You can’t have them shipped.
You have to go to Paris.
“How—”
The word comes out fractured, incomplete, my voice cracking on a single syllable in a way that would humiliate me under normal circumstances. But nothing about this moment is normal. My hands are trembling—actually trembling, the fine motor control that keeps me alive in the ring abandoned entirely in favor of some emotion I can’t name because I’ve spent so long avoiding the entire catalog that I’ve lost the vocabulary.
I look up at him, and I know—I know—that something has shifted in my face. Something that usually stays locked behind the blank, emotionless exterior I present to the world. Because Hawk’s expression changes when he sees it. A subtle alteration, the smirk softening into something that isn’t quite a smile but occupies the same emotional territory.
My eyes.
They’re doing the thing.
The thing I can’t control—the involuntary brightening that happens on the rare, catastrophic occasions when an emotion bypasses my defenses and reaches the surface before I can intercept it.
He’s seeing me.
The real me.
And I can’t make it stop.
I try to fathom how he did this. Hawk hasn’t left Savage Knot’s territory in months. I track his movements the same way he tracks mine—not out of suspicion, but out of the mutual surveillance that passes for trust between two people who’ve seen too much betrayal to accept it in its conventional forms. He hasn’t been to Paris. Hasn’t been anywhere.
Which means he planned this.
Arranged it through contacts, through favors called in, through whatever shadow network he maintains outside these walls.
For me.
He did this for me.
He smirks again—that devastating, infuriating, impossibly warm expression—and rises to his full height. The motion is fluid, all predatory grace and restless energy, and he looks down at me with those amber eyes that see through every wall I’ve built as if they’re made of glass rather than reinforced steel.
“So you’ll get all up and clean-looking so we can go to school for your dance class, yes?”
My cheeks flush.
Heat blooms across my porcelain-pale skin with the subtlety of a forest fire, and I hate it—hate the involuntary betrayal of it, the way my body announces my internal state to the world without consulting me first. Blushing is for people who still have the capacity for normal emotional responses. I am not one of those people.
And yet.
I look up at him, the shoes cradled against my chest like something fragile and holy, and I don’t have words. Victoria Sinclair—who has talked her way out of fights, lied her way through identity checks, and delivered a farewell monologue to her dying sister without stuttering—has absolutely no words for the thirty-five-year-old feral Alpha standing in her bedroom in boxers who just gave her Parisian ballet shoes that he has no business knowing she needed and no logical means of acquiring.
He leans down.
Slowly. Deliberately. Giving me every opportunity to pull away, to deflect, to deploy one of the thousand defensive mechanisms I keep loaded and ready for moments exactly like this one.
I don’t pull away.
His lips brush mine—light, impossibly light, a contact so gentle it barely qualifies as a kiss. More like a whisper that choseskin instead of air as its medium. Pine and smoke and iron fill my senses completely, and for one suspended heartbeat my void—that vast, echoing emptiness behind my sternum—contracts. Not fills. Contracts. As if the darkness itself flinches from his proximity.
“Happy birthday, Victoria.”
The words are whispered against my mouth.
We share a look.
It lasts only seconds but carries the weight of years—three years of silent agreements and unspoken truths and the careful, complicated dance of two people who refuse to name what exists between them because naming it would make it real, and real things in Savage Knot are targets.
