Chapter 1

Eve's POV

I'd been lying in Renault's bed for three hours, waiting, and the scent had soaked into my skin the way it always did when I stayed too long in this room.

Cedar and dark amber and something underneath that that had no name, something that didn't ask permission, that just settled into your lungs and stayed there like it owned the place. Like he owned the place.

Like he owned everything in it, including me.

Like a warning I kept choosing to ignore.

Obsidian Estate sat at the heart of the wolf district, deep enough in that the city noise couldn't reach it.

I had no business being there.

The werewolf upper class had a particular kind of contempt for humans that they dressed up as theology.

No wolf spirit, they said.

Incomplete soul.

As if the Moon Goddess herself had looked at the human half of the population and decided we were rough drafts.

And yet here I was, a human, one year into something unnameable with the man who was already being talked about as the frontrunner for the next Alpha King election.

If that wasn't proof that the universe had a genuinely terrible sense of humor, I didn't know what was.

I heard the car before I heard him.

Then footsteps on the stairs, unhurried, the particular rhythm I'd memorized without meaning to.

The bedroom door opened.

Renault set his jacket over the chair by the window and came toward me with the slow, deliberate movement of something that had never needed to hurry because nothing had ever outrun it.

He stopped at the edge of the bed, looking down at me with that particular expression that meant he was already deciding what he wanted.

"Four days," he said, his voice dropping lower. "Think your body still remembers me, or do I need to remind it?"

I knew what was coming.

My body knew before my brain finished the thought, and I hated how easily it happened, how the knowing moved through me like warmth before he'd even touched me.

What followed was not gentle.

He'd been gone four days and his wolf was closer to the surface than usual, the way it got when he'd been away from whatever he considered his territory for too long.

I felt it in the weight of his hands, in the way he moved, in the low sound that wasn't quite human that came out of him when I shifted under him.

When he pressed me face-down into the pillow and his mouth found the back of my neck, I knew what he was doing and I knew it wasn't going to work.

He knew it too.

That was the thing about werewolves and the marking instinct during their cycles.

The need was there regardless of whether the biology cooperated, and for humans, it never did.

No gland, no bond, no matter how hard he bit down.

I made a sound I couldn't entirely suppress and he made a rougher one in response, his grip tightening like the lack of result made him angrier rather than less.

I focused on breathing. On keeping my body loose and accommodating rather than flinching.

On giving him what he was looking for even when what he was looking for left marks that I'd be pulling my collar up to cover for the next week.

He felt me tense.

I knew he did, because his grip shifted in response, not softer, but different, more deliberate.

His mouth dragged across the back of my neck almost lazily before he pulled back just enough to speak.

"You know," he said, low and unhurried against my skin, "for someone who doesn't like it rough, you sure don't act like it."

A pause, weighted and amused.

"Honestly? You put professional escorts to shame."

I didn't say anything.

There was nothing to say that wouldn't make it worse or make me look like I cared more than I was supposed to.

So I didn't.

I just reached up, curled my fingers lightly against the side of his jaw, and kissed him.

Soft, unhurried, the kind of kiss that didn't ask for anything back.

It was easier than answering.

It was always easier than answering.

I was still catching my breath when he said it.

"Move in," Renault said.

I blinked.

"What?"

"Here." He gestured, a minimal movement that somehow indicated the entire estate. "Move your things in."

For a moment I genuinely thought I'd misheard him.

"You want me to move into Obsidian Estate."

"I want you here when I come back." He said it like it was obvious, like the logic was so clean it barely needed stating. This is the simpler solution."

I sat up slowly.

My neck ached.

I pulled the sheet up without thinking about it.

"Renault. You know I can't just do that."

"I don't see why not."

"Because I live with the Silverleaf Pack." I watched his face.

Nothing moved on it.

"You're the Alpha of Obsidian. These are not the same pack. If I move into your estate without a mark, without a contract, without any formal bond, the gossip alone would--"

Something flickered.

"Don't tell me what I should care about."

I stopped. Took a breath.

"I'm not trying to argue with you. I'm trying to explain that my family would want an explanation I don't have. Ella would be worried."

I tried to find the right word.

"I'm not marked. We don't have a contract. "

I heard how thin my own voice sounded and couldn't do anything about it.

"I don't know how to explain this to them. I genuinely don't know what I'm supposed to say."

He looked at me then, fully, the way he rarely did.

It was a look that had no warmth in it and no particular coldness either, just the flat, absolute certainty of someone who had never once wanted something and not gotten it.

"I don't care," he said, his eyes fixed on mine. "If you want me, you should be able to manage something that simple."

I opened my mouth. Closed it.

There were at least four things I wanted to say, and I swallowed all of them, because I already knew how that conversation ended.

Renault decided, and then he waited for the world to catch up.

So I pressed my lips together and stared at the ceiling and started trying to figure out, entirely on my own, how to make the impossible sound reasonable.

What was I supposed to tell Ella?

My foster mother, the Luna of Silverleaf Pack, the only person in the entire wolf world who actually cared whether I lived or died.

That was exactly why I didn't know how to say it.

That I was moving into another pack's territory, into the estate of Obsidian Pack's Alpha?

There was no version of that sentence that landed well.