Page 15 of Ruthless Bond

She leans forward to take the folder and her hair falls across her face and I catch her scent at full concentration, vanilla and warm skin and underneath it the darker note I’ve been trying to identify for two weeks.

Amber.

Not perfume. Her own scent deepening when her temperature rises, when her blood runs close to the surface, when she’s sitting three feet from me in a dark office and her pupils are wider than they should be.

She knows. Not about the bond, not about what I am. But she knows that what she feels around me isn’t ordinary attraction. I can see it in the way she reaches for the folder and her fingers hesitate, as if touching something I’ve touched is an intimacy she’s not sure she wants to accept.

Our hands meet on the folder.

I don’t plan it. Or maybe I do. Maybe my body has been planning it since she walked through the door and every second between then and now has been the approach, the slow narrowing of distance that a wolf does before he closes the gap.

My fingers brush hers and she goes still. Completely still, the way a deer goes still, every muscle locked, every sense focused on the point of contact. Her pulse jumps. I can see it in her throat and hear it in my ears, the sudden acceleration of her heart, and her scent blooms, warm and dark and unmistakably aroused.

She looks up at me. Her lips part. There’s a question in her eyes that she doesn’t ask, and the answer to it is yes, this is happening, this has been happening since the first second you walked into this room two weeks ago, and neither of us is going to stop it.

I hold her gaze. Three seconds. Five. The air between us is so charged I can feel it on my skin, and my wolf is screaming at me to close the distance, to put my hands in her hair and my mouth on her throat and find out if she tastes the way she smells.

I don’t.

I release the folder. I pull my hand back.

“Review the files,” I say. “Let me know what you find.”

She stands. The folder is pressed against her chest like a shield. Her face is flushed from her jaw to her hairline and her breathing is faster than it was when she walked in.

“Goodnight, Mr. Voronov.”

“Dominic.”

She pauses in the doorway. Doesn’t turn around. I watch the line of her shoulders, the tension in them, the effort of not looking back.

“Goodnight, Dominic.”

She leaves. The door closes. Her footsteps retreat down the hallway, faster than they came, and the elevator takes her down and away and the distance opens between us.

I sit in the dark for a long time.

I can tell she’s doing exactly what her father did. Watching us. Tracking us. Building a picture of this family that gets more detailed and more dangerous with every day she spends inside these walls.

And I’m letting her. Because my wolf won’t let me send her away, and my own desire won’t let me want to, and somewhere in the space between those two failures I’ve lost the ability to tell the difference between protecting the pack and protecting the bond.

I pick up my phone. I think about texting her. Something professional, something meaningless, anything to close the distance that I just forced open.

I put the phone down.

I turn off the lamp and sit in my office in the dark, breathing in the ghost of her scent, knowing exactly what I’m doing and knowing I’m going to do it again tomorrow.

Chapter Eight

Sophia

Three weeks in, and I have two lives.

The daytime version is the one I show the world. Sophia Marchelli, financial analyst at Voronov Construction, employee of the month in a contest nobody’s running. I arrive at eight, sit at my desk on the thirty-eighth floor, and do the job I was hired to do. I review vendor contracts. I reconcile accounts. I flag discrepancies to Patricia, who routes them to Dominic, who responds with decisions that are always swift, always precise, and always structured to keep me informed enough to be useful without informing me enough to be dangerous.

I’ve reorganized the filing system for the Pilsen project. I’ve streamlined the payment processing for three subcontractor accounts. I’ve built a spreadsheet that cross-references vendor registration dates with payment initiation dates, and the patterns it reveals are so clean, so deliberate, they’re almost beautiful. Like a well-designed lock. Someone built this financial architecture with the same care a watchmaker uses on a movement, every piece calibrated to serve a function that isn’t the one written on the label.

Patricia told me last week that Dominic is pleased with my work. She said it like you’d relay a weather report, neutral and factual, but I saw her watching me afterward, trying to figure out if I understood what it meant to have the boss pleased. I understood. I just don’t know yet whether his pleasure is about my competence or about keeping me busy enough that I stop asking questions.