Jaleesa’s eyes move past me. Land on the brothers. She didn’t know they were here. I watch the realization hit—her lips parting, her posture stiffening, the instinct to cover her throat with her hand arrested halfway through the motion. She drops her hand. Forces it to her side. But the embarrassment is there—not in a blush, because her skin doesn’t betray her that way, but in the shift of her jaw, the way her weight moves to her back foot, the micro-retreat of a woman who just exposed herself in front of an audience she didn’t expect.
“I should—” She takes a half step back toward the hall. “You have company. I’ll—”
“No.”
The word comes from the deepest part of my chest. Not loud. Not a growl, not a command, not the alpha broadcasting dominance. Just a single syllable, dense with everything I’ve been holding since I watched her walk out of a coatroom with her head held high.
I reach past her and hold the door wide. Look at Grayson. At Liam. Both on their feet, Grayson with the expression of a man who understands exactly what he’s looking at, and Liam with the expression of a man whose certainty has just developed its first visible crack.
“They can go.” I don’t take my eyes off her. “Not you. Not when you’re right where you belong.”
The silence holds for three heartbeats. Then Grayson moves. He crosses the room, pauses beside me, and places his hand on my shoulder. One squeeze. The kind of gesture our father used to give us when words weren’t his language, and touch was the only fluency he had left. Then he’s through the door, past Jaleesa—and I watch him nod at her, brief, respectful, the CEO acknowledging a woman who just won the most important case of her career with evidence his brother handed her.
Liam follows. Slower. He stops in the doorway and looks at Jaleesa’s mark—at the dark, permanent evidence of everything he’s arranged his life to avoid—and his expression is unreadable. Then he looks at me. Whatever he finds makes his jaw tighten.
“You’re sure about this.” Not a question. An audit.
“Get out, Liam.”
The ghost of something crosses his face. Not a smile—Liam doesn’t smile at biology—but a recalculation. The accountant adjusting a forecast he’d thought was final. He leaves without another word. His footsteps recede down the hall. The elevator chimes.
The door closes.
We’re alone.
She’s still standing just inside the threshold. Her chin is lifted. Her shoulders are squared. The pride that carried her through every courtroom and mediation session and coatroom and hallway and every morning she walked away from me is right there, blazing in her posture, daring me to make this easy.
I don’t make it easy. I make it honest.
“No scarf.”
“No scarf.”
“You walked through the lobby.”
“I did.”
“Past the concierge.”
“He stared. I stared back. He looked away first.”
The laugh that tears out of me is raw and broken and more real than anything I’ve produced in weeks. Of course, she stared down my concierge. Of course, she won.
“No,for now?” I ask. Because I have to. Because the phrase has been a blade between us since the lodge, and if she’s going to remove it, I need to hear her say it.
She holds my gaze. Those dark eyes, steady, fierce, the ones that dismantled my legal arguments and my belief system andevery wall I ever built. Her throat works—a swallow, the only sign that the composure is costing her. The mark pulses at her neck, dark against her skin, visible and unhidden andmine.
“No,for now.”
Two words. The absence of two other words. The loophole closed, the escape clause expired, the contract signed without reservation by the most brilliant, infuriating, magnificent attorney I have ever faced across a negotiating table.
I cross the room the way I crossed the lodge. Not slowly. Not tentatively. The distance between us collapses because I am done with distance, done with eleven inches and seven feet and the twenty-three-minute drive between her apartment and the office where I spent my nights pretending the walls still stood.
My hands find her face. Her skin is warm. Her curls crush against my palms. I tilt her chin up, and my thumb traces the mark—mymark, uncovered, proud, the scar tissue that says she chose to stop hiding what we are.
“Say it.”
Her eyebrow arcs. The defiance that is her native language, her first response to every demand, every challenge, every alpha who has ever stood in front of her and expected compliance. “You know what I am.”
