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The possessiveness is becoming a problem. With her, the possessiveness is a feature, something she meets with a directness that both disarms and inflames me. When my hand tightens on her hip, she presses into it. When I growl against her skin, she shivers and pulls me closer. She’s not intimidated by the wolf in me. She’s attracted to it, which is either the bond’s influence or the most intoxicating thing about her. Probably both.

The problem is with everyone else.

Wednesday morning. A man from the contracts department, someone named Kevin, comes to Sophia’s desk to ask about a vendor agreement. He’s polite. Professional. He leans against the edge of her cubicle wall and asks his question and she answers it and the entire interaction takes maybe three minutes. During those three minutes, I am standing at the window of my office one floor up, listening through the floor, and my fingers are denting the aluminum frame of the window because Kevin from contracts is standing four feet from my mate and his body language is angled toward her and his heartbeat has the slightly elevated rhythm of a man who finds the woman he’s talking to attractive.

Kevin does not know that the woman he’s talking to has a wolf’s bite on her neck and a wolf’s scent in her skin and a wolf’s heartbeat synchronized with hers. Kevin does not know that the man whose window frame he’s causing structural damage to can hear every word he’s saying and can smell his attraction from sixty feet away and is currently fighting the urge to walk downstairs and break Kevin’s hand for the crime of existing in Sophia’s proximity.

I don’t break Kevin’s hand. This is what passes for growth.

But the incident crystallizes something I’ve been trying to ignore: the mate bond, now that it’s sealed, has amplified the possessive instinct to a level I can’t keep managing indefinitely. Before the marking, I could manage it. The pull was strong but abstract, a desire for proximity rather than a demand for exclusivity. Now, post-marking, the wolf doesn’t distinguish between threat and non-threat. Every male who comes near Sophia registers as a potential challenger, every interaction as a potential incursion, and the response is immediate, physical, and requires active management to suppress.

This is what the bond does. It takes a functional alpha and turns him into a man who can’t let his mate talk to the contracts department without causing property damage.

Thursday. Sophia and I attend a business dinner at a restaurant in the Gold Coast. The dinner is legitimate. Three potential investors in a new development project, their wives, and the usual machinery of polite conversation and expensive wine that lubricates these kinds of transactions.

She’s wearing a black dress that ends just above the knee and shows the line of her collarbones and, at the right angle, the silver edge of the scar on her neck. She’s wearing it deliberately. She asked me this morning if the mark showed above the neckline and I said yes and she looked at herself in the mirror and said “good” and the word nearly dropped me to my knees.

She works the room like she was born in it. She talks to Marvin Webb, the lead investor, about tax implications of commercial real estate development, and he leans in with the expression of a man who came to this dinner expecting a beautiful woman on the boss’s arm and is getting a financial mind that rivals his own. She talks to his wife about architecture, pivoting seamlessly from balance sheets to building design, and Catherine Webb laughs at something Sophia says and puts her hand on Sophia’s arm and I watch from across the table and feel a pride so fierce it borders on violence.

She’s mine. This woman who can charm a room and dismantle a spreadsheet and take everything I give her in bed and ask for more, this woman is mine. The mark on her neck says so. The heartbeat in her chest says so. And every person at this table is looking at her and seeing someone extraordinary and none of them know what she really is to me.

The dinner ends. We say our goodbyes. We walk to the car where my driver is waiting and I hold the door for Sophia. She slides into the backseat and I slide in after her and the door closes and we’re alone in the dark.

The partition between us and the driver is up. The car is warm. The leather seats are soft. And Sophia is sitting next to me in that black dress with the silver scar visible at her neckline and her perfume mixing with her natural scent in a combination that goes directly to the base of my spine.

“That went well,” she says. She’s pleased. I can feel it through the bond, a warm pulse of satisfaction and professional pride. “Marvin Webb is going to invest. I could see it in his face when I walked him through the tax structure.”

“You were incredible tonight,” I say against her mouth. My hand is already on her thigh, sliding under the hem of the dress. “I can’t wait to show you off at the Ravensgate Founder’s Ball in January.”

“What’s Ravensgate?” Her breath catches as my fingers trace higher.

“An academy. My family founded it a long time ago.” I press my lips to the spot below her ear. “It’s customary for us to attend each year.”

“Where is it?”

“Later.” I pull her onto my lap. She comes without resistance, her knees bracketing my hips, her dress riding up around her thighs. “We’ll discuss it later.”

She looks at me. The streetlights passing outside paint her face in alternating light and shadow, and she’s smiling, that private smile she gives me when I’ve said something that reaches past her defenses.

I can’t wait. We’re twenty minutes from my building. The driver is separated by a partition and a professional discretion that’s been tested and proven over fifteen years of service. And the combination of watching Sophia command a room full of wealthy men and the black dress and the mark on her neck and the bond humming between us like a live wire has pushed me past the point where twenty minutes feels survivable.

I pull her to me. The kiss is possessive in a way that I don’t try to temper. My tongue in her mouth. My hand tightening in her hair. The taste of the wine she drank at dinner and underneath it the taste that’s just her, warm and dark and mine.

“Dominic,” she says against my mouth. “The driver.”

“Can’t see. Can’t hear.”

“We’re in a car.”

“We’re in my car.”

She laughs, that bright sound I’m addicted to, and then the laugh dissolves into a gasp because my fingers are sliding upward and the lace of her thong is already damp.

“You’re wet,” I say against her ear. “You’ve been wet all evening, haven’t you?”

“I’ve been sitting across from you in a suit for three hours watching you run a room. What did you expect?”

“I expected exactly this.”