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I blink. “You don't even know me.”

“I know enough.”

“You know my name.”

“I know your heartbeat.”

What! What the hell does he mean with that? “What?”

His beautiful lips kick up as he leans closer. “I know you're pretending I'm not making you nervous.”

Every instinct I had was shouting to break free, to step away, to shut this whole thing down. That was my default, but Viking wasn’t touching me, he wasn’t cornering me, he wasn’t flirting, not really. My chin lifted. “You're not.”

“Your pulse says otherwise.”

“You can't hear my pulse.”

He smiled. “Can't I?” he asks, but then his eyes snap behind me again. I follow his gaze to see the man leaving. “He's leaving.”

“Yes.”

“You didn't say anything to him.”

“Didn't need to.”

His confident reply has every fibre in my body tensing. “Should I be worried about you?” My question has him stepping closer until barely any space remained between us. My head tips back. His hand was still against my waist. I should have removed it but I didn't.

“Not unless you plan on disappearing before I get to know you.”

My lips twitch at his flirting tone. “Was that supposed to be charming?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“Did it work?”

“Absolutely not.”

I answer but my pulse is racing. My breath caught again, sharper this time, like he’d reached into my chest and squeezed. This was too much, too intense, and far too sudden. My pulse spiked, heat crawling up my neck, not entirely from fear and not entirely from attraction. A mix that felt reckless, I didn’t even know him.

I didn’t know why he looked at me like he was already planning our wedding. I didn’t know why his voice sounded like steel dragged over stone. I only knew one thing, and that was that nothing about tonight made sense anymore, because men didn’t get close to me. Men didn’t look at me like I had flipped some internal switch inside them they couldn’t turn off.

But Viking Dragic looked at me like that now, gaze burning with an ownership he had no right to feel and no reason to declare, and the most unsettling part? A small, treacherous part of me didn’t hate it.

Chapter 2

I noticed her before I even understood what I was looking at. One second Draugr and I were pulling up to Havoc, another typical night of keeping an eye on things we didn’t talk about. The next, something punched straight through my chest so hard I forgot how to breathe.

At first, I thought I imagined it. A flicker of dark blond hair caught in the winter air. A shift in the crowd, a pull low in my ribs, sharp and electric, like a string snapping taut between me and someone I had never seen before.

Fucking impossible!

I didn’t imagine things, my mind didn’t play tricks. Not after everything we’d survived, everything we’d buried. I didn’t feel things I couldn’t explain, yet my eyes dragged back to her like magnets locked on steel.

She stood in the queue, arms crossed against the cold, chin tilted with a kind of quiet defiance. She wasn’t dressed to impress anyone or trying to be seen. But she glowed against the street like the rest of the world was a grayscale backdrop and she’d been painted in colour, and then her eyes lifted. Hazel, bright and focused on me. She is curious but trying to be subtle.

Her gaze hit mine for one second. One…And my entire world tilted. It wasn’t lust, or even interest. It wasn’t that usual quick scan I gave women on the street. This was recognition, it was ancient, instinctive. A punch of clarity so violent it shook everything loose inside me. I saw her properly then. Not just a flash of colour or a pull in my chest, but her.