Page 72 of Ruthless Bond

“DeSanto said he’s just a businessman,” the man says. But the certainty in his voice has a crack in it.

“DeSanto is wrong.”

He stands up. He walks back to the column. He picks up his phone. The doubt is still there, sitting in the line of his shoulders, in the way he keeps glancing at the rolling door as though he expects it to open any second.

Smart man. Wrong decision.

I close my eyes. I tried. My father would be proud. He always said that a warning, even one that wouldn’t be heeded, was the ethical thing to do before violence became inevitable.

The waiting gives me time to think about us.

I’m sitting on a warehouse floor with my hands zip-tied behind my back and three armed men between me and the door, and the thing I’m thinking about is not escape. It’s the fact that I miss him. That I want him here. Not just because he’ll save me, though he will. Because his presence is the thing I want most in the world, and the wanting isn’t coming from the bond.

The bond is muffled. Suppressed. Running at a fraction of its normal capacity. And I still want him. I still love him. I still feel the ache of his absence like a hole in the center of my chest, and the ache isn’t biological. It’s emotional. It’s the missing of a person, not the withdrawal of a mechanism.

This is what Katya was trying to tell me. The volume was wrong. The feeling was right. And now, sitting in the quiet that the drug created, with the bond running on fumes instead of full power, I can hear my own feelings clearly for the first time since the mark was placed. They’re quieter. Simpler. Stripped of the amplification and the overwhelming physical intensity that made me question their authenticity.

They’re still there. The love, the desire, the admiration, the trust that survived the betrayal and is waiting to be rebuilt. All of it, mine. All of it, real.

He lied to me. He manipulated the bond. He marked me without consent. And I love him anyway. Not because the bond tells me to. Because he cooked for me and laughed at Mr. Whiskers and told me he was terrified of the way I look at him when I’m figuring something out. Because he let me go when I asked him to and sat alone in our apartment and didn’t follow me even though every instinct he had was screaming at him to close the distance.

He’s a flawed man. He’s a dangerous man. He’s a man who made choices that I may never fully forgive. But he’s my man. He’s been my man since the day I walked into his office and felt the pull that started before any bond had time to build. And I’m going to tell him that, if I survive the next hour.

Present tense. Not past.

I love him.

The bond surges. Not a gradual strengthening. A flood. His heartbeat slams into my chest with a force that makes me gasp, loud and fast and furious, and I know, the way you know lightning is about to strike by the taste of metal in the air, that he’s here.

The man with the broken jaw stands up. The man with the scar pulls his gun. The silent one by the door takes a step backward.

Too late.

The rolling door explodes inward.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Dominic

Lex finds them in twenty-two minutes.

A warehouse in Bridgeport, south of the expressway, registered to a shell company that traces back to Tony DeSanto through two layers of incorporation that Lex peeled apart in the time it took Roman and me to cross the city. Three men inside. One hostage. The thermal imaging from the drone Lex launched confirms what the bond already told me: she’s alive, she’s conscious, she’s sitting on the floor with her hands behind her back, and her heartbeat, which I can feel again now that whatever they drugged her with is wearing off, is fast but controlled.

She’s not panicking. She’s waiting.

She’s waiting for me.

Roman and I are parked two blocks from the warehouse. Lex is on comms from the compound, feeding us the thermal layout, the entry points, and the position of every body in the building. Two men by the main door. One near Sophia.

“Assume they’re armed,” he says.

I already was.

Three men. Three human men with guns, standing between me and my mate.

I’ve killed for less.

“How do you want to do this?” Roman asks. His wolf is so close to the surface that his eyes haven’t been human since we left the compound. His hands are flexed on his thighs, fingers curved, the tendons standing out like cables.