She barely got any.
From the sorry excuse of a pack that used her body and mocked her for eating and cornered her in alleys and never once—not once, in however many years that arrangement lasted—looked at her the way I’m looking at her right now and told her the truth.
That she’s stunning. That the crop top is committing crimes against my cardiovascular system. That seeing her on a horse with October light on her face and her constellation tattoos catching the sun is the single most attractive thing I’ve witnessed in my thirty years of existence and I’m including the time I accidentally saw a Victoria’s Secret commercial at an impressionable age.
They didn’t tell her.
And she stopped expecting to hear it.
And now when someone says it—when someone looks at her and tells the truth—she blushes like it’s the first time.
Because for all practical purposes, it is.
I store the information.
File it alongside the other data points I’ve been collecting since the day she arrived: the way she flinches at generosity, the way she tries to pay for things that are free, the way she asks permission to exist in spaces she’s been invited to. Each one a scar that doesn’t show on the skin. Each one a place where the previous pack’s damage left an absence where something warm should have been.
I’m going to fill every single one.
With compliments and cheek kisses and direct, unambiguous honesty until the blush stops being surprised and starts being expected.
But right now, we have a job to do.
The horseback riding is real—genuine, fresh-air, get-this-woman-out-of-a-hospital-bed-and-into-sunlight recreation that her body needs after eighteen hours of unconsciousness and her mind needs after a diagnosis that would break most people. But it’s also strategic. Every element of the next two weeks has been mapped by Alaric’s methodical brain and approved by Roman’s tactical instincts and executed by my field operational training.
Alaric is already working.
Back at the house, running his checks—pulling records on each of the former pack members, cross-referencing financial transactions, mapping the shell company network that Hazel’s corkboard had started to identify. He’s getting things into position with the silent, systematic precision of a detective who dismantles criminal operations the way a surgeon dismantles tumors: identify the connections, isolate the blood supply, remove the structure.
The next few days are distraction.
Visible, public, strategically photographed distraction. Hazel and her new pack, doing pack things—riding horses, eating at diners, appearing in the neighboring towns with the relaxed, unbothered ease of people who are building a life rather than investigating a crime. The visibility is the bait. Dr. Winters’ strategy, executed through the lens of operational deployment.
And if we pull enough strings—if the visibility is obvious enough, if the normalcy is infuriating enough, if whoever is watching Hazel sees her living her life with three Alphas who worship the ground she walks on—we won’t need to wait two weeks for them to take the bait.
A few days is all we need.
If they’re serious about trying to strip our girl of everything—her career, her investigation, her life—they’ll make a move. Because what we’re presenting isn’t just a woman who survived an assassination attempt. We’re presenting a woman who survived and isthriving. And there is nothing more infuriating to a predator than prey that refuses to be afraid.
Not that we’ll allow them to get anywhere near her.
But they don’t need to know that.
She huffs.
The sound pulls me back from the tactical layer to the immediate one—the woman, the horse, the October paddock, the way the sunlight makes the icy blue of her hair look like it’s glowing.
I smirk.
“You sure you’ll be okay on the horse?”
She nods.
The motion is confident. Definitive. The nod of a woman who has been asked a question she considers beneath her capability and is answering out of courtesy rather than uncertainty.
“I’ll follow your lead,” she says.
I take her word for it.
