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He breaks the kiss. We’re both breathing hard, our foreheads pressed together, his hand still in my hair and mine still twisted in his shirt. I can feel his chest heaving against me, his heart pounding, fast and hard. Underneath the pounding there’s a sound, low and resonant, vibrating in his chest. Almost like a growl. Almost like a purr. Something that isn’t a sound a human man makes.

I should be afraid. I pull him back to my mouth.

The second kiss is longer, deeper. His hands are on my hips and he walks me backward until my legs hit the arm of the couch and I’m bent back over it with his weight above me and his mouth on my neck and his teeth grazing the skin below my ear. I arch into him. My hands are under his shirt now, palms flat against his stomach, and his skin is so hot it’s almost painful, a heat that pulses under my hands like something alive and separate from the man it belongs to.

He pulls back. Abruptly, almost violently. He separates himself from me in a single motion and stands two feet away with his chest heaving and his hands clenched at his sides and his eyes, when I look into them, are burning gold at the edges.

There and gone. A flash of amber in the gray, so fast that I could convince myself I imagined it if I hadn’t seen the same color in his brother’s eyes three nights ago.

“I need to go,” he says. His voice is wrecked, scraped raw, barely recognizable.

“Dominic.”

“If I stay…” He stops. His jaw flexes. His hands open and close at his sides and I can see the effort it takes him to stand still, the physical cost of not closing the distance between us. “If I stay, I won’t be able to stop. And you’re not ready for what happens when I don’t stop.”

I stare at him. My lips are swollen. My neck is hot where his mouth was. My body is so aroused that standing upright feels like an act of will.

“What happens?” I whisper.

He looks at me. The gold is gone from his eyes but the darkness is still there, bottomless and hungry, and the look he gives me carries a promise and a warning in equal measure.

“You become mine,” he says. “In a way you can’t undo.”

He picks up his coat. He puts it on. He walks to the door and opens it and steps into the hallway. He turns back to look at me one more time, and the expression on his face is the most unguarded thing I’ve ever seen from him.

He closes the door and his footsteps retreat down the hallway. The elevator opens and closes and takes him away, and the distance between us stretches. I stand in my living room with my mouth bruised and my body burning and his words echoing in my ears.

You become mine. In a way you can’t undo.

I press my fingers against my lips. They’re still tingling. I can still taste him, something dark and warm, and the taste makes me want to chase him into the elevator and pull him back inside and let whatever happens next happen.

I don’t.

I lock the door. I walk to the bedroom. I pull the legal pad from under the mattress and read the entry one more time.

Not human.

I lie down in the dark and press my hand against my chest where the pull lives, where his heartbeat echoed against mine for a few seconds before he tore himself away, and I think about what he said.

In a way you can’t undo.

I’m already undone. I think I have been since the first time he touched me. Whatever he is, whatever he means, whatever irreversible thing waits on the other side of giving in, I’m going to find out. Not because the pull compels me, though it does. Because I need to know. Because my father needed to know and died for it and I’m his daughter and the need to understand is coded into me the same way the cipher is coded into the notebook.

I close my eyes. I don’t sleep for a long time.

Chapter Thirteen

Dominic

Ishouldn’t have gone. I shouldn’t have touched her. I shouldn’t have kissed her, and I absolutely should not have said what I said on my way out the door.

I’m sitting in my car in the parking garage of her building with the engine off and my hands on the steering wheel and my head tipped back against the headrest. I am thinking about the catastrophic series of decisions that led me to this moment.

Decision one: I went to her apartment. Not because of the financial records. I haven’t thought about Marco Marchelli’s financial records in days. I went because Lex told me this morning that she skipped lunch, that she seemed distracted, that Katya reported her being unusually quiet. I went because the bond translated those observations into a pull so visceral that by nine o’clock I was in my car with no memory of deciding to drive there. My body made the choice. My body has been making choices for me since the day she walked into my office, and I’ve been letting it because fighting the wolf is a war I’m never going to win.

Decision two: I stayed. She opened the door with red-rimmed eyes and her hair down and the scent of tears still clinging to her skin, and I should have asked my question and left. Instead I walked into her apartment and let her scent close around me like a fist. Vanilla and warm skin and the sharp, mineral undertone of grief. She’d been crying over her father, and the wolf’s response to her pain was so immediate and so absolute that it took every mechanism of control I’ve built over a century to keep myself from pulling her against my chest and holding her until the grief burned out.

Decision three: I touched her. Her wrist. Her pulse hammering under my fingers like a trapped bird. The moment my skin made contact with hers, the bond flared so hot I could feel it in my spine, a line of heat running from my fingertips to the base of my skull, and every rational thought I had about distance and discipline and the operational necessity of keeping my hands to myself dissolved like ash in water.