I told him everything.
The debt.The trap I’d laid.The revenge I’d been planning since I was old enough to understand what had been done to me.
My father had been a wolf.A painter from Moscow with more passion than sense, who’d met a senator’s daughter at a gallery opening and fallen for her between one heartbeat and the next.Fated mates.The bond that was supposed to be sacred.
They’d married against her family’s wishes.Had a son.For three years, they’d been happy.
Then my father’s wolf had broken free.
I didn’t remember much of that night.Just flashes.Screaming.Blood.My mother’s body on the kitchen floor.My father standing over her, still half-shifted, horror dawning in his golden eyes.
He’d put the gun in his mouth before the police arrived.
I’d been three years old, hiding in the coat closet, watching through the slats.
My grandfather had arrived with lawyers and NDAs and enough money to make the whole thing disappear.The official story was a murder-suicide.Tragic.Unexplainable.The senator’s daughter and her unstable foreign husband.
No one mentioned wolves.No one mentioned the little boy who’d witnessed it all.
Senator Prescott had looked at me once.Just once.I remembered his eyes.Cold and distant and already calculating how to minimize the damage.
Then he’d signed the papers that sent me to boarding school in Vermont.Paid in advance through my eighteenth birthday.A trust fund for expenses.No visits.No contact.No acknowledgment that I existed.
I was an inconvenience.A reminder of his daughter’s shameful choice.So he’d erased me.
“And now you’ll erase him,” Max said when I finished.His voice held no judgment.He understood revenge.He’d built his own empire on it.
“His career.His legacy.His precious reputation.”I stood and walked to the window.The forest stretched dark and endless beyond the glass.“I’ll take everything he values.Let him spend his final years knowing that the grandson he threw away destroyed him.”
“What about the girl?”
I didn’t turn around.“What about her?”
“Don’t play games with me, Raphael Antonovich.”Max’s voice sharpened.“I heard your heartbeat change when you mentioned her.I can smell her on you even now.You want her.”
Yes,the wolf growled.Want.Need.Claim.
“She’s leverage,” I said flatly.“Richard Hughes spent his whole life controlling that girl.Sheltering her from anything useful.She doesn’t know how to run the hotel.She doesn’t know about the debt.When he dies, she’ll have nothing.”I turned to face my Pakhan.“Except me.”
Max studied me for a long moment.His wolf was close to the surface.I could see it in the amber flickering at the edges of his pupils.
“Human attachments are dangerous,” he said quietly.“You know the rules.Romance creates weakness.Distraction.It gets people killed.”
“I know.”
“If she becomes a liability, you’ll have to deal with it.One way or another.”
The wolf snarled at the implication, but I kept my voice steady.“She’s a tool, Max.That’s all.A means to an end.”
He held my gaze for three long seconds.Then he nodded and rose to refill our glasses.
“Good.Then I give you my blessing to proceed.But Raphael.”He pressed the vodka into my hand.“Be careful.The mate bond is not easily ignored.Your father learned that the hard way.”
I drank without tasting.
We said our farewells at the door.Max gripped my shoulder, a gesture that meant more than words between us.Then I was back in the car, Parsons pulling away from the compound, the dark trees swallowing the headlights.
The drive home was torture.
