing something he hadn’t done in longer than he could remember.

He was pacing.

Not the controlled, deliberate movement he used when he was thinking through pack strategy or working out a problem with the border patrols. This was something else, restless and useless, back and forth across the same stretch of stone floor until his boots had worn a faint path into the old rug beneath them.

He kept seeing her. Not the woman from the hotel lobby who’d looked at him like he was a ghost, but the one from the palace, crumpled on the floor of a bedroom that reeked of blood and betrayal, her hair matted dark and wet, her breathing so shallow he’d had to hold his own breath just to hear it over the pounding of his heart.

He’d felt her before he saw her. That was the part that still didn’t sit right in his chest. He’d been three floors down, arguing with a guard captain about territory boundaries that no longer mattered to him in the slightest, when something had torn through him like a blade, sharp and immediate, and every instinct in his body had screamed at him to move.

He didn’t understand it. He didn’t want to understand it. Twenty-eight years he’d gone without a mate, had built an entire life around the assumption that the bond simply wasn’t for him, that the goddess had looked at Dante Hamilton and decided he could manage well enough alone. He’d made peace with that a long time ago. He’d built walls around the possibility so thick that even the thought of a mate felt like a foreign concept, something that happened to other people, to his brother maybe, never to him.

Then a woman he’d never met had collapsed on a hallway floor and something in him had simply broken open.

He hated it.

He hated the way his hands still weren’t steady, hours later. He hated that he’d put four of her father’s guards on the ground without a second thought, that he would have gone through forty more if that was what it took to get to her. He hated most of all the sound she’d made, small and broken, when she’d said his name like a question, like she wasn’t sure whether he was real or another cruelty her mind had invented to punish her.

“Well, I guess you’ve met my brother.”

He didn’t even know why he’d said that. Some part of him, some ugly defensive part, had wanted to put distance between them immediately, wanted her to know exactly what she was dealing with before the bond could get its hooks any deeper into him. Better she resent him now for something small than trust him later for something he couldn’t promise to become.

Because that was the truth sitting like a stone in his gut. He didn’t know how to be anyone’s mate. He’d watched what happened to men who let themselves need someone that much, had watched his own father hollow out a woman over decades until there was nothing left of her but a title and a portrait in the west hall. Dante had promised himself young that he would never do that to anyone. The easiest way to keep that promise was to never let anyone close enough to test it.

But the bond didn’t care about promises. It sat under his skin now, low and insistent, and every time he closed his eyes he saw her face again, pale and trusting even in unconsciousness, and something in his chest twisted so hard it was difficult to breathe.

He stopped pacing at the window and pressed his palm flat against the cold glass, trying to ground himself in something that wasn’t her.

It didn’t work.

He thought of Damien in the west wing, playing nursemaid, and something ugly and unfamiliar curled through him. Jealousy. He recognized it distantly, the way you might recognize a word in a language you’d stopped speaking years ago. His own brother, and he couldn’t stand the thought of him in the same room as her.

This was insanity. This was exactly the kind of weakness he’d spent his whole life avoiding.

He should walk away. Should let the bond fade the way unclaimed bonds sometimes did, should let her go back to whatever life she was trying to salvage and leave the Hamilton name out of it entirely. It would be simpler. Cleaner. Safer for both of them.

He made it as far as the door before his feet stopped listening to a single word of that plan.

By the time he reached the west wing, his heart was doing something erratic and unfamiliar in his chest, and he told himself it was only irritation, only the leftover adrenaline from the guards, only anything other than what it actually was.

He didn’t knock.

The door swung open and Freya turned from where she stood by the window, and the moment their eyes met, the bond surged between them like a current finding its circuit, sudden and complete and impossible to deny.

Neither of them moved.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​