Page 20 of Ruthless Bond

Her breath turns white in the cold air, her ponytail swinging behind her, her body moving with efficient grace. She’s beautiful. A human woman running along a river in a city that belongs to me. Then she feels me.

I’m not close enough for her to see me, but the bond carries my presence to her like a frequency she can’t consciously hear but her body recognizes. She slows. Stops. Looks toward the bridge.

I stay perfectly still in the shadows as her gaze sweeps past the place where I’m standing. The hair on my arms rises. Then the wind shifts.

My scent reaches her. I see the exact moment it hits. She goes still, just as she does in the elevator or when I touch her hand, her body orienting toward me. She stands on the path in the cold for a full minute. Waiting.

I don’t go to her. I stand in the dark and let the wind carry my scent to her. I watch her body react to the ghost of me, and I add it to the long list of ways I’m destroying the boundary between what she wants and what I’m making her want.

Then she runs. Fast. I follow at a distance until she disappears inside her building.

I stay across the street longer than I should, staring up at the windows, listening until I pick out the rhythm of her heartbeat above the noise of the city. Only when it begins to slow do I turn away.

I make it three blocks before I realize I can’t go home like this.

The wolf is too close. My skin feels too tight. My teeth ache. Every scent in the city arrives too sharp, every heartbeat too loud. Sophia’s is still the loudest, even with distance opening between us. I turn south instead of east.

We keep a warehouse near the river that doesn’t exist on any public Voronov property list. There’s a fenced yard behind it, shielded by brick on three sides and railroad tracks on the fourth. We use it when wolves need room and the compound is too far.

Roman is already there. Of course he is. He stands beside his car with his jacket off, sleeves rolled to his elbows. “You smell like her,” he says.

“Don’t.”

His mouth curves. A challenge. “You going to keep pretending?”

My wolf surges. This time I let it.

The shift tears through me. Bones shortening and lengthening at once. Shoulders collapsing forward. Hands becoming paws before they hit the pavement. Fur breaking through skin in a wave of heat that burns for half a heartbeat and then becomes relief.

The world changes. Scent replaces color. Sound acquires shape. The city becomes layers of exhaust and river water and old blood and distant food and thousands of human lives stacked on top of one another.

And under all of it: Vanilla. Her.

My wolf lifts his head toward the West Loop. Roman shifts beside me. His wolf is dark gray, leaner than mine, built for speed where I am built for force. He circles once, energy snapping off of him, then stops. We look at each other. For all the pushing he does in human skin, the truth is simpler here.

His wolf lowers its head first. Recognition. Alpha.

I should feel satisfaction. Instead my head turns west again. Toward her. Even like this, especially like this, everything in me points to Sophia.

Roman bumps his shoulder against mine hard enough to start a fight if I want one. I don’t.

We run. For twenty minutes there are no shell companies, no federal analysts, no DeSanto, no father waiting in the shadows of my authority. There is pavement under my paws. Cold air in my lungs. My brother beside me.

And my mate’s scent sitting at the edge of the city like a promise I already know I’ll bleed to keep.

Hours later I head home. To my empty penthouse, to my empty bed, to the silence that has become unbearable in a way it never was before.

I pour a drink I don’t need and stand at my window and look at the city and think about Roman and the Cicero crew and the federal investigation and the hundred fragile systems I’m holding together with both hands.

And I think about Sophia on the running path, standing still in the cold, waiting for something she couldn’t see.

The wolf in my chest is lying still, nose pointed toward the West Loop, toward the building where she’s sleeping, and his patience is more terrifying than his hunger because it means he’s done fighting. He knows what’s coming. He knows I can’t hold this line much longer.

Chapter Ten

Sophia

Istay late on a Thursday.