All Chapters of THE CONTRACT WIFE OF THE DEMON WOLF: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

ZAINThe whiskey sat there getting warm. I hadn't touched it once since I poured it, twenty minutes ago, maybe longer. On screen, Aaron Krane stood behind a podium with about thirty microphones pointed at his face, and I kept waiting for him to fumble, to hedge, to give the reporters something they could chew on.He didn't.He talked like he was reading off a grocery list instead of defending a marriage half the territory assumed was a business transaction. "If anyone has a problem with that, they have a problem with me."I sat forward. Then I sat back. My jaw hurt from clenching it and I hadn't even noticed I was doing it until my teeth ached.This wasn't what I wanted to see. I wanted Lena scrambling. I wanted her apologizing on camera, maybe crying a little, maybe even quitting outright so the whole thing would just be over and I could stop hearing her name every time I walked into the arena. Instead I got a billionaire staking his own reputation on hers in front of every camera i

YERAI noticed it before he probably realized he was doing it himself. The way his eyes went to his phone every time it buzzed, hoping, I could tell, for a name that wasn't mine. The way he stopped finishing sentences at dinner, drifting off mid-thought like his mind had wandered three rooms away to a woman who wouldn't look at him twice.I clawed my way into this engagement. Nobody handed it to me. I spent two years making myself indispensable to Zain's father, learning which rooms mattered and which ones didn't, smiling through dinners where men twice my age talked about me like I wasn't sitting right there at the table. I didn't do all that work to watch him fall apart over his ex-wife the moment she married someone more powerful than either of us could ever hope to be.He came home late Tuesday smelling like someone else's perfume. Not cologne, actual perfume, floral and expensive, nothing like anything I own or would ever wear. I didn't ask about it right away. I let it sit for

AARONGary's name did something to me I hadn't felt in years. I've heard it in boardrooms, in whispered warnings from allies who owed my family favors, in the mouths of healers who refused to treat me once they learned whose enemies I'd inherited. I know what that family is capable of the way other people know their own address, without having to think about it, without needing to look it up.I stopped being calm the second my security chief said it out loud over the radio.I didn't panic, though. Panic wastes time, and I've never had much patience for wasted time, not since the years I spent watching men waste it while my family bled out slowly around us. I gave the order to lock down the estate before he'd even finished the sentence, cutting him off mid-report to start listing what I needed. Which gates. Which cameras? Who I wanted stationed where within the next ten minutes. He didn't argue. Nobody who's worked for me long argues when my voice drops into that particular register

AARONThe dark didn't scare me. I've lived through worse things than a power failure, and my eyes adjust faster than a human's ever could, some old inheritance from the wolf that never fully goes quiet even when I'm trying to think like a man instead of an animal. What scared me was the shape of it. The timing. The fact that whoever cut the power hadn't followed it with anything else. No gate breach. No shots fired. Just darkness, held for exactly eleven minutes, then gone, like someone had wanted to watch what we'd do with it and nothing more.That's not an attack. That's a test.I said as much to my security chief once the backup generators kicked the hallway lights back on, his radio crackling with updates from three stations at once, voices overlapping in that clipped, urgent shorthand people fall into when they're trying to sound calmer than they feel. He wanted it to be Gary's people making a real move. Honestly, so did I. A direct hit I could answer with a direct hit of my o

AaronThe council chamber holds thirty-one people when it's full, and by the time I walked in that morning it was closer to forty, word having spread overnight the way it always does in this world, faster than any of us can manage it. Thoren sat at his usual place near the far end, jaw tight, flanked by two men who wouldn't meet my eyes when I came through the door. I already knew what that meant. So did he.I didn't open with the sponsor. I opened with procedure, the tedious kind, minutes and old business, letting the room settle into its usual rhythm before I said a word that mattered. Lena sat beside me the whole time, spine straight, hands folded on the table in front of her, wearing the green dress she'd picked out that morning without asking my opinion on it. I'd noticed and said nothing, because saying something felt like it would give away more than I wanted to give away in a room full of people who'd spent the last decade learning to read me for exactly this kind of tell.