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My pulse betrays me with a single sharp kick.

“This is work,” I say evenly. “Fate has nothing to do with it.”

His gaze sharpens. “Of course.”

But the way he says it doesn’t agree.

The giant estate around us feels suddenly smaller. The air charged. Like the calm outside is just waiting for someone to strike a match.

And if Ramsey is the storm gathering beyond the horizon—Nash Cross might be the lightning already striking the ground in front of me. And I realize, with zero amusement, that this moment right here wins hands down as the most surprising twist of fate’s fucked up sense of humor yet.

3

NASH

Ishift as soon as the sun is down and run until my lungs burn.

The woods bordering the Giovanni estate are old growth. Dense oak and black pine press in from every side; the kind of forest that’s been here much longer than the city it borders. Wide paths have been cleared through it, leaving a soft floor of pine needles beneath my paws. My wolf doesn’t give a shit about the aesthetics. He just needs to move. To burn off whatever this is crawling under my skin before I do something I can’t walk back from.

Like knock on her door.

With muscles on the verge of cramping, I push harder. Branches whip past. The moon has crested the ridge, throwing silver light in broken patterns across the ground, and my wolf catches each flash of it like fuel. He’s been keyed up since the moment we walked out of that office and found her standing there.

Found her. Like I didn’t know exactly where she’d be.

Like I hadn’t imagined that exact moment over and over again. Mostly with my hand wrapped around my dick. I hadn’t pictured a scenario where she pretended not to know me, but I’m not surprised. Mia Reyes likes to be in control.

She’s probably cursing me right now for surprising her like that. And it might have been amusing if I weren’t so twisted up about her. Because when I walked out of that meeting, and she was standing there, something in my chest locked into place with a quiet, terrible certainty.

It’s a problem I’m currently trying to outrun.

I’ve run ops in hostile territory. I’ve stood in boardrooms with men who were planning to kill me before the ink dried on whatever they were pretending to negotiate. Hell, I built an elite war college from the ground up out of sheer will and an inherited property that was one bad season away from foreclosure. I don’t rattle easily.

Mia Reyes rattles the fuck out of me.

Two years. Two years of my wolf going quiet and cooperative, of meetings and logistics and building something real in Crossvale, and I’d almost managed to convince myself what I remembered about her was exaggerated. That I’d been romanticizing a single night. That no one is actually that irresistible.

Then she straightened her shoulders in the corridor and looked at me like she wanted to set me on fire, and I knew I’d been lying to myself the entire time.

Whatever I remembered, she’s more.

My wolf snarls at that, and I give myself over to his frustration, losing my humanity since at least that quiets my mind temporarily. For the next mile, I’m pure instinct. Wind. Speed. The creak of branches and the distant sound of the river threading through the lower ravine.

But even my wolf can’t outrun this.

He slows at the ridge overlook, nosing at the air. The city spreads below us, the lights of Indigo Hills blinking like scattered embers against the dark mountain basin. I’ve seen a hundred cities from a hundred vantage points, and most of them left me cold. I saw everything as strategy. Assets and liabilities. Entry and exit points. A catalog of vulnerabilities.

This one is different. Maybe because I know what it cost her.

I’ve been watching Indigo Hills for years; the way Franco Giovanni ran it like a personal fiefdom, the way corruption filtered down from his table to every corner of city life. The way the mafia pack preyed on the weak because there was no structure in place to stop them. When Grey Diavolo reached out through quiet back channels two weeks ago with news of their change in leadership, I paid attention. Not just to the tactical opportunity. To what he was trying to build. How he was going about building it.

A city like this one, hidden, insular, bruised from decades of bad leadership, doesn’t heal overnight. But it heals faster when the alpha at its center is the kind of man who actually gives a damn about the people in it rather than what they can produce for him. Grey’s the real thing. His mate is too. Watching Lexi Giovanni stand at the head of a pack that had every reason to reject her, watching her hold it together through sheer force of will and character, I understood what Crossvale was being asked to protect.

What they’re creating here is something worth protecting.

I’d have offered the alliance even without Ramsey’s approach. His attempt to recruit me only confirmed the decision. He came to me offering money and territory and the quiet promise of violence against anyone who stood in the way of whatever empire he was constructing from the rubble of Franco’s leftovers. He pitched it like a business deal and watched my face the whole time, looking for the moment I’d calculate the margin and say yes.

I said no.