She had made only one demand.The hotel.Her business, her decisions, no interference.I had given her that without negotiation, the one thing she had asked for with fire still burning in her eyes.Maybe it was the beginning of earning back what I had destroyed.Maybe it was just weakness.
My wolf stirred, restless but calmer now that there was a plan.A timeline.A path forward.
She agreed,the wolf reminded me, satisfaction bleeding through the words.She’ll be ours.We can protect her properly now.
The stalker was still out there.The threats that had plagued the hotel for months, the dead animals, the sabotage, the violence.Whoever was behind it hadn’t been caught.Once Lena was legally my wife, she would have the full protection of my resources.Guards she did not know about.Surveillance she would never see.A net of security she would probably hate if she found out.
I would keep her safe anyway.Her hatred was a price I could pay.
The paperwork blurred in front of me.I set down the pen and let myself remember the way she had looked at the end of our confrontation.Not broken.Not defeated.Furious.Planning.The fire in her eyes when she had made her one demand about the hotel.
The war had just begun.
I had seen it written in the set of her jaw.She had agreed to marry me, but she had not surrendered.She was going to fight back, in whatever way she could.Find a way to hurt me.Find a way to reclaim the power I had taken from her.
I should be worried.A wife with a grudge and access to my secrets could be a dangerous thing.She could destroy me if she learned how much power she held.One word of forgiveness and I would give her everything.One genuine smile and I would hand her the knife to gut me with.
She didn’t know.Couldn’t know.If she ever realized what she was to me, she would have a weapon no shield could deflect.
She had teeth.She had fire.She hadn’t let me break her, despite everything I had done.That was worth more than a thousand willing surrenders, more than a thousand soft smiles from a woman who had never known what it meant to fight for her own survival.
I looked at the marriage certificate, her name written in my handwriting.This wasn’t the end of anything.It was the beginning.
She would be mine.Legally.Officially.Under my protection whether she wanted it or not.
And I would spend every day earning the right to deserve her.
The wolf could wait.I could wait.We had time now, time I had purchased with blood and silence.Months of forced proximity.Months of wearing down her hatred, inch by patient inch.Months of proving through action what I could never prove with words.
I had been patient before.Fifteen years of planning my revenge against the people who had destroyed my childhood.I had built my power from nothing, cultivated connections, positioned pieces on a board that spanned continents.Patience was a weapon I knew how to wield.
This was just a different kind of war.
I finished the paperwork as the afternoon light faded to gold, then gray, then darkness.The wounds on my back burned with every movement, but I didn’t stop.Didn’t rest.
There was too much to do.Security arrangements to make.Pack politics to navigate.A wedding to plan, even if it was just a courthouse ceremony with two witnesses and a woman who hated me.
And underneath it all, dangerous and impossible to kill, a flicker of hope.
She wasn’t broken.She was fighting.
Someday, maybe, she would stop fighting against me and start fighting alongside me.Someday she would look at me and see the man beneath the monster who had destroyed her family.Someday she would let me show her what she meant to me, what I had sacrificed, what I would keep sacrificing for as long as I lived.
Until then, I could wait.
For her, I could wait forever.
5
LENA
I woke up on Thursday morning still Lena Hughes.
By afternoon, I would be someone else entirely.
The spring sunlight lit up the windows of my childhood bedroom.The last time I would sleep here as a single woman.The last time I would sleep here with my own name.
My phone showed 9:47 AM.Four hours and thirteen minutes until the courthouse.
