She looked up when I entered.Her expression went careful, guarded, the open warmth I’d glimpsed two nights ago buried beneath defenses I’d forced her to don with my hot-and-cold cruelty.
“I’m not hiding from you,” she said before I could speak.“I just needed space.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”There was an edge to her voice, challenge mixed with bone-deep exhaustion.“Because your security detail followed me to my room last night.I heard them in the hallway, their footsteps stopping outside my door like they were listening.And this morning, there was a man standing outside the garden entrance when I looked out my window.Just standing there, watching the house.”
“For your protection.”
“For your control.”
She wasn’t wrong.The line between the two had blurred so completely I wasn’t sure I could find it anymore, wasn’t sure it had ever existed in the first place.Everything I did to keep her safe also kept her trapped.Every guard I posted to protect her also served to remind her that she wasn’t free.
I crossed to the window and stood beside her chair, close enough to catch her scent but not touching.The wolf pressed against my ribs like a caged thing, demanding contact, demanding that I close the distance and pull her into my arms and cover her with my scent until no one could ever mistake who she belonged to.I held him back with the thin leash of my remaining restraint.
“There are things I want to show you,” I said.“Not as part of the arrangement.Not because the contract requires it.Just because I think you might want to see them.”
Her brows drew together, confusion flickering across her face before suspicion replaced it.I watched her weigh my words like she was checking them for traps, for hidden clauses, for some new way I might be manipulating her.
“What kind of things?”
“My mother’s work.She was a sculptor.Most of her pieces are in the greenhouse on the west side of the grounds.”I paused, the words catching in my throat like they had thorns.“I’ve never shown anyone.”
Her expression softened.The wariness remained, but underneath it, I saw a flicker of the woman who’d looked at me and said she could see right through my games.The woman who’d challenged me even when she had no power, who’d met my cruelty with defiance instead of tears.
“Why now?”
Because I’m about to destroy your family’s legacy and I want one day of honesty before it all burns.Because my wolf won’t stop howling for you and I’m running out of ways to deny what that means.Because you spent last night crying alone when you should have been in my arms, and the thought of you turning to Michael for comfort makes me want to tear something apart with my bare hands.
“Because you’ve been terrorized and isolated and I’m the reason for half of it,” I said instead.“And I thought you might want a day that wasn’t about survival.”
She was quiet for a long moment.Outside the window, a bird called out across the frozen garden, its song swallowed by the cold morning air.I watched emotions chase each other across her face: surprise, suspicion, something that might have been hope quickly smothered.
Then she set down her book and rose from the chair, her movements careful, like she was approaching something that might bite.
“Okay,” she said.“Show me.”
The greenhouse was a twenty-minute walk from the main house, down a stone path that wound through the dormant gardens and past a frozen pond where ice had formed in patterns that looked like frozen lace.The cold bit at exposed skin, sharp and clean, turning our breath into clouds that hung in the still air before dissipating.Ice glazed the trees, turning bare branches into crystal sculptures.
I matched my pace to hers, shortening my stride to keep us walking side by side rather than leading her like I would a subordinate or a prisoner.Her boots crunched on the frozen snow.Her cheeks flushed pink with cold.
We didn’t talk much.The silence between us was different now, charged but not hostile.She kept glancing at me from the corner of her eye, quick looks she probably thought I didn’t notice, as if trying to reconcile the man walking beside her with the predator who’d demanded her surrender.
I couldn’t reconcile them either.I’d been both for so long I no longer knew where one ended and the other began.
The greenhouse rose from the winter landscape like something out of a different era.Victorian ironwork curved in elegant arches, glass panels hazed with condensation from the warmth within, climbing roses dormant against the frame in a tangle of thorny canes.I’d had it built five years ago, commissioned to house the only things I had left of my mother.Her sculptures had been in storage for decades before I had the money and power to reclaim them.Now they lived here, surrounded by the kind of beauty she would have loved, preserved against time and neglect.
I pushed open the door, and warmth enveloped us immediately, a wall of humid air that smelled of green growing things and damp earth.The heating system Alice maintained kept the space tropical even in February, a pocket of eternal summer preserved against the mountain winter.Plants I couldn’t name pressed against the glass, their leaves broad and green and glistening with moisture.Orchids bloomed in corners.Ferns unfurled their fronds in the filtered light.
And scattered among them, on pedestals and benches and directly on the tiled floor, were my mother’s sculptures.
Lena drew in a sharp breath.
“Oh,” she said softly.“Raphael.”
The pieces weren’t representational.Abstract shapes, flowing curves, stone carved to look like water frozen mid-motion.One figure suggested a woman lifting her arms toward something just out of reach, her fingers stretching toward a sky she would never touch.Another was a spiral that seemed to pull the eye inward forever, coiling down into its own center.A third looked like flames captured in marble, frozen fire that would never burn out.
My mother had called them her “emotions made solid,” each one a feeling she couldn’t express any other way.Joy.Grief.Longing.Fear.Love so fierce it burned through everything in its path.
