That trajectory is exactly why I back off.
Because attraction leads to investment.
Investment leads to vulnerability.
And vulnerability is the door I welded shut when Damien burned us.
I huff.
The sound is involuntary—expelled through my nostrils before my composure can intercept it, the audible manifestation of a man who has just spent ten minutes trying to make a woman kneel through biological imperative alone and watched her pout at her companion instead. The pout. That small, involuntary, completely inappropriate expression that made her face shift from blank to?—
Don’t.
Don’t finish that thought.
“Fine.”
One word. It costs me more than I’ll admit. The concession scrapes against the interior of my throat on its way out, tasting like compromise, which is a flavor I’ve trained myself to findunpalatable because compromise in my experience is the first step in a sequence that ends with betrayal.
Ask Damien.
He’s an expert on the subject.
I turn. Walk back to my chair with the measured stride that I deploy when I need the physical act of movement to bridge the gap between what I’m feeling and what I’m showing. Each step buys a fraction of a second of recalibration. By the time I’m seated—one leg crossed over the other, my posture rebuilt into the controlled architecture that communicates authority without effort—my expression has been restored to its default setting: nothing.
Learned that trick from an Omega, apparently.
We have more in common than I’d prefer.
The twins are watching me with the particular attention that identical siblings develop when one member of the unit deviates from expected behavior. I feel their gaze without meeting it—Lucien’s sharper, more amused, carrying the edge of a man who has already begun calculating the entertainment value of this development; Cassian’s steadier, more analytical, reading the situation with the patient intelligence that makes him the one I rely on for assessment when my own judgment is compromised.
And my judgment is compromised.
I can admit that to myself if not to them.
“The extra baggage can come.”
I deliver the concession with a smirk that I don’t have to manufacture because it’s genuine—the specific amusement of a man who has just agreed to complicate an already impossible situation and is calculating the probability of disaster with something that might, in a less disciplined person, resemble anticipation.
“But if he perishes along the way?—”
I find her eyes across the room. Storm-gray. Empty. Hiding everything.
“—she can’t end herself until the contract is done.”
The clause lands where I aimed it. I saw it during the stare-off—not in her expression, which gave nothing, but in the negative space around her expression. The things she wasn’t showing. The particular quality of her emptiness that isn’t the emptiness of a woman who has nothing to feel but the emptiness of a woman who has decided that feeling is no longer worth the cost of living. And the man beside her—the feral Alpha with the romance-novel posture and the casual death threats—is the single variable keeping that equation from resolving.
Remove him, and she follows.
I’d bet the Virelli inheritance on it.
If the Virelli inheritance still existed.
The smirk holds because I know what comes next.
The challenge ahead is not insignificant. The masquerade’s requirements are specific, the timeline is brutal, and the woman who just stared down a Prime Alpha without blinking is going to need to play a role that demands something beyond empty defiance and exceptional ballet. She’ll need to function within a pack dynamic she has no experience navigating. She’ll need to bond—genuinely bond, not perform the facsimile of bonding—with Alphas she met ten minutes ago. And she’ll need to do all of this while managing the feral companion who just announced his willingness to die on her behalf with the casual specificity of a man reading a weather forecast.
I doubt she can do it.
