desire

CHAPTER 3

I don't want things.

Wanting is a weakness I cut out of myself a long time ago, somewhere between the first man I buried and the last one who made the mistake of thinking I had limits. What I do instead is decide. I see something. I assess it. I take it or I leave it, and either way I sleep fine.

That's how I've operated for twenty years.

Then she walked across that bar and sat down at my table like she owned the air between us, and something in my chest made a sound it hadn't made in a very long time.

I noticed it.

Filed it.

Left the hotel at five the next morning before she woke up because I don't do complications and a woman who looks at a stranger like she's trying to burn something down with her bare hands is nothing but complications.

I was back in Voss City before sunrise.

Back in my office by seven.

By eight I was in a meeting with three men who were terrified of me and doing their best not to show it, which is exactly how I prefer my meetings.

By nine I was thinking about her again.

That was the problem.

I run things in Voss City that don't appear in any public record.

The legitimate side is substantial enough — Blackwell Industries, fourteen subsidiaries, real estate across six territories, the Blackwell pack itself which I've held as Alpha for two decades. That alone would make me someone other men stepped carefully around.

But the other side is what made them not look me in the eye.

I took over my father's underworld infrastructure at twenty-three when three rival organizations decided a young Alpha with a fresh inheritance was an easy target. They were wrong. I didn't just defend what he left me — I dismantled them. Absorbed their operations. Rebuilt everything cleaner, harder, more efficient than anything they'd had the vision to construct.

Supply lines running across seven territories. Private security contracts that weren't security contracts. Judges. Politicians. Port officials in four cities who took my calls before they took anyone else's. The kind of reach that meant when I said something needed to happen, it happened — and when I said something needed to stop, it stopped immediately and permanently.

I didn't build it because I wanted power.

Power is a byproduct.

I built it because I decided at twenty-three that no one would ever put me in a position of vulnerability again, and I have honored that decision every single day since without exception and without apology.

This is who I am.

This is the life I run.

And somehow a girl in a black dress had walked into the edges of it and refused to leave my head three days later.

I called Søren into my office on the third night.

Søren Vael had been with me eleven years. Before that he was military intelligence — a unit that didn't officially exist, operating in territories that weren't officially touched. He found people. Found information. Found whatever needed finding, quickly and without contamination, and in eleven years he had never once asked me what I planned to do with anything he brought back.

That quality was genuinely rare.

I didn't look up from my desk when he came in. "Meridian Hotel. Last Thursday, bar level, approximately eleven p.m. A woman approached my table. Dark hair, mid-length. Early twenties. She came in alone and left with me. Gone by morning." I turned a page. "Find her."

Søren didn't reach for a pen. He never did. "Parameters?"

"Full background. Pack affiliation. Family. Current status." I paused for exactly one second. "Everything."

He left.

I went back to work.

I told myself what I'd been telling myself for three days — this was unfinished business. A loose thread. I didn't know her name, and not knowing things was a liability in my world. Basic information management. Closing an open loop.

I was good at lying to other people.

I was significantly better at not lying to myself.

The truth was straightforward and unwelcome: she had gotten under my skin in a way I hadn't allowed anything to in years, and I needed to know who she was because I needed to know whether this was something I could close and walk away from or something else entirely.

Those were the only two options I was prepared to consider.

Søren came back forty-seven hours later.

Ten at night. No call ahead. He set a black folder on my desk and stepped back, hands behind his back, and looked at the wall to my left — giving me the room to read without the inconvenience of being watched.

I finished the paragraph I was on.

Then I opened the folder.

Her name was Seraphine. Twenty-two years old. The photograph was a pack registry image — standard issue, fluorescent lighting, beige backdrop, front-facing. She was looking just left of the camera, jaw set, like she'd been told exactly how to pose and had decided to do it her own way anyway.

Even in that photograph, in that lighting, she looked completely like herself.

I noted it.

Turned the page.

Father: Casimir. Senior pack member, Solenne territory, solid standing. Mother: Ilaria. Same pack. No incidents on record. No complications anywhere in her background — which in my experience meant one of two things. Either she was genuinely exactly what she appeared to be, or she was exceptionally careful.

From what I remembered of her, she was exactly what she appeared to be.

In my world that was its own category of unusual.

I kept reading.

Current status: engaged.

I stopped.

Approved union. Blackwell pack. Intended: Luca Blackwell. Planned ceremony—

I read it twice.

Set the page down flat on the desk.

Sat back.

Søren didn't move. Didn't speak. Continued looking at the wall with the practiced neutrality of a man who had learned that staying very still around me was the correct response to uncertain moments.

I looked at the ceiling.

Luca. Twenty-five. My son by biology and by the one genuinely sentimental decision I had ever made — marrying his mother — which I had corrected eight years ago when I accepted that sentiment was a luxury I wasn't built for. Luca, who carried my name and none of my instincts. Who I kept at distance not out of coldness but out of the clear-eyed understanding that proximity to my actual operations would get him killed or turn him into something I'd have to deal with differently, and I hadn't yet determined which was more probable.

Luca, who was apparently engaged to the woman I had spent Thursday night with.

The woman who had walked into that bar with fury running underneath her skin like a current.

The woman who had held her ground in front of me without flinching — and I was someone people flinched in front of. Grown men. Men with their own power, their own history, their own reasons to believe they were untouchable. They still flinched.

She had looked me in the eye and picked up my glass.

She had been gone before morning like she was determined to make sure I couldn't reconsider.

I looked back down at the folder.

At her photograph.

Something was moving in the back of my mind — not emotion, not sentiment, nothing as inefficient as either of those things. Something structural. The cold precise recognition that this situation had more dimensions than its surface suggested, and the instinct that had kept me alive and ahead for two decades telling me that the obvious move here was not the right one.

The obvious move was to close the folder, file it under irrelevant, and let Luca marry his fiancée while I went back to running the world I'd built.

Clean. Simple. Correct by any reasonable standard.

I closed the folder.

Turned it over.

Looked at Søren.

"When does Luca return to the pack?"

"End of the week." His voice was even. "He's hosting a gathering at the estate. Saturday."

I nodded once.

"Prepare my rooms," I said. "I'm coming home."

He picked up the folder and left without another word.

I stayed at my desk after he was gone. The building was quiet around me — thirty floors of Blackwell Industries, empty at this hour, the city spread out below the windows doing whatever it did without my supervision.

I thought about her face when she'd finally stopped fighting herself and just let go.

I thought about Luca at his pool party, completely unaware that the ground under everything he assumed was already different.

I thought about the fact that she'd come to that bar furious.

Not sad. Not lost. Furious — which meant someone had done something. Which meant there was a reason. Which meant underneath the black dress and the borrowed nerve and the I want you delivered like a direct challenge, there was a story.

I wanted that story.

And underneath that — the part I sat with directly, without softening it, because I had not survived this long or built what I built by looking away from my own intentions —

I wanted her.

Not the memory. Not a resolved ending to an unfinished night.

Her. Specifically. Completely.

Which was a problem by every rational measure I had.

I looked at the empty space on my desk where the folder had been.

The corner of my mouth moved.

Not a smile.

Something quieter than that.

Something that, if Søren had still been in the room, would have made even him take one careful step back.