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Decision four: I kissed her.

And the kiss. God, the kiss. I have lived for a hundred and thirty-two years. I have kissed women on three continents and in as many centuries. None of it prepared me for the sensation of Sophia Marchelli’s mouth opening under mine, her tongue finding mine, the small broken sound she made that vibrated against my lips and traveled down through my chest and lit a fire in a part of me I thought I’d closed off decades ago.

She tasted like red wine and salt and something underneath both that I can only describe as recognition. My wolf, who has been pacing and howling and clawing at the inside of my ribs for three weeks, went silent the moment my mouth touched hers. Locked on to the taste of her with the single-minded intensity of a predator that has finally closed its jaws on the thing it’s been hunting.

I kissed her and she kissed me back. Not tentatively, not cautiously, not the way a woman kisses a man she’s not sure about. She grabbed my shirt and pulled me closer and kissed me like she’d been drowning and I was the surface. Her hands on my stomach, her palms flat against my skin, the shock of her touch, cool against my heat, spreading through me like water on a burn.

And then. The couch. Her body bent back over the arm of it, my weight above her, my mouth on her neck. The scent of her arousal so thick in the air that I could taste it on my tongue, rich and devastating. I had my teeth on her skin. The spot below her ear where her pulse runs close to the surface, where the blood moves fast and hot, where a wolf marks his mate.

I was going to do it. In that moment, with her body arched against mine and her hands under my shirt and the sound of her breathing filling the apartment, I was going to sink my teeth into her neck and claim her and make the bond permanent and irreversible. The wolf was ready. The wolf was certain. The wolf had been waiting for this moment for over a hundred years and was not interested in waiting any longer.

I stopped.

I don’t know how. I don’t know where I found the discipline, what remaining shred of control I located in the burning wreckage of my willpower. But I stopped. I pulled away from her so fast that the separation felt like tearing muscle, and I stood there shaking with my fists clenched and the gold bleeding into my eyes and I looked at her, flushed and swollen-lipped and looking back at me with an expression of such open, bewildered want that it nearly broke me.

If I stay, I won’t be able to stop. And you’re not ready for what happens when I don’t stop.

True. All of it true. If I had stayed another ten seconds, I would have marked her. She would have woken up tomorrow with my bite in her skin and a bond she didn’t choose.

I’ve told myself since the beginning that the bond is a tool. A mechanism I can use to keep her close, bind her to me, make sure she doesn’t run when the truth comes out. But sitting in this car, tasting her on my lips, I can’t maintain the lie anymore.

The bond isn’t a tool. It’s a trap. It doesn’t negotiate. It doesn’t wait for permission. It doesn’t care about strategy or restraint or the careful rules I’ve built around myself. It takes what it wants. And it wants her.

My wolf has known that from the beginning. Mate. Claim. Keep.

I thought I was feeding the bond so I could control her. I was wrong. Every touch. Every breath. Every second I’ve spent pulling her closer has only tightened it around both of us. A ruthless bond. One neither of us is walking away from. And the most dangerous part is that I no longer want to.

What I said on the way out was too close to the truth, too close to exposing what I am and what’s happening between us.

She looked at me when I said it. Those dark eyes, wide and liquid, searching my face for a meaning she could hold on to. She didn’t understand. She thought I was talking about sex, about intimacy, about the kind of emotional point-of-no-return that humans experience in relationships. She doesn’t know I was talking about teeth in her skin and a mark that doesn’t heal and a bond that rewires her nervous system to need me the way her lungs need air.

She’ll know eventually. She’s too smart and too close to the truth to be kept in the dark much longer. She’ll figure out what we are. The question is whether she figures it out before I lose my grip on the wolf entirely, before the next time I touch her and the wolf decides that enough is enough and takes the choice out of both of our hands.

I start the car. I drive home. The city rolls past the windows, lit up and indifferent, and I grip the steering wheel hard enough that the leather creaks under my fingers. I can still taste her on my tongue, can still feel the imprint of her body against mine, can still hear the sound she made when my mouth found her neck.

My hands are shaking. From the withdrawal. The physical cost of pulling away from my mate mid-claim, of stopping the wolf at the very edge of the thing it wants most. My whole body is vibrating with unspent energy, the same compressed voltage that drove me to the warehouse in Cicero, except tonight there’s no target. No release. Just the long drive home with her taste in my mouth and the wolf snarling in my chest and the knowledge that I came within ten seconds of doing something that can’t be taken back.

I park in my garage. I sit in the car for a long time. The engine ticks as it cools. The garage is quiet and dark and I close my eyes and let myself replay it, frame by frame. The way she opened the door. The tears she’d tried to hide. The way she asked about her father with a tremble in her voice that she was working hard to control. The moment my hand closed around her wrist and her pulse jumped and her scent went dark with want.

I was so close. A fraction of a second. If she had moved against me one more time, if she had made that sound one more time, if she had whispered my name the way she whispered it by the couch, I would have bitten down and sealed us together and spent the rest of the night inside her while the bond locked into place.

But I stopped. I don’t know if that makes me a better man or a worse one.

In my penthouse, I pour a glass of whiskey and stand at the window and look out at the skyline. The wind is pressing against the glass, and I can feel the cold radiating through it.

She saw the gold. I’m almost certain. In the moment before I pulled away, when the wolf surged forward and my eyes shifted, she was looking directly at my face. She saw the amber bleed into my irises for a fraction of a second before I turned away. Another data point for the file she’s probably building. Another piece of the puzzle that’s taking shape inside that relentless, brilliant mind.

She’s close. She’s so close to figuring out what we are. And when she gets there, when the last piece falls into place and the picture comes into focus, she’s going to look at everything that’s happened between us through the lens of that discovery.

The touches. The elevator. The hallway. The way her body responds to mine. Her dreams, the way her scent shifts when I’m near, the way the pull in her chest has been growing stronger every day. She’s going to realize that none of it was random. That it's the bond, amplifying her desire through a mechanism she didn’t know existed, and every moment of intimacy between us has been built on a foundation of information she was deliberately denied.

I need to tell her. The thought arrives with a clarity that cuts through the whiskey and the wanting and the wolf’s incessant demands. I need to tell her what I am, what the bond is, what the pull means. I need to give her the information she needs to make a real choice, before the wolf takes the choice away.

But telling her means exposing the pack. It means trusting a human woman with a secret that doesn't belong to me alone. It means betting everything on the gamble that she won’t run, won’t call the authorities, won’t decide that the man she kissed tonight is a monster and the right thing to do is burn his world to the ground.

I think about Marco. About the notebook I know exists. About a careful, observant man who wrote something in those pages that frightened him enough to hide it. He wanted her to know. Whatever he found, whatever terrified him, he wanted Sophia to have it. He trusted her with it. And then someone killed him for finding out.

Marco’s daughter is in that building right now, lying in the dark, tasting me on her lips, thinking about what I said. She’s not afraid of me. She should be, but she isn’t. I could smell it in her apartment, the total absence of fear in a room full of want. A want so deep and so consuming that it filled the air like smoke, and I breathed it in and it nearly destroyed what was left of my restraint.