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But it's the conversation that’s coming. The moment when she touches the mark and asks what it means and I have to find words that bridge the gap between the wolf’s truth and the human woman’s need for agency.

I’ll handle it. I’ve handled everything this city has thrown at me for thirty years. A federal investigation, a territory war, a father who operates behind my back, an organization that depends on my control and my clarity and my ability to make the right move at the right time. I’ve handled all of it.

Sophia Marchelli, furious and brilliant and demanding answers, is going to be the hardest thing I’ve ever handled. But I’ll do it. Because she’s mine.

She stirs against me. Her hand finds mine on her stomach and her fingers thread through mine and she squeezes, a small, unconscious gesture that sends a pulse of warmth through the bond. Even in sleep she’s reaching for me. Even in sleep the bond is drawing her toward the heartbeat that now lives alongside hers.

I press my forehead against the back of her neck and close my eyes.

Around five in the morning, light begins to filter through the windows. The city wakes up in the gray space between night and dawn. I watch the light move across her shoulders, across the mark on her neck, across the tangle of dark hair on my pillow.

She’s beautiful. Not in the way I noticed the first day, the surface assessment of symmetry and structure. Beautiful in the way that only a mate can be, with the full weight of the bond adding dimension to every feature, turning a pretty face into a landscape I could spend a century exploring. The curve of her cheekbone. The shadow of her eyelashes. The small mole on the back of her left shoulder that I’ve never noticed before and that I will never forget.

I memorize her. The way her hair falls across the pillow in dark waves. The way her fingers curl loosely around mine even in sleep. The way her breathing deepens when I press closer, her body responding to my proximity with a trust that the bond is building into something unbreakable.

She makes a sound in her sleep. A small, contented murmur. Her hand tightens around mine. She shifts, pressing back against me, and the mark on her neck comes into full view. My teeth marks. The wound is still fresh, still raw, but already the edges are beginning to change. Not scabbing the way a human wound would. Smoothing. The blood has dried to a dark line and underneath it the skin is already silvering, the first stage of the transformation that will turn this bite into a permanent, delicate scar within days.

I press my lips against it. She sighs in her sleep.

Mine.

The word settles into me like a heartbeat. Steady, permanent, beyond discussion.

Outside the windows, the city brightens. The light finds the mark on her neck and turns the silvering edges luminous.

I pull her closer. I breathe her in. I close my eyes.

The wolf sleeps. For the first time in weeks, the wolf sleeps, and the woman in my arms holds us both without knowing it.

This must be what peace feels like.

Chapter Twenty

Sophia

Iam in so much trouble.

Not the kind of trouble I was in when I arrived in Chicago, the debt and the dead father and the notebook full of secrets. That trouble was external, manageable, the kind you can organize into spreadsheets and action items and attack with the systematic rigor of an MBA education. That trouble had edges.

This trouble has no edges. This trouble is inside me, beating in my chest alongside a heartbeat that doesn’t belong to me. This trouble tastes like Dominic Voronov’s mouth and smells like his skin and sounds like his voice saying my name in the dark, and I have been drowning in it for a week and I don’t want to come up for air.

The bite on my neck has healed into a silver scar. It happened faster than any wound should, the raw edges closing within two days, the angry red fading to pink and then to a pale, luminous silver that sits against my skin like a piece of jewelry. It’s beautiful. It shouldn’t be beautiful. A man bit me hard enough to draw blood during sex and the result is a mark that looks like it was placed there by an artist rather than inflicted by teeth. I catch myself touching it throughout the day, my fingers finding it absently while I’m reading a report or standing in line for coffee, and every time I touch it I feel a pulse of warmth that has nothing to do with blood flow and everything to do with the man one floor above me.

I know what he is. I know the bite did something. I know the pull isn’t just attraction. I know the doubled heartbeat in my chest started the moment his teeth broke my skin. What I don’t know is exactly what he did to me.

The notebook sits in my nightstand drawer. I haven’t opened it since the night I decoded enough to confirm what the Voronovs are. I haven’t added to my mental spreadsheet. I haven’t cross-referenced, analyzed, or drawn conclusions. I’ve taken the most meticulous investigation of my life and I’ve put it in a drawer and I’ve closed the drawer and I’ve walked away from it because opening it means thinking about what the mark means. And that might lead me to conclusions that would require me to stop doing what I’m doing.

And what I’m doing is falling. All at once, no brakes, the ground rushing toward me and nothing to grab except the man falling with me.

We can’t stop touching each other. The first morning after, I woke up in his bed and reached for him before I opened my eyes, my hand finding the hot plane of his chest, and his arm tightened around me and he pulled me on top of him and we made each other late for work by an hour. The second morning, he was already awake when I opened my eyes, watching me with those gray eyes that go gold at the edges when his control slips, and the look on his face made me feel like the center of his universe.

I haven’t slept at my apartment in a week. My toothbrush is in his bathroom. His shirt is my pajamas. The pull in my chest, the one that used to ache when he was absent, has quieted into a steady warmth now that we’re rarely apart, and the relief of that quiet is so profound that it scares me. My body has recalibrated. His proximity is my baseline now. His absence is the anomaly.

Tuesday. We’re at work. I’m at my desk on thirty-eight, he’s in his office on thirty-nine. We’ve been apart for two hours, which is the longest stretch since Friday, and the bond is making its displeasure known through a low-grade restlessness that makes it impossible to focus on the subcontractor reports I’m supposed to be reviewing.

My phone buzzes. A text from a number I now have saved under his name.

My office. Now.