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“I do.”
“I need someone in my finance department. Someone with fresh eyes and strong credentials. The position pays well. You’d work here, in this building. I’ll provide housing in a property my company owns. You’ll have time to settle your father’s affairs, and you can use your compensation to offset the debt.”
“For how long?”
“Until the balance is cleared.”
I do the math. Even with a generous salary, the number he quoted would take years. Years of working for this man, in this building, under his eye. Years of being close enough to touch.
The thought lands wrong. Close enough to touch. Where did that come from? I don’t know this man. I’ve been in his presence for five minutes and I’m thinking about proximity and heat and how his hand felt against mine.
I push it down. Hard.
“And if I say no?”
He doesn’t answer immediately. He lets the silence do the work. In that silence I hear everything he isn’t saying: there is no no. There is the version where I cooperate and keep my dignity and get paid, and there is another version that we’re both going to pretend doesn’t exist.
“I think you’ll find this arrangement beneficial, Ms. Marchelli. For both of us.”
His expression doesn’t change.
“When money belonging to the Voronovs disappears, the balance gets settled.”
I should feel trapped. I do feel trapped. But underneath the trap, underneath the anger and the fear and the disbelief, there’s a current I don’t want to examine. Because the truth is, this is exactly where I want to be. Inside the machine my father was part of. Close to the people who knew him. Close to whatever he was hiding, and whatever got him killed.
Because I don’t believe it was a heart attack.
“When do I start?” I ask.
He almost smiles. Almost. The corner of his mouth shifts by a fraction and his eyes warm by a single degree, and the effect of that tiny change on my body is so disproportionate that I have to look away.
“Monday,” he says.
Chapter Three
Dominic
Idon’t move for a long time after she leaves.
The chair she sat in still holds the faintest trace of her scent. I breathe it in before I can stop myself. Vanilla. Not perfume, not lotion. Her skin. Underneath the vanilla, something warmer. Darker. Like honey left in the sun, sweet going amber.
My wolf is on its feet.
Standing at attention, every sense locked forward, vibrating at a frequency I haven’t felt in a hundred and thirty-two years of living. A frequency I’ve heard described by other wolves. A frequency I swore I’d never feel because I was smart enough, disciplined enough, cold enough to live without it.
Mate.
The word rolls through me like a wave hitting a seawall. Mate. Her. The daughter of a dead man who learned too much. The woman with the MBA and the dark eyes that looked at me across the room like she was trying to take me apart and catalog the pieces.
I press my palms flat against the arms of my chair and close my eyes.
I’ve spent over a century watching other wolves fall to this. Watching alphas lose their edge, their judgment, their ability to think past the need in their own blood. My father mated with my mother late, when he was a hundred and twelve, and I watched what it did to him when she died. I watched the strongest wolf I’d ever known crack down the center and spend the next century trying to fill the space she left behind with authority and control and cold fury. I watched him become the man he is now: sharp where he used to be steady, brittle where he used to be strong.
For an ordinary wolf, a mate is vulnerability. For an alpha, she is politics. A fracture point.
Every wolf in the pack will smell the bond eventually. Every older male who already thinks I’ve grown too cautious will know exactly where to put the knife if he wants to test me. And if my mate is human, Marco Marchelli’s human daughter, the argument won’t only be whether she makes me weak. It will be whether she belongs beside the alpha at all.
I cannot have a mate.
