Page 50 of Ruthless Bond

“Yes.”

“Your tie is backward.”

He looks down. I leave while he’s fixing it, and I’m smiling in the elevator and I’m smiling at my desk and Katya sees the smile and shakes her head and goes back to her coffee, and I am happy. Dangerously, recklessly, willfully happy in a way that I know is built on a foundation I haven’t fully examined and I don’t care.

The rest of the week follows the same pattern. Work. Him. Work that’s interrupted by him. Nights at his penthouse that start with dinner and conversation and end with his body against mine and the doubled heartbeat lulling me to sleep.

We cook together on Wednesday. He teaches me to make risotto, standing behind me at the stove, his hands over mine on the wooden spoon, his chin on my shoulder. The risotto burns because he starts kissing my neck and I stop stirring and we end up on the kitchen floor with the smoke alarm going off. He orders Thai while I lie on the tile laughing at the ceiling.

Thursday night he works late and I fall asleep in his bed alone, and when he slides in at midnight the bond flares so hard at his proximity that I wake up gasping, my body arching toward his before I’m fully conscious. He pulls me against him and murmurs something I don’t catch and the doubled heartbeat synchronizes and I’m asleep again in seconds. In the morning I ask him what he said. He tells me it was nothing. The look on his face tells me it was everything.

I start to learn the shape of his life. The penthouse, which I first thought was cold and impersonal, reveals itself in layers. The books on his shelves, which are in six languages and span centuries of publication dates, though I’m trying not to think too hard about what that implies. The kitchen, which is clearly the room where he’s most himself. Sometimes he stands at the window, looking out at the city with the gaze of a man surveying territory rather than admiring a view.

He tells me things. Carefully, selectively, always stopping short of the truth I already know, but the fragments add up. Stories about traveling through Italy when he was “younger” that include details about food and architecture that don’t match any era I can identify. References to historical events that he frames as things he “read about” but describes with the sensory specificity of someone who was there. A passing comment about watching Chicago rebuild after a fire that he immediately redirects when he sees my expression.

I don’t push. Not because I don’t want to know, but because pushing means arriving at the conversation I’m not ready to have. The one where I tell him I know what he is and he tells me what the mark really means and we both have to look at the thing between us without the comfortable blur of avoidance.

I’m not ready. I know I’m not ready because the happiness is still new and still fragile, and I’m afraid that the truth, the full truth, all of it laid out in the light, will break something that I’m not sure I can put back together.

So I leave the drawer closed. I leave the notebook unread. I leave the questions unasked. And I let myself fall.

Katya watches all of this with an expression I can’t quite decipher. On Friday, walking back from the coffee cart, she says something that stops me on the sidewalk.

“He’s happier than I’ve ever seen him.”

I look at her. She’s not smiling. She’s serious in a way that goes deeper than her usual professional composure.

“I’ve been with this family for a long time,” she says. “I’ve watched him carry things that would break most people. He doesn’t break. He calcifies. He turns whatever he’s feeling into strategy and control and he keeps moving. That’s how he’s survived.”

She pauses. Her eyes find the silver scar at my neckline and something complex moves across her face.

“You’ve cracked him open. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. But he’s alive right now in a way he hasn’t been in years, and I want you to know that before whatever happens next happens.”

“What’s going to happen next?”

“The truth always happens next.” She takes a sip of her coffee. “The question is whether you’re both strong enough for it.”

She walks back toward the building. I stand on the sidewalk with my coffee getting cold in my hand and the silver scar throbbing gently at my neck and I think about Katya’s words. The truth always happens next. She’s right. The drawer won’t stay closed forever. The notebook won’t stay unread. The questions I’m not asking are piling up and the weight of them is growing and sooner or later the fragile balance of avoidance and happiness is going to give way under the weight.

But not today. Today I’m going to go back to my desk and do my job and tonight I’m going to go home with a man who looks at me like I’m the answer to a question he’s been asking for a century, and I’m going to let myself be happy for one more day.

Chapter Twenty-One

Dominic

Ihave never been addicted to anything.

Wolves don’t become chemically dependent the way humans do. Alcohol burns through us too fast. Drugs barely register. Even the rush of violence fades cleanly.

Sophia is different.

Sophia is the first addiction of my life and I understand now, with the clarity of a man who has watched humans destroy themselves over substances for over a century, why they do it. Because the high is worth the destruction. Because the alternative to having her is not having her, and that alternative is a darkness so complete that I can’t look at it directly.

I’ve had lovers. Over a hundred and thirty-two years, I’ve taken women to bed with varying degrees of affection and detachment, and every one of them was a transaction. Pleasure exchanged, needs met, the door closing behind them when it was done. None of them touched the wolf. None of them reached the place in my chest where the bond lives. They were bodies, warm and willing, and I was grateful and I was generous and I forgot them.

They were nothing like this. The mate bond has burned her into my memory so completely that every time I touch her the record deepens. The specific pressure of her fingers on my chest when she’s about to kiss me. The sound she makes, a soft, broken gasp, when I first enter her. Her unexpected, bright laugh. The look she gives me afterward, flushed and satisfied and sharp again as her mind clicks back into gear while her body is still humming.

She’s magnificent. She is the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever encountered. I have been alive for over a century and I have seen wonders that would break a human mind. None of them, not one, compares to Sophia Marchelli sitting on my desk with her skirt wrinkled and her hair messed and a stack of ruined reports under her and her mouth curving into a smile that’s just for me.