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I look at his hands, and I push two fingers inside myself, and I imagine they’re his. Thick. Rough. I think about that voice, too deep, half a growl. Mine. I think about him ripping a steel table out of the floor to get to me. I rub my clit fast, my thighs are shaking, and I’m moaning…

Come here, he said. Like it was already decided. Like I already belonged to him.

I come so hard I see spots. It rips through me. I’m gasping, clenching on my own fingers, and saying his name at the ceiling.

When it’s over, I lie there, panting, with my robe wide open and a mob boss’s mugshot on my chest.

What in the fuck, Zahra?!

I sit up, close the file, put it back in my bag, zip the bag, carry it to the hall closet, and shut the door. Because apparently I’m now a woman who can’t be left alone in a room with a photograph.

* * *

My phone buzzes at ten thirty. I grab it so fast I knock my water over.

Cillian: He’s conscious. Stable. In isolation.

All the air goes out of me.

He’s alive. He’s okay.

I press the phone against my chest and shut my eyes, and for the first time since we walked out of that prison, my body settles down. Not all the way. Just enough that I can pull a full breath.

I type three different answers, delete them, then I send, Thank you.

Cillian: Go to sleep.

I don’t answer.

I sit in the dark with my wet hair and my spilled water, and I make myself think it. Like a lawyer, laying out the facts.

I met Declan Greene this morning. He’s a convicted murderer. He’s a mob boss. He’s a wolf, and an Alpha, and he put three guards in the hospital today because another man was standing between us.

I’m a smart woman. I’ve got a career and a life.

I’m not going back there.

Three

Declan

I wake up strapped to a bed.

My wolf takes that about as well as one would expect.

OUT.

The restraint on my right wrist snaps tight before my eyes are even all the way open. Concrete ceiling. Concrete walls. Steel door. One bright light, right in my fucking face. Isolation. I know this room. I’ve been in it before.

My shoulder’s on fire where the dart went in. My back feels like somebody took a blowtorch to it. There’s something wrong with two of my ribs, my mouth tastes like blood, and there’s a bruise coming up on my hip that I don’t remember earning.

None of it matters.

“Where is she?”

There’s two guards outside the bars. One I know, Murphy. One I don’t. Murphy’s got the look of a man who’s been standing there a while, waiting for me to wake up so he can be the one to tell me no.

“Greene.”