Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 44703 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 149(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 44703 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 149(@300wpm)
After Zia, silence was an absence. A held breath. A room where her voice should be and wasn’t.
He had smelled it yesterday. On the road leading to the fortress, the access route that existed only for those who knew how to find it, a scent that didn’t belong. Faint. Old enough to be from a passing car, not a visitor. But distinctive. Wolf shifter. Young. Male.
Billy Stein had been near his home.
Not at it. Not yet. But close enough to learn the route. Close enough to study the timing. Close enough to understand the pattern of a fortress that existed in a pocket dimension and didn’t welcome uninvited guests.
The boy was watching.
And Zia had been hiding phone calls for days.
The two facts arranged themselves in his mind with the clean, terrible logic of a proof he didn’t want to solve. She had been receiving messages. She had been blocking them. She had lied about it, once, on the couch, with a stammer and a scent of deception so sharp it had stopped the humming in his chest.
She was in contact with Billy. And Billy was finding his way to the fortress.
The conclusion was simple.
The conclusion was unbearable.
He could have confronted her. Could have asked, directly, the way he did everything, without ambiguity, without games. He could have said I smelled deception on your skin and I need you to tell me the truth.
He didn’t.
Because the truth, if it was what he thought it was, would require him to hear her say it. And he could survive many things, had survived many things, had survived the annihilation of his entire race, had survived decades of solitude in a fortress that echoed with nothing, but he could not survive hearing Zia say that she wanted someone else.
So instead he lied.
The Bellecourts. A Sunday negotiation. He kissed her forehead, not her mouth, because if he kissed her mouth he would not leave, and he needed to leave, because Billy Stein’s scent was on the road to his home and the boy deserved the chance to come to her without the obstacle of a husband who could break him in half.
If she wanted Billy, Alexei would not be the wall between them.
He would be the door she could walk through.
His chest ached.
He ignored it.
Twenty minutes after leaving the fortress, he accessed the surveillance system.
The fortress had cameras in every public space: hallways, the main rooms, the grounds. Not the private quarters. Never the private quarters. The system was a security measure, installed decades ago, and Alexei had used it exactly twice in all that time, both for external threats.
This was not an external threat.
This was the worst kind of threat, the kind that came from inside the walls, from inside his own marriage, from a boy with dark eyes and a voice that cracked on Zia’s name.
He found Billy in the living room. The wolf shifter was standing by the window, looking around the space with an expression that Alexei recognized because he had worn it himself, once, from the back of a car across from a coffeehouse.
Longing.
The boy was longing for what he saw.
Alexei watched Zia enter the room. Watched Billy move toward her, reaching for her face. Watched Zia step back, quick, sharp, and something in his chest lurched with a hope he immediately crushed.
She stepped back because he was watching. Because the boy had shown up uninvited and she was startled. It meant nothing.
He watched the conversation. Billy’s apologies, the declarations, the I waited for him to leave that confirmed what Alexei had already known. Zia’s face, cycling through shock and anger and something he couldn’t name.
Then Zia excused herself. Left Billy in the living room. Walked down the hallway toward the library.
Alexei switched cameras.
The library. Zia was alone. Pacing. Her phone pressed to her ear.
Maryah. She was calling Maryah. He could hear the tinny warmth of Maryah Celestini’s voice coming through the speaker, and Zia was pacing the way she paced when she was working through a problem, quick and tight, her free hand gripping her elbow.
“I don’t know how to break the truth to him,” Zia said.
Alexei’s hand went still on the screen.
I don’t know how to break the truth to him.
Him.
Not Billy. Him. Her husband. The man she’d married two weeks ago in a hidden garden, the man whose chest hummed for her, the man who had knelt on her bedroom floor and told her I love you and meant it with every molecule of his being.
She didn’t know how to break the truth to him.
He terminated the feed.
The screen went dark.
He did not need to hear anything else.
For one hour, Alexei Lykaios sat in his empty office and did not move.
Not a finger. Not a breath that wasn’t automatic. He sat in the chair he’d occupied for a decade of board meetings and negotiations, and he was absolutely still, the stillness of a body that has run out of instructions.