Chapter 4

Wendy's POV

Armed with the file and a storm of unspoken questions, I stepped into his private office. The door clicked softly shut behind me, sealing off the bustling office chatter and leaving us trapped in taut, heavy silence.

I set the revised acquisition file neatly on his desk, my fingers brushing the cool paper before I lifted my gaze to him.

"You made breakfast?" I asked quietly, the question slipping out before I could hold it back.

"I did."

"I didn't know it was for me."

"You saw the plate."

"I thought it was yours."

His jaw shifted once. "You left before I came out of the shower."

The reminder sent an unwanted wave of heat beneath my collar.

"I was late," I said.

"You were twenty minutes early, Wendy." Something flickered in his eyes—there and gone, quickly buried. "As your husband, I won't have my wife racing against the clock every morning just to avoid me."

He lifted his hand. Not to my face, not to anywhere he shouldn't—just to the collar of my coat, where it had folded under itself when I dressed in a hurry that morning. He straightened it with two fingers, slow enough that I felt the warmth of him through the fabric, and I forgot how to breathe.

"Go home after work," he said. "We'll talk tonight."

I left with my pulse still racing.

I didn't understand him.

I told myself that was the problem.

I was afraid the real problem was that I wanted to.

Cassian's POV

The door closed behind her, and for a long moment I didn't move.

I could still feel where she'd been standing. I always could. Three years, and the effect had never once dulled—her nearness pulling at something in me that no strategy, no distance, no amount of discipline had ever managed to quiet.

She thought I'd met her four days ago.

I let her think it. It was the only mercy I could give her that she'd actually accept.

I sat down and opened the drawer on the left of the desk—the one that stayed locked—and took out the thing I kept there.

A bracelet. Thin silver links, the clasp still bent from the night it was torn loose. I'd found it half-buried in the bloodied snow after the beasts scattered—flung from her wrist somewhere in the fighting, small enough that she'd never noticed it was gone.

Three winters ago. The killing forest on the edge of Whitlock territory, where the beasts ran thick and nothing sensible went after dark. I'd been passing through the region on pack business, close enough to hear it when the woods erupted—snarling, the wet sound of a hunt, and beneath it, impossibly, a wolf still fighting.

She should have been dead already. A small silver wolf, no scent to warn her, no pack at her back, bleeding into the snow and still tearing at anything that came close. Outnumbered ten to one, and refusing to lie down.

I'd pressed my power over the whole of the forest and the beasts had scattered like leaves. She never saw me. She lifted her head to the black sky, and in a voice I have not stopped hearing since, she renounced the pack that had thrown her out to die.

"I renounce the Whitlock Pack."

That was the moment I fell in love with her. Not because fate told me to.

I would have loved her without the bond. I would have loved her if she'd been no one's mate at all.

I locked the bracelet away and pressed the intercom.

"Send Jovan in."

He came within the minute—my second, the only man in the building who knew whose name was on the marriage certificate in my coat.

"Bloodmoon filed a petition with the regional council," I said. "It was accepted this morning."

"I saw the notice." Jovan's jaw tightened. "They're moving faster than we expected."

"They're moving because Drexel Pace knows she's alive, and he knows she's here." I turned from the window. "I want to know how. Someone told him. Find out who, and find out what it cost them—because whatever Bloodmoon paid, I'll pay more to have it undone."

"And the petition itself?"

"Bury it." I said it the way I'd say close the door. "The council accepted it on the fiction that Wendy Vance still belongs to Whitlock. That fiction dies today. I want George Vance's failure to confirm her renunciation on record, in writing, before the week is out—and I want three council members reminded exactly whose district they're standing in when they cast their votes."

Jovan didn't blink. "Some of them will call that pressure."

"It is pressure." I let the edge of the Alpha King into my voice, and even Jovan's shoulders dropped a fraction. "Drexel spent three years buying favors he thinks make him untouchable. Let him find out what real weight feels like. He threw away a fated mate and left her to die in the snow. He does not get to file a form and take her back."

"Understood." A pause. Then, more carefully: "And if he comes in person?"

"Then let him come." I looked out at the city. "I'm not so weak that I'd consider a wolf like him anything more than a snack. If he dares to show up in person, I'll tear him apart myself—for my Luna."

Jovan almost smiled. "You've been waiting a long time to say that."

"Three years." I picked up the folder she'd brought me and set it square on the desk. "That's long enough."

He moved to go, then stopped at the door. "The mating ceremony. If we bond her to the pack formally, the council can't touch her—the claim collapses overnight. It would end this in a day."

"I know."

"But you're not going to push it."

"No." I met his eyes. "She'll come to the bond when she chooses it. Not when Drexel forces it, and not when I do."

Jovan inclined his head—part agreement, part something closer to respect—and left.

Alone again, I let myself do the thing I never did in front of anyone.

For three winters, I'd watched her from the edges of a life she'd built to keep everyone out.

I was done watching.

"Soon," I told the empty office, and for once the word didn't sound like waiting.