He squeezed my hip, then kissed the spot on my neck where his teeth had left a mark. It wasn’t deep, but I could feel it all the way to my toes. “This’ll fade,” he said, voice rumbling through my skin. “But the rest won’t.”
He meant the bond. The promise.
I touched his cheek, surprised at how easily he let me. “I believe you,” I said.
He rested his head back against the wall, eyelids drooping. “Don’t sleep yet,” he muttered. “We gotta make a plan.”
“I know,” I said, but my body was already melting into his, as if I could crawl inside him and stay hidden from the world.
I ran my fingers through his hair, then down to his jaw. The scruff was already coming in, rough and dark. “You look like hell,” I teased.
He opened one eye, grinning. “You should see yourself.”
We laughed again, softer this time. My chest felt tight with something I hadn’t allowed in years—hope, maybe, or the dangerous start of a real attachment.
He shifted, pulling me closer so our bodies lined up. My leg slotted between his, and his hand landed heavy and warm on my thigh. We lay there, listening to the house breathe.
“When are you going to do it?” I asked.
He took a deep breath, and I wasn’t sure if he was annoyed or thinking about his answer. “Do what?”
“You’re fucking with me,” I said. “The knotting thing.”
He chuckled and ran his hand up my bare thigh, his pinky pressing between my pussy lips. “When the time is right,” he said, and we left it at that. For now.
Shivs
Every bad feeling started in my teeth. At the Stillwater mansion, it was the molars—hunger, ache, the urge to gnaw. Tonight, it was the canines, hot and bright and mean, as I trailed behind Carrie into the biggest bourbon industry gala in five states. My suit itched. The building crawled with predators who didn’t even know it.
It was at the Louisville Distillers’ Society, the last truly old-money haunt left in Kentucky that could still make a man in biker denim feel like a dog on a leash. All the stone and brass and crystal, like someone took a church and lined the altar with top-shelf liquor and lawsuits.
Carrie moved through the entry like she’d been poured into her dress: midnight blue, slit at the thigh, and open at the back so the whole goddamn city could see the constellation of freckles at her shoulder. The kind of fabric that clung everywhere it touched, which tonight was less than half her. It turned every eye in the lobby, most of them hungry, a few already cataloguingthe cost. She kept her chin up, her bourbon voice warm and dry, but her heels bit the marble as she walked, and she never unclenched the hand clutching her purse.
My job was to hover one step behind, six inches to the left, always in frame but never in focus. Security, they called it. Bodyguard, if you were feeling generous. Fucktoy, if you wanted to see her blush. I preferred “wolf,” and so did the part of me that couldn’t stop tasting every motion in the room.
She waded into a pod of industry suits, all tailored and trimmed, the air between them dense with money and the low-key threat of legacy. “Caroline, my condolences,” said one, some walking toothpick from Sazerac. “Your father was a lion.” His handshake lasted a beat too long. Another poured her a neat from a bottle older than I was, and a third circled, trying to edge me out of the ring. I bared my teeth at him, the smallest flicker, and he flinched.
Carrie’s laugh—pitch-perfect, perfectly hollow—rippled across the group, but I watched her other hand. The left one, nails painted gunmetal, tightening and releasing around her phone in a rhythm that had nothing to do with the conversation. She was tracking something, or someone. I followed her gaze and saw Marcus Ellery on the far side of the room.
Marcus. If you ever wondered what an apex predator would look like in a Brioni suit, he was it. Tall, hair full and fake-silver, with the face of a man who’d never known a day of real work in his life but still somehow had the handshake scars to prove he’d bled. His eyes were pale, almost blue, and when they landed on Carrie, it was like he’d stuck a pin through a butterfly.
He detached from his cluster of hangers-on and made for us, bourbon in one hand, phone in the other. The crowd parted. You could feel it—not fear, exactly, but respect. Or maybe just the sense that something ugly was about to happen.
He slipped an arm around Carrie’s waist, casual as old friends, and pressed his lips to her cheek. The wolf in me registered it as a hostile move. So did her spine, which stiffened under the silk. “Caroline,” he purred, “I didn’t expect to see you here. Or with him.”
His glance at me was dismissive, but the smile never broke. I nodded, nothing more, letting the tattoos at my throat do the talking.
Carrie smiled, polite as a blade. “Marcus. You remember Shivs. He’s with me tonight.”
There was a moment, an audible pause. Someone poured another round nearby, the click of glass on glass sharp enough to cut the air.
Marcus held out a hand to me, like we were equals, like he hadn’t ordered men to shoot me last week. I shook it. My grip was firmer. I let him feel it.
“I heard about the unpleasantness at Stillwater,” Marcus said, voice honeyed, just loud enough to travel to the nearest six people. “So sorry, truly. You know you can always call me if you need real security.”
The words stung. The threat underneath them was louder than the jazz trio in the corner.
Carrie sipped her drink, perfectly still. “I have all the security I need. Thanks to Shivs.”
