Page 41

I eat. I take what I need and leave the rest for the scavengers and I run again, blood on my muzzle and the night wind in my fur. I circle the perimeter of the property, marking the boundaries with scent, reasserting my claim on the territory the way alphas have done since before the concept of territory had a name. Here. Mine. This land, these trees, this pack, this woman sleeping in a building far from here with a heartbeat I can still feel in my chest even in wolf form, even at this distance.

The moon is high and white above the trees. I stop in a clearing and lift my head and the howl that comes out of me is not a decision. It’s a release. Every compressed need, every frustrated want, every night I’ve spent lying in my bed aching for a woman I won’t let myself touch, all of it rises out of my throat and into the frozen air and echoes off the trees and fades into the dark.

The silence that follows is the closest thing to peace I’ve found since Sophia walked into my life.

I run until the wolf is tired, genuinely tired, the muscles in my legs burning with the good kind of exhaustion that comes from pushing a body to its limits. I run until the man inside the wolf is ready to come back.

I shift back around four in the morning. The return to human form is always harder than the departure, the body cramped and oversensitive, the senses narrowing again as the human body takes over. I dress in the dark, my clothes cold against skin that’s still running hot from the shift. My body is vibrating with residual energy, the hunt still echoing in my muscles, the wolf still riding close to the surface.

I drive home. The city is empty at this hour, the streets slick with the first frost of the season, the traffic lights cycling through their colors for no one. I park in my garage and ride the elevator to the penthouse and stand under a shower hot enough to scald a human and let the water beat against my shoulders until the last of the wolf recedes and I’m fully a man again.

In the mirror, my eyes are gray. Human. The mask is back. The suit will go on in a few hours and I’ll walk into my office and sit behind my desk and no one will know that four hours ago I was running through the woods on four legs with blood on my muzzle and the moon on my back.

No one except me.

Friday. She’s coming to dinner on Friday. I’m going to cook for her, in this kitchen, in this apartment where no one has ever been invited who wasn’t pack. She’ll sit at my counter and drink wine and look at me with those dark, observant eyes, and I’ll stand across from her and pretend that the man making dinner is the whole truth rather than half of it.

The wolf stirs at the thought of her. Not with the frantic urgency he’s been carrying for weeks, but with something quieter. Anticipation.

Friday.

I turn off the water. I dry off. I lie down in my bed and I think about how it might smell if she were in it. Vanilla and warm skin and the dark amber undertone that I’ve been breathing in fragments for weeks but have never tasted at the source.

Two more days.

The wolf is patient. He can wait two more days. I’m not sure I can.

Chapter Eighteen

Sophia

He wasn’t lying. He can cook.

His penthouse is on the top floor of a building in River North, and it looks exactly like I expected. Clean lines, dark furniture, floor-to-ceiling windows that turn the city into a private light show. Everything is expensive and nothing is warm, as though the space was designed by someone who understood aesthetics but had forgotten what comfort was supposed to feel like.

Except the kitchen. The kitchen is different. It’s the only room in the apartment that shows signs of actual use, the only counter with a nick in it, the only shelf with something that isn’t perfectly aligned. There’s a wooden cutting board that’s been used so many times the grain has softened, and a knife block that holds blades with handles worn smooth from years of contact. Decades of contact, maybe.

He’s making a wine reduction rich with rosemary and lamb and something smoky. He moves through the kitchen with a looseness here that I don’t see in his office. His sleeves are rolled to the elbows. His feet are bare on the tile floor. He looks more human in this room than he does anywhere else, and the irony of that observation, given what I now know he isn’t, makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time.

I’m sitting on the counter. We’re on our second glass of wine. The first glass loosened my shoulders. The second is loosening my tongue.

“So,” I say, watching him slice shallots with a precision that would make a surgeon jealous. “How long have you been cooking?”

“A long time.”

“How long is a long time?”

“Longer than you’d believe.”

“Try me.”

He looks up from the cutting board. Those gray eyes, warm tonight, the color of woodsmoke. “I learned from a woman in Tuscany. She ran a kitchen the size of a closet and she could make a ragu that would change your understanding of what food is for.”

“When was this?”

“A while ago.”

“You do that a lot. Answer questions with durations instead of dates.”