Page 39 of Pretty Little Assassin

More beads of sweat start quickly forming on his brow.

“Viktor,” I say again, this time reaching out my hand to touch the side of his muscular arm. “Breathe.”

He looks at me, for the first time not as the cocky alpha asshole who barged into my apartment and drank my IPA, but as a man who is genuinely going through something at the moment.

“I’m fine.”

He just broke eye contact with the hotel. The Wraith is clearly not fine.

“It’s just a bit tight in the car at the moment.”

Oh shit. Viktor fucking Petrov is claustrophobic.

We’ve been sitting in this car for hours. And yes, it’s been uncomfortable and annoying. But he’s having some sort of physical phobia reaction.

“You’re okay,” I say, still touching the side of his arm. “Just breathe.”

I wonder if this has to do with his sister. But I don’t have time to wonder. I need the Wraith back in business. I have omegas to protect.

“Like this.” I put one hand on my own diaphragm and one on Viktor’s abs—Jesus Christ, has he got abs like a fucking Greek statue.

After a few minutes, the panic subsides. He lets go of the steering wheel. His breathing slows.

His hand comes off the wheel and turns over in his lap, and that’s when I see it. Inside his wrist, where the skin is thin. Letters. Small ones. A name, or part of one—the ink gone soft and pale the way ink goes when something has been rubbed over it ten thousand times.

“Who’s that?”

He turns his wrist face-down against his thigh. Not fast. Just away.

“Nobody you’ll meet.”

Which isn’t an answer, and we both know it.

Viktor looks at me as if he’s just done something unintentional. I’d say a claustrophobic PTSD episode qualifies.

It doesn’t seem right to use this to prove I’m a better assassin. If anything, it makes his accomplishments more impressive.

As the moment de-escalates, I notice my own breathing is not so steady, either. Not from a panic attack or any sort of threat detection. By the thing that’s been bothering me this whole stakeout—Viktor’s fucking scent.

Leather, pine, black pepper—no, that’s not it. It’s not the aroma profile that keeps disrupting my thoughts. It’s not that he smells good or bad or even intriguing. It’s almost as if⁠—

No, that is definitely not on the table.

I pull my hands away from him and settle back into my seat, as close to the passenger-side window as I can.

There’s no way that this is a scent match. There’s no possible fucking way that Viktor Petrov is my mate.

Impossible.

“You okay over there?” His eyes are back on the building like his little episode never happened. He reaches over to touch my arm.

“Yes, I’m fine,” I snap at him a bit too quickly. “I told you not to touch me.”

“Oh right,” he smirks. “I forgot that unsettles you.”

The overconfident alphahole is back. I’m relieved.

He doesn’t take his hand back.