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Roman leaves. I’m alone in the meeting room.

I check my phone. Nothing from Sophia. We haven’t spoken since Monday night, since the kiss. I’ve seen her in the building, passed her in the hallway, felt her eyes on me from across the floor. But neither of us has broken the silence. The kiss sits between us like an object neither of us knows how to pick up, heavy and warm and impossible to ignore.

I’m about to leave when my phone rings. Not a call I expected.

Viktor.

I answer because ignoring my father’s calls is something that has consequence. Viktor may be diminished, may be aging, may be stripped of the authority he held for over a century, but he’s still a wolf with nearly three hundred years of experience and a network of loyalties I can’t fully map. Ignoring him is worse than hearing him, because at least when I hear him I know what he’s thinking.

“Dominic.”

“Viktor.”

“You sound tired.”

“I’m not.”

“You sound like a man who’s not sleeping. I recognize the tone. I used it myself, once. A very long time ago.”

I wait. My father doesn’t make small talk. Every word is a corridor leading somewhere specific, and the destination is never where you think it is when you start walking.

“Your mother did that to me,” he says. “The not sleeping. The inability to focus. The feeling that your skin doesn’t fit your body anymore because your body wants to be somewhere else, wrapped around someone else, and every second you’re not there is a kind of dying.”

The words land in my chest with a precision that tells me he knows. About Sophia, about the bond, about the mate recognition. He knows, and he’s waited until now to tell me.

“How long have you known?” I ask.

“Since the day you brought her into the building. You think I can’t smell a mating bond forming on my own son? I’m old, Dominic. I’m not dead.”

“Then why didn’t you say something?”

“Because I wanted to see what you’d do. Whether you’d fight it or feed it. Your mother, when I recognized her, I didn’t fight. I didn’t have the luxury. She was pack. She was wolf. There was no reason to resist. You have reasons. The girl is human. She’s inside the operation. She’s the daughter of a man who learned too much. And you’re feeding the bond anyway.” He pauses. “That tells me everything I need to know about how strong it is.”

I don’t respond. The silence stretches.

“Be careful, Dominic.” His voice drops, rougher now, closer to the wolf register that my own voice has been slipping into more often lately. “A mated alpha is the strongest thing I’ve ever seen and the most vulnerable. Your mother made me invincible for a hundred and six years, and when she died she made me into something I’m still trying to climb out of. That’s the bargain. All of it or nothing. There is no partial bond. There is no halfway.”

“I know.”

“You don’t. You can’t, until it’s done. But I’ll tell you this because no one else will.” He breathes. The sound is heavier than it used to be, weighted with age and the exhaustion of a wolf who has outlived his usefulness to the pack he built. “If she’s your mate, claim her. Stop circling. The longer you wait, the more damage you do to both of you. The bond doesn’t reward patience. It punishes it.”

He hangs up. I sit in the empty meeting room and stare at my phone and think about my father, sitting alone in whatever room he occupies these days, remembering a woman who died decades ago. The mate he claimed without hesitation. The bond he never recovered from losing.

All of it or nothing.

I think about Sophia. About the taste of her mouth. About the gold at the edge of my vision when I pulled away. About the choice I made in the car afterward, the wrong choice, the one where I decided to keep feeding the bond instead of telling her the truth.

Viktor says stop circling. Viktor says claim her.

And underneath Viktor’s advice is the question I can’t answer: what happened to Marco Marchelli? My father knew about Marco’s investigation. He told me as much in our first conversation about Sophia. Be careful with this one. She has his eyes. Viktor knows what Marco discovered, and Viktor has never been a man who leaves threats unresolved. I don’t know what my father did or didn’t do about Marco. I haven’t asked because the answer might be something I can’t know and still look Sophia in the eye.

I leave the meeting room. I take the elevator down to the lobby and walk to my car and drive home. The city is dark and the wind off the lake carries the smell of coming winter and I think about my mother, gone for so long, and my father, who I understand more than I want to. About Sophia, who is lying awake in an apartment eight blocks from mine, and the pull between us that stretches across those eight blocks like a wire, humming, waiting, getting tighter every day.

All of it or nothing.

I’m almost certain it’s going to be all of it. I'm almost certain it’s going to cost me everything.

Chapter Sixteen