Away from me.
I lay in the dark and listened to the silence he left behind.
The ledger grew longer.Every night he stayed away was another data point.
He was keeping his distance.Good.That gave me time to study him without getting close enough to forget why I was here.
This was what I wanted.
The words rang thinner than yesterday.I was too tired to examine why.
8
RAPHAEL
I hadn’t slept.
Four in the morning and I was in my study with a glass of whiskey I hadn’t touched, listening to the house breathe around me.The pipes ticking in the walls.The heating system cycling on against the mountain cold that pushed through the old stone.And above all of it, threading through every other sound like a needle through silk, the steady rhythm of her breathing.
Two floors up.Door locked.Heart rate slow and even, dipping in and out of light sleep.She had turned over twice in the last hour.The sheets rustled each time, a soft whisper of cotton that my ears had no business catching from this distance.
My wolf tracked every sound with the focus of a predator staking out prey.Every shift of her body, every murmur she made in her sleep.He had been doing it all night.Counting her heartbeats the way other men counted sheep, each one a confirmation that she was here, in our territory, breathing our air.
Ours.
I tipped the whiskey glass and watched the amber liquid catch the desk lamp.Didn’t drink it.The scars on my ribs ached when I shifted in the chair, the claw marks still tender where the skin was knitting together.Three weeks since the Pakhan’s enforcers had done their work and the wounds were healing slower than they should have.Stress.Sleep deprivation.The constant low-grade agony of having my mate under my roof and not being able to touch her.
I set the glass down and pulled up my phone.Six messages from Viktor.One from the Pakhan’s secretary, confirming this afternoon’s arrangements in language so clinical it could have been a dental appointment.
Your associates will arrive at fourteen hundred hours.Mrs.Antonov’s presence is expected.
Mrs.Antonov.Two words that meant she was alive.Two words that meant the Pakhan had accepted the marriage as sufficient protection to stay his hand.For now.For as long as the inner circle believed she wasn’t a liability.
Today they would judge for themselves.
I closed the phone and pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes.The study smelled of leather and old wood and, underneath everything, her.Apples and cream.The scent had seeped into the manor’s bones in the two weeks since she had moved in, subtle and persistent, layering itself over the sandalwood and dust.My wolf rolled in it like a dog in grass.
The floorboards above me creaked.She was awake.My body went still with attention, tracking the soft pad of her feet on hardwood as she moved to the bathroom, then the sound of water running, then the click of a light switch.
I stood up before I could stop myself.Sat back down.Pressed my knuckles against the desk until the wood groaned.
Go to her.
No.
She is awake.She is alone.Go.
I went to the kitchen instead.
Alice arrived at six-thirty.She didn’t ask why I was already on my second pot of coffee, standing at the counter with the posture of a man who had been vertical for hours.She had stopped asking three days ago, around the same time she had stopped pretending she didn’t hear me pacing the ground floor at midnight.
She set her bag on the counter and assessed me with the quiet thoroughness of a woman who had been reading the emotional weather of this house for forty years.Her eyes lingered on the shadows under mine, the stiffness in my left shoulder where the deepest claw marks pulled when I reached for the mugs.
“She ate the lamb,” Alice said, opening the refrigerator.“And most of the Burgundy.”
I hadn’t known that.I had been in my study when she came home, had listened to her move through the ground floor, heard the faint clink of silverware on china, and assumed she had eaten in the dining room.Alone.The way she preferred it.
“She has good taste.”Alice pulled out eggs, butter, cream.“You used to.”
