Being an angry, inquisitive kid got him into a lot of trouble, but never moreso than the day he decided to break into that very building.
All of ten years old, totally unsupervised and eager to get away from a home that reeked of unhappiness, he’d taken a shine to hating the Solbournes. It was easier to blame them for the misery at home than it was to acknowledge it was his father, hisalpha’sdoing. Perhaps it was his father’s rants about the elves that pointed him in their direction, or perhaps it was simply the directionless anger of a neglected child that did it.
He picked a day to break into their special apartment building. He did his recon, knew that they mostly spent their time on the top two floors. With a lot of fury, a coyote’s cunning, and very little good sense, he slipped in through an old, defunct service shaft once connected to the bank next door and made his way up the emergency stairs to the penthouse floor.
His plan, so far as he could recall, was to use his claws on everything they owned. He wanted to smash every mirror and rend every curtain. He wanted to tear down the massive oil paintings and shatter every vase. He wanted to act on the vitriol his father had filled his head with. He wanted to let the coyote out and howl in what should have been their territory if only to feel like he wasdoingsomething.
What he got wascaught.
It was bad luck and pure foolishness that landed him squarely in Valen Yadav’s sights at the end of the hall, his hand on the doorknob he now knew he never could have opened without his biometric scan anyway.
Viktor remembered that moment with the perfect clarity of an animal’s perception: Valen, huge and intimidating, looked nothing like the men he was used to. Dressed head to toe in black, his neck covered by the signature elvish collar and his claws capped in gleaming silver, he looked like a specter out of Viktor’s childhood nightmares. His jewel-toned skin shone in the light from a small window.
So did the flash of his fangs when he opened his mouth to ask whatexactlya coyote cub was doing in a high security penthouse.
Of course Viktor made a break for it, but there was no chance of success. Valen was an elf in his prime — and General of Patrol to boot. He was a living weapon honed in fire. Viktor, by comparison, didn’t even have all his adult teeth in yet.
When Valen grasped him by the scruff of his neck and hauled him into one of the apartments, Viktor was certain that the elf would rip his throat out.
That’s what elves did, right? They killed — violently, without hesitation or remorse. That’s what his father told him. One of the many lies he spewed when he wanted to blame his failures on their elvish overlords.
The predator in Viktor respected the ruthlessness, but the boy was just terrified. Not enough to stop fighting for even a second, though. Even at home, where he knew he could never hope to win, he kept fighting. He would always fight.
Even when he cried, he fought.
In hindsight, that was probably why Valen took such a shine to him, and why he didn’t just dump him on his ass in front of his father, demandinghemete out bloody retribution for the trespass. Valen saw something familiar in the stupid, angry kid, and, astonishingly, took mercy on him.
He couldn’t have predicted that he would go on to spend some of his hardestandhappiest moments in those fancy apartments, nor that he would, twenty-six years later, find himself breaking into them once more.
Viktor didn’t care that the old service shaft was a tight fit for his adult body. He didn’t care that he had to disable the alarms and, the first time he tried it, use a small laser torch to cut through a new steel access panel. There were no barriers tough enough to keep him from Camille.
The only person who could really accomplish that was the elf herself.
Racing up the emergency stairs two steps at a time and deftly avoiding the security sensors he knew only scanned in regular, exploitable intervals, Viktor felt his senses sharpening, his claws prickling at the tips of his fingers as his animal fought to burst free. It was damn sick of waiting for him to act, and it blamedhimfor what might be the permanent loss of their mate.
By the time he slid out of the fire door — alarm disabled, of course — his heart was racing and his eyes were no longer blue, but a wild coyote gold. He sank into a very canine half-crouch. The need to hunt, to track, was a wild call in his blood.
Immediately, he picked up the scent of her in the air. It was faint, but he would be able to follow that scent through driving snow or sleet, in his sleep or drugged, through complete darkness or across a scorched desert.
Wildflowers and amber.Rich like honey, but with a floral edge that reminded him of a childhood spent tumbling in the grass.
It lived in his pores as surely as Camille lived in his soul.
Biting back a snarl, Viktor was down the hallway and in front of her door in a flash. This time, he had no gifts to leave her, no way to show her that he cared, that he wouldalwayscare, even when she didn’t want him to. He had only himself and his need for her.
That need demanded he kick down the door to her apartment and force her to look at him, to see reason before she committed herself to someone who didn’t love her, but the part of him that was still a man knew that was a bad idea.
For one thing, she wouldn’t take that sort of invasion of her space well at all. For another, he knew for a fact that the doors were reinforced with sigil-lined steel. The Solbournes might have kept the antique look of the building, but that didn’t mean they neglected security.
Mostly,he thought, a tiny bubble of amusement making its way through his panic as he recalled the service shaft. He’d have to tell them about the security breach at some point. Just not yet.
Viktor braced his palms on either side of the door and tried to get his ragged breathing under control. He squeezed his eyes shut.
I shouldn’t have come here like this.
He knew it in the car, but now that he was actually standing there, grappling with the compulsion to howl until his mate was forced out of her den, he felt like he was being torn to shreds. It was stupid to think he could do this rationally when he rode a wave of pure possessive fury.
He should have waited. He should have let himself cool down. He shouldn’t have allowed the thought of her with someone else to drive him half insane. She deserved better than that.
