LOGINCHAPTER THIRTEEN — "Watch Your Back"I left without a word.The door took care of the word for me — I pulled it behind me with everything I had and the sound of it cracked through the hallway like a gunshot and I walked away from it before the echo died.My room. My bed. My phone.I sat on the edge of the mattress and pulled up the news and there he was — Derek's face on the screen, caught outside the hotel, jaw tight, eyes carrying the specific weight of a man holding something together through sheer force of will. The banner still running underneath. Board members. Pulling out. The company he'd built bleeding out in real time on a Tuesday morning because I had sat at a desk and sent a file.I watched for thirty seconds.Then called him.He picked up on the first ring."Ira." His voice steadier than I expected. Careful."I'm resigning, Derek."Silence.Then — "Why." Quiet. "You too? I just lost half my board and now—""Listen to me." I kept my voice level. "You have all my support. A
CHAPTER TWELVE — "Addicted"I didn't knock.I pushed his office door open hard enough that it hit the wall behind it and I walked in and I didn't care about the assistant who called after me or the sound it made or any of it. I crossed the room and put myself in front of his desk and looked at him directly."You did this."Not a question. A statement laid flat on the desk between us like evidence he couldn't close a file on.He looked up from whatever he was reading.Said nothing.That face. That absolute wall. Looking back at me like I was a weather event he was observing from a safe distance — interested, maybe. Unbothered, completely."Derek didn't do anything to you." My voice was shaking and I hated that it was shaking but I couldn't stop it — the fury and the guilt and Derek's face in that hotel room all running together into something I didn't have a clean container for. "He worked his entire life for that company. Everything he built — you made one call and you took it. Just l
CHAPTER ELEVEN — "Consequences"He didn't come.I lay in my bed staring at the ceiling and told myself that was exactly what I wanted. The silence. The nothing. The proof that I had called his bluff and his bluff had folded and tomorrow I would go back to Derek's building and sit at my desk and the ground would finally be stable.I believed it.For about eleven minutes.Then the thing I wouldn't say out loud surfaced in the dark where I couldn't manage it — quiet and honest and completely inexcusable.I wanted him to come through that door.Not gently. Not with explanations. The door opening and those gold eyes and that jaw and the energy of a man who had decided something and was here to collect on it. I wanted the confrontation. Wanted to stand in front of whatever he brought and hold the line again and feel that specific electricity of two people who understood each other in ways that had nothing to do with sense.I fell asleep wanting it.Hating myself for wanting it.Wanting it a
CHAPTER TEN — "Testing The Wolf"Call it selfish.Call it exactly what it was — a woman who had been cornered in a hallway, threatened, almost kissed, and left standing there with her pulse in her throat and something that felt dangerously close to excitement where fear was supposed to be.I sent the file anyway.Derek's confirmation came back in forty minutes. I read it once. Set my phone down. Picked it back up.Gold eyes. Tight jaw. His breath on my neck.Think carefully, Ira.I thought carefully.Hit confirm.His office had been a war zone since six AM.Not visibly — nothing was overturned, nothing was broken. The files were open, the desk was ordered, everything exactly where it belonged. But the energy inside that room had weight to it. The kind that pressed against the walls and seeped under the door and reached his staff before they reached him.His first assistant knocked at seven. No answer. Knocked again at seven forty. Nothing. By eight she was communicating exclusively th
CHAPTER NINE — "Thrilled"I woke up angry.Not the clean kind of angry that has a clear source and a clear solution. The complicated kind — the kind that sits on your chest before your eyes are fully open and doesn't move when you try to breathe around it.His voice in the hallway.I'm not going to let you go easily.His breath on my neck. His chest against my back. His finger tracing my lips like he had the right — like five years of someone else's marriage was a detail too small to matter. I lay in the dark of my room in the pack house and stared at the ceiling and told myself I was angry.I was.I was also wet.I squeezed my eyes shut. Tried to redirect. Tried to think about the interview. The closed door. The man behind the desk and his careful face and you offended someone powerful — tried to build the anger back up to the size it needed to be to drown out everything else.His finger on my jaw.The slow trace of it.I gave up.My hand moved under the sheets before I finished deci
CHAPTER EIGHT — "Never Letting Go"The office was quiet.Daemon stood exactly where she'd left him — facing the door, the air still carrying the shape of everything that had just happened in it. Her words. Her finger between them. The way she'd held his gaze without flinching and then turned and walked out like she was the one with all the power.She was.That was the part he hadn't accounted for.He moved to the desk. Slowly. Sat in the chair and looked at the surface of it — the wood grain, the files he hadn't touched, the pen sitting at the exact angle he'd left it this morning before the day had become whatever this day had become.His eyes moved to the spot.Where her hands had been. Both palms flat against the wood, her weight behind them, leaning into him with that cold fury that was somehow more dangerous than heat. He could still see the faint impression of it — or maybe he was constructing it, the mind filling in what it wanted to find.He reached out.Slow. Without deciding







