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The third man. The one near Sophia. He has his gun out and he’s pointing it not at me but at her, and the calculation in his eyes is clear and desperate: if he can’t fight me, he’ll use her. He’ll put the gun to her head and make demands and hope that the threat of her death is enough leverage to stop what’s happening.

He doesn’t understand that pointing a gun at my mate is not leverage. It’s a death sentence.

Everything changes. The business disappears. The territory disappears. DeSanto disappears. There is only my mate and a weapon pointed at her.

I look at the old steel covering my hand. Human weapons belong to human problems. This isn’t one anymore. I pull the knuckles free. They hit the concrete. The sound echoes through the warehouse.

The wolf comes forward. I let him. I shift.

The transformation is violent. I don’t ease into it. I explode into it, my body ripping apart and reassembling in a fraction of a second, jeans shredding, skin giving way to fur, bones reshaping with a series of cracks that echo off the warehouse walls. The man with the gun sees a human being become a wolf in the space between heartbeats, and the sound that comes out of his mouth isn’t a scream. It’s a whimper. The involuntary, animal sound of a creature that has just seen a predator appear from nowhere and knows that it is about to die.

I cross the fifteen feet between us before his finger can squeeze the trigger. My jaws close around his wrist and the gun clatters to the floor and the taste of his blood is hot and coppery on my tongue. I shake my head, a single violent motion, and his wrist comes apart. He screams. He drops to his knees. I release his arm and he curls over it, whimpering, and I stand over him and the growl that comes out of me is the lowest sound I’ve ever made, a vibration I feel through my entire body. Then I close my jaws around his throat and finish it.

Sophia is watching. She’s right there, sitting on the floor with her hands behind her back, and she’s watching a wolf destroy a man who pointed a gun at her, and the look in her eyes is the thing that determines what happens next.

She sees me. The wolf. The animal that lives inside the man she loves. She sees the blood on my muzzle and the gold in my eyes and the sheer physical reality of what I am, the thing that has been hiding behind every suit and every careful word and every controlled expression, and her eyes are wide and wet and absolutely steady.

I shift back. The transition is fast and leaves me naked and panting, blood on my mouth, the bullet wound in my side already sealed to a thin line.

I reach for the zip tie on her wrists. My hands are trembling. I snap the plastic and her hands come free and she rubs her wrists where the plastic dug in and I’m in front of her, naked and bloody and breathing hard, and I’m afraid to look at her. Because this is it. This is the moment I’ve been dreading since the first day.

She’s seen the wolf before. She touched my face while I wore this skin. Put her forehead against my muzzle and whispered there you are as if she’d recognized something she’d been looking for. But she has never seen this. Blood on my teeth. A dead man beneath me. Predator. Killer.

This is the part that might finally make her afraid of me.

I look at her anyway.

She’s looking back. Her face is streaked with tears but her jaw is set and her shoulders are straight and there’s something in her expression that I can’t read, something that isn’t any of the emotions I expected. Not fear or disgust. Not the careful analytical assessment she gives to data she’s processing.

She stands up. She takes two steps toward me.

And she throws her arms around me.

The impact of her body against mine nearly knocks me backward. Her arms wrap around my neck and her face presses into my shoulder and she’s holding me so tightly that I can feel her fingers digging into my back, can feel the desperation in her grip, can feel the tremors running through her body that aren’t fear but relief. Relief so total that it’s indistinguishable from collapse.

I catch her. My arms close around her waist and I pull her against me and I bury my face in her hair and I breathe her in, vanilla and warm skin and amber and alive, alive, alive.

“You came,” she says. Her voice is muffled against my neck, broken and thick with tears.

“I will always come.”

“I know.”

She pulls back just enough to look at me. “Take me home.”

My chest tightens. “Sophia—”

“Not here. Not with bodies on the floor around us and whatever they drugged me with still in my system.” Her hands tighten on my face. “Take me home, Dominic. Then we talk.”

“Okay.”

“And I’m still angry with you.”

“I know.”

“Very angry.”

“I know.”