Because he knew what he was doing. Every single move since the ice cracked had been calibrated to take me apart without crossing a line I could call him out on. A latte was just coffee, a report review was just work, the filing cabinet was just helping, that whisper was just a comment. All perfectly deniable, all perfectly innocent, and none of it was innocent and we both knew it.
I paced, made tea, burned my tongue drinking it too fast because apparently I couldn’t handle hot liquids anymore, then went out to the porch because the walls were closing in and I needed to breathe.
The steps were empty. No Fin. Just the quiet street, the bare spot by the railing where he used to sit. I lowered myself onto the top step, pulled my knees up, wrapped my arms around them.
My wrist still felt warm where his fingers had been. Not physically, not really, but my body kept circling back to the pressure of his grip and the heat of his breath on my neck and those five words in that low voice and every time I replayed it my pulse kicked up again like it was happening fresh.
I sat there for a long time. The neighborhood went quiet around me, houses going dark one by one, a car pulling into a driveway down the block, someone’s sprinkler clicking on and off in a rhythm I could hear through the stillness. My tea went cold in my hand. I didn’t drink it.
I kept thinking about what Mary said on the phone.Stop overthinking and see where it goes.Easy for her to say. Mary didn’t have a wolf king whispering in her ear about mutual dreams and making lattes from memory, didn’t have a bond humming in her chest that got louder every time he stood tooclose, a pull that I couldn’t logic my way out of no matter how hard I tried.
But she wasn’t wrong either. I liked him. That was the part I kept trying to argue around and couldn’t. Under the anger and the betrayal and the mortification, under all of it, I liked him. I’d liked him for two years before I knew what he was and I still liked him now and no amount of ice queen bullshit was going to change that.
I was going to kiss him again and we both knew it. He was taking me apart one move at a time and I was letting him.
“I am so fucked,” I said to nobody.
Not about the kiss. About everything. The bond, the pull, his breath on my neck, the fact that I didn’t want to fight it anymore. Falling for a wolf king who grunted, drank too much coffee, turned into a dog, and whispered things in elevators. Sitting on my empty porch with my burned tongue and my cold tea and my racing pulse, I wasn’t sure I wanted to stop.
12
— • —
Andrea
Tuesday. Ordinary, nothing Tuesday, except Finneas was wearing a dark shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows and I’d been watching the tendon in his forearm flex while he wrote for twenty minutes from my desk. Through the glass. Like a goddamn creep.
He buzzed my desk. “Walk me through the projections for the Q3 account.”
I grabbed the file and went in. Stood across from his desk, opened to the summary page. Revenue forecasts, quarterly targets, client retention numbers.
“Page three is where the discrepancy starts.” I turned the file toward him, leaned over the desk to point at the figure. “They reported a 12% increase but when you cross-reference with the original filing it doesn’t add up.”
“You changed your perfume.”
I stopped. “What?”
“You’re wearing a different perfume today.”
“I’m walking you through a quarterly projection and you’re sniffing me?”
“I’m observant.”
“You’re derailing.”
“I can do both.”
I stared at him. He looked back from his chair, chin resting on his hand, eyes moving from my eyes to my mouth to my collar, slow and unhurried, like the Q3 account could burn to the ground and he wouldn’t notice.
“The discrepancy,” I said. “Focus.”
“I’m focused.”
“On my perfume.”
“I said I can do both.”
I leaned further over the desk to point at the next column. “This line doesn’t match the quarterly total.”
