I closed my eyes.Below me, his footsteps moved across the ground floor.From the study to the kitchen, the pause while water ran, then the measured path back through the hallway.
Then the stairs.
Silence.The kind that meant he had stopped moving, stopped walking, stopped everything except listening.
His footsteps moved away instead.Back toward his study.The door opened.Closed.
Away from me.Again.
I exhaled and waited for the relief that should have come.
So why was my body listening for his footsteps like I wanted him to climb those stairs?Why did my pulse pick up at the creak of the staircase, hope and dread tangled together?I hated him.I hated myself more for still getting wet when I heard him moving through the house.
I finished the wine and turned off the lamp.Lay in the dark with the ring heavy on my finger.
The anger was still there.But it was getting harder to find beneath the weight of warm coffee and a man who kept walking away from my door instead of through it.
Tomorrow.The plan would feel clearer tomorrow.
10
RAPHAEL
Five-fourteen AM and I was already failing.
The coffee had to be timed precisely.She came downstairs at six-twenty on weekdays, six-forty on weekends, and a French press turned bitter if it sat longer than ten minutes after steeping.I had tested it.Measured the extraction window against my own heightened senses and then calibrated for human perception, the warmth she would register against her palm when she wrapped both hands around the mug the way she did every morning, like it was the only steady thing in her day.
Sunday.Six-forty window.I wouldn’t even grind the beans until six-thirty-two, which left me an hour and eighteen minutes of knowing exactly how she liked her coffee and having nowhere to put that information.
I told myself this wasn’t pathetic.
My wolf disagreed with the self-assessment for different reasons.He wanted me upstairs.Wanted me at her door, wanted me through her door, wanted the locked handle to splinter under my fist and the scent of her sleep-warm skin close enough to taste.Four nights she had locked that door.Four nights I had stood at the base of the stairs and listened to her breathing slow into something that wasn’t quite rest, her heartbeat carrying the residual bitterness of whatever she told herself before she closed her eyes.
I never went up.The wolf never forgave me for it.
The study was dark except for the desk lamp.I preferred it that way when she was sleeping above me.The darkness made my senses sharper, pulled the world into scent and sound, and I could track her through two floors of hardwood and plaster as easily as I could track a deer through open forest.The soft rasp of sheets.A shift of weight on the mattress.Her breathing, steady and stubborn even in sleep.
Patient.We wait.
The wolf settled.Not happy.Tolerant.
My phone buzzed at five-twenty.Petrov, punctual as always.
“Report.”
“Bishop.Three sightings in forty-eight hours.”Petrov’s voice was flat and professional.He had the emotional range of a loaded weapon.“Parking structure yesterday, fourteen-oh-seven.Service entrance approach, sixteen-thirty.And this morning, oh-four-fifty, he was sitting in a rental sedan across from the staff entrance.”
I leaned back.The leather protested.“Photos?”
“Sent.”
I opened the file one-handed.Joe Bishop.He had sandy hair and pressed khakis, the kind of jaw that came from good orthodontics and inherited confidence.In the first image he was leaning against a concrete pillar in the parking structure, phone raised, taking pictures of the hotel’s rear exits.The second showed him near the service entrance, hands in pockets, watching the door like he was waiting for someone specific to come through it.
The third was from forty minutes ago.Sitting in a rented Audi.Engine off.Staring at the building where my wife worked.
The wolf’s response was not complicated.Kill.Eliminate.The rival who circled his mate’s territory with his soft human hands and his wounded-boy entitlement and his conviction that years of tepid courtship entitled him to a woman who had chosen someone else.Every alpha instinct I possessed screamed to end this now, drag the boy out of his rented car by his pressed collar and leave him unable to walk again.
“Want me to handle it?”Petrov asked.
