Page 33 of Ruthless Bond

The thought makes me nauseated. Not because it’s implausible. Because it’s the only theory that fits all the data.

The first time he touched my hand, I felt it for hours. The first time he brushed my arm in the hallway, my whole body oriented toward him like a compass. The dreams started after a week of proximity. The physical arousal, the ache, the consuming need that fills my nights and bleeds into my days, all of it escalated in direct proportion to the amount of time I spent in his presence.

That’s not a love story. That’s a dose-response curve.

I lie down in the dark and stare at the ceiling and try to separate what I feel from what’s being done to me, and I can’t. That’s the cruelest part. If there is a signal, a mechanism, a biological force that’s amplifying my desire for Dominic Voronov, it’s woven so deeply into my own wanting that I can’t find the seam. I can’t tell where the natural attraction ends and the manipulation begins.

I wanted him the first day. I remember that clearly. Before any of this escalated, before the dreams and the ache and the consuming need. I saw him walk through a doorway and I felt a pull that was immediate and deep and entirely mine. That part was real. I’m sure of it.

But everything since? The escalation, the intensity, the way my body has become an instrument tuned to the frequency of his presence? I’m not sure of any of it. And the uncertainty is corrosive, eating away at the foundation of every feeling I have for him, because how do you trust your own heart when you can’t verify that the feelings in it belong to you?

I turn over and press my face into the pillow. It smells like laundry detergent and nothing else. No warm skin. No dark, animal scent that makes my brain go quiet and my body go loud.

I miss it. Even now, even suspecting what I suspect, I miss his scent. I miss the heat of his body. I miss the weight of his arm around my waist. I miss the sound of his voice saying my name in that register that lands between my ribs and lower.

That’s the trap. If it is a trap. Wanting the mechanism of your own undoing. Lying in the dark aching for the man who might be engineering the ache.

I don’t sleep well. The apartment feels too big and too empty and the bed feels too cold without a heat source I’ve never actually had in it but that my body has apparently decided it requires. I lie on my back and stare at the ceiling and try to think about financial statements, vendor contracts, the clean logic of numbers that don’t lie. But the numbers keep dissolving into the memory of his hands on my hips, the sound of his breathing against my neck, the way his entire body pressed against mine with a solidity that made me feel simultaneously safer and more endangered than I’ve ever felt in my life.

I try reading. I try watching something on my laptop. I try making tea and drinking it slowly and doing the breathing exercises I learned from a meditation app I downloaded in grad school and used exactly twice. Nothing works. The pull is louder at night, when the city is quiet and there’s nothing between me and the awareness of the distance between us, and tonight the pull is deafening.

Around midnight I give up on sleep and sit at the kitchen counter with the legal pad and a pen and I do what I do when emotion overwhelms logic: I make a list. Two columns. Column one: evidence that my feelings for Dominic Voronov are real, organic, self-generated. Column two: evidence that they’re being externally influenced by a mechanism I don’t understand.

Column one is short. I was attracted to him the first day. The attraction predates any escalation. I find him interesting, intelligent, compelling. These are normal responses to a powerful, charismatic man.

Column two is longer. The escalation follows a proximity curve. Physical contact amplifies the response in ways that feel disproportionate. The dreams began after repeated exposure. The physical arousal scales with time spent in his presence. These are not normal responses. These are symptoms.

I stare at the two columns. The evidence is not conclusive. A good analyst would say the sample size is too small, the variables too uncontrolled, the subject too compromised by her own involvement to draw reliable conclusions. A good analyst would say more data is needed.

A good analyst would not be sitting in her kitchen at midnight in her underwear making a pro-con list about whether she’s in love or under the influence of a biological agent produced by a man who might not be human.

I tear the page off the legal pad and fold it twice and put it in my purse. Not because I’ll need it. Because writing it down made it real, and keeping it close makes it mine. My analysis. My data. My uncertainty. Whatever is happening to me, I’m going to understand it before it finishes happening.

I go back to bed. I dream about hands on my body and a voice in my ear and a pull in my chest that leads me through the dark toward something warm and waiting. In the dream I follow it gladly. In the dream I don’t ask whose want I’m carrying. In the dream I don’t care.

I wake up at three in the morning with my hand between my legs and his name dissolving on my tongue and tears running sideways across my face into my hair.

Chapter Fifteen

Dominic

The kiss broke something open that I can’t close.

Three days since I stood in her apartment and put my mouth on hers and almost marked her on the back of her couch. Three days since I pulled away and said something true and dangerous and drove home knowing I had no intention of telling her everything yet. Three days, and I am coming apart.

The wolf is no longer background noise. He’s at the front of my skull, pressing against the backs of my eyes, running his feral hunger through my bloodstream like a drug. I can’t think clearly. I can’t sit in meetings without losing the thread because her scent drifts up from one floor below and my concentration shatters against it like glass on concrete. I can’t sleep without dreaming about her, and the dreams are so vivid, so detailed in their physicality, that I wake up hard and aching and close to shifting.

I’m shorter with my people. Gregor brings me a report on the Pilsen project and I snap at him over a formatting error that I wouldn’t have noticed two weeks ago. Danny Sorvino comes in with a zoning update and I dismiss him before he’s finished talking because his heartbeat is annoying me. His heartbeat. The sound of a human man’s heart pumping blood through his body is annoying me because it’s not her heartbeat, and the only heartbeat I want to hear is one floor down, steady and calm, beating at a rate that tells me she’s working.

On Wednesday I nearly shift in my office. The trigger is absurd. A man from accounting, someone I’ve never spoken to, walks past Sophia’s desk and puts his hand on the back of her chair to lean in and ask her a question. He doesn’t touch her. His hand is on the chair, not on her body. But from one floor up, through the ceiling and the carpet and the concrete, I sense the proximity of a male body to my mate and the wolf lunges so hard my vision goes red and my hands transform into claws against the surface of my desk. I leave gouges in the wood before I pull myself back. Deep grooves carved by fingernails that are no longer entirely fingernails. I spend ten minutes in my private bathroom running cold water over my hands and watching my fingers return to their human shape.

I have the desk replaced that afternoon.

Roman notices. Of course Roman notices. My brother has been watching me like a wolf watches a wounded packmate, with attention that’s partly concern and partly calculation. He sees the fraying edges. He sees the volatility. After what happened at the warehouse, the dynamic between us has shifted enough that he’s not needling me the way he would have a month ago. The admiration from that night bought me a margin of tolerance. But it’s narrowing.

“You need to do something about this,” he says on Thursday morning, standing in my doorway with a coffee he doesn’t offer me. “Whatever’s happening with the Marchelli girl, it’s bleeding into operations. Gregor came to me yesterday asking if you were alright. Gregor. The man who has the emotional range of a filing cabinet is concerned about your wellbeing. That’s how bad it’s gotten.”

“I’m handling it.”