Page 31

I drain the whiskey. I set the glass down and press my forehead against the cold window and close my eyes. The wolf is quiet now. Quiet in the way a predator is quiet when the hunt is nearing its end. He knows what’s coming. He can feel the trajectory of this thing, the inevitable arc from wanting to having, and he’s content to wait because the conclusion is no longer in doubt.

I have a choice. Tell her the truth and risk the pack. Or keep feeding the bond and let the wolf take what it wants and deal with the consequences when she discovers what I’ve done.

I know which one is right. I know which one I’m going to choose. They are not the same.

Chapter Fourteen

Sophia

Icall Becca on Tuesday night because I need to hear a voice that belongs to the world I used to live in.

She picks up on the third ring. I can hear music in the background, something electronic and low, and the clink of glasses. She’s at a bar, or a restaurant, or one of the after-work things she goes to in the city that used to be my city, the city where I was supposed to be starting a career and building a life and being a normal twenty-seven-year-old woman with a freshly minted MBA and a future that made sense.

“Sophia! Oh my God, finally. I’ve been texting you.”

She has. I’ve seen the messages. Little check-ins, memes, photos from nights out with people whose faces I recognize but whose names feel distant now, like characters from a show I stopped watching. I haven’t responded to most of them. I don’t know how to respond. What would I say? Sorry I’ve been quiet, I’ve been busy decoding my dead father’s secret journal and discovering that my employer’s family isn’t human and also I kissed him last night and I think I might be losing my mind?

“I know, I’m sorry. Things have been busy here.”

“Busy how? Are you okay? How’s Chicago?”

I sit on my bed with my back against the headboard and I try to answer that question. How’s Chicago. How is the city where I grew up, where my father lived and died, where I’m working off a debt I didn’t earn. How is the apartment they gave me with the electronic locks and the camera in the hallway and the nightstand drawer where I keep a notebook that says “not human” in my father’s handwriting.

“It’s fine,” I say. “The job is fine. The apartment is nice.”

“And the debt thing? Is that guy being a creep about it?”

I told Becca a version of the story the night I found out. A cleaned-up version, stripped of context, in which my father owed money to a business associate and I’m working it off. She accepted it like people accept things they don’t want to examine too closely, with concern and a vague suggestion to talk to a lawyer and then a pivot to something easier.

“He’s not being a creep.”

“But?”

I close my eyes. I think about Dominic’s mouth on mine. The heat of his hands. The sound he made against my neck, that low vibration that was almost a growl. The gold at the edges of his eyes in the half second before he pulled away.

“There’s no but.”

“Sophia. I can hear the but. You’ve got a very loud but.”

I almost laugh. Almost. The sound catches in my throat and turns into something else, something wet and sharp, and I press my fist against my mouth and breathe through it.

“Hey,” Becca says. The bar noise fades. She’s moved somewhere quieter. “Hey, talk to me. What’s going on?”

I want to tell her. The urge is so strong it’s physical, a pressure in my chest that wants to crack open and pour everything out. The notebook. The gold eyes. The way Roman lifted a man off the ground. The way Dominic kissed me like he was claiming territory. The pull that lives in my chest and won’t let me sleep and won’t let me think and won’t let me want anything except him.

But I can’t. Not because I think she wouldn’t believe me, though she probably wouldn’t. Because saying it out loud would make it real in a way I’m not ready for. Right now the truth exists in the space between my father’s notebook and my own observations, a theory built on evidence I haven’t fully assembled, and I can still hold it at arm’s length. I can still pretend that there might be an explanation that doesn’t require me to rewrite everything I know about biology and the world and the man I’m falling for.

If I say it out loud, the arm’s length collapses. And I’m not ready for what’s on the other side.

“I’m just tired,” I say. “It’s been a lot. New city, new job, my dad’s stuff. You know.”

“I know.” Her voice is soft now. Becca has always been good at the soft parts, the moments when you need someone to stop being funny and start being kind. “You know you can come home, right? Screw the debt. Just come home. We’ll figure it out.”

Home. The word feels like a foreign language. Where is home? The studio apartment I was subletting before I came here, the one I couldn’t afford on an empty bank account? The grad school campus where I spent two years learning to read financial statements? None of those places feel like home. If I’m honest, and tonight seems like a night for honesty, the closest thing to home I’ve felt in months is the heat of Dominic Voronov’s body against mine in my living room with his mouth on my neck and his arm around my waist.

That thought should disturb me more than it does.

“I can’t come home yet,” I say. “I need to finish what I started.”