Wendy's POV "This is the ninety-ninth one," Nell Pearce said, setting a paper cup of coffee in front of me. "If this one disappoints you too, I'm picking your next husband myself." "You said that about number ninety-eight." "Number ninety-eight tried to explain your own job to you." "He was passionate about spreadsheets." "He was passionate about hearing himself talk." She dropped into the chair across from me. "You're planning an escape route again." "I always plan an escape route." It was the truest thing I'd said all day. The restaurant was small and warm-exposed brick, low gold light, humans and wolves sharing tables without anyone announcing which was which. That was why I'd stayed in this district for three years. Here nobody cared that I was the daughter of the Whitlock Pack Alpha, or that I carried no scent at all. Here I was only Wendy Vance-a sales assistant with a rented apartment, a secondhand car, and a best friend who refused to let me give up on the idea of a family. Three years ago I'd believed love was supposed to feel like safety. Then Drexel Pace chose Mabel, and the story reached every nearby pack before I'd even crossed the territory line-that I was too cold, that I'd driven him away, that I should have been grateful he'd wanted me at all. I'd believed my father would protect me. I'd believed someone would come looking when I disappeared. No one did. So I ran until the human district swallowed me whole, and I built a life small enough that no one could take it from me again. "This is the last one," I told her. The door swung inward, and the room rearranged itself around the man who walked through it. Tall, broad through the shoulders, a black coat that fit like it had been cut in silence. Dark hair, a sharply carved face, eyes an unsettling shade of ice blue. He didn't move like an ordinary wolf-there was too much control in it, too much power held deliberately still. Conversations lowered. Heads turned. I had spent years learning to recognize danger before it reached me, and every instinct told me this man was dangerous. Then his scent reached me. Black cedar. Cold smoke. Rain-soaked stone. Wraith slammed against my ribs so hard my fingers whitened around the cup. Mate. The word struck through me again and again, and I could barely hear Nell whisper my name. He crossed the room and stopped beside our table. For one impossible second I thought he might recognize me-and then he didn't, because no one ever could. A scentless wolf. He offered a polite nod. "Miss Vance?" "Yes." "Cassian Vey." He said it as though I ought to know the name. I'd made a habit of avoiding pack news and business headlines and everything tied to the life I'd fled, so I only moved my chair to make room. Nell was already on her feet, chair scraping. "I just remembered I have somewhere to be." She leaned in and breathed, "Don't panic, he's gorgeous," then smiled at him. "I'm Nell. Be nice to her." His brow lifted a fraction. "I intended to." He sat, stripped off his gloves, set them beside his plate. A faint scar crossed the back of his right hand; he caught me looking and didn't hide it. "Have we met before?" he asked. "You seem familiar." "I have one of those faces." The answer came too fast, and his eyes stayed on mine a beat too long before he let it go. "Tell him." Wraith paced inside me. "He is ours." "He can't smell us," I told her, and she growled. When the waiter came, Cassian ordered steak and black coffee; I ordered pasta because it was the safest thing on the menu and because my hands were still unsteady under the table. He didn't ask about my family, or why a woman with my posture was filing sales reports in a human district, or offer pity when I said I had no relatives nearby. He asked harder things. "What do you want from a marriage?" I looked up-men on first dates asked about vacations, not this. "A quiet home," I said slowly. "Honest bills. Separate closets. I don't like people touching my things without asking." He nodded as if it were the most reasonable list in the world, so I said the rest before I could stop myself. "And someone who doesn't make me beg to stay." Something moved beneath his calm-a tightening at the eyes, a shadow passing. "Has someone made you beg?" "Someone tried." The date lasted an hour and forty minutes. He didn't flirt, didn't touch me, didn't make a single promise he couldn't keep. Outside, in the cold, he asked for my number and texted me at once so I'd have his-Cassian Vey, nothing else. No heart, no compliment, no demand to know when he'd see me again. It should have made him easy to forget. It didn't. For two days Wraith wouldn't settle, whispering the same word through spreadsheets and coffee lines and twice in the dark: Mate. I told myself it didn't matter. Fate had never once protected me. So I did what I always did when my heart wanted something dangerous-I ignored it. On the second evening my phone rang while I was folding laundry. I let it nearly ring out before I answered. "Are you free next Wednesday?" "Why?" A short silence. Then, with the same calm certainty he'd used to give me his name: "I want to get married." My hand went still over the shirts. "Excuse me?" "I've thought about it. We're compatible. I respect you. I want a stable life, and I believe you want the same." "We've met once." "I know it's fast." "This isn't fast, Cassian. This is insane." "Possibly." Almost amusement, there and gone. I pressed my fingers to my forehead. "Why me?" The question left me before I could catch it. He didn't answer right away. In the silence I could hear his breath, slow and steady, and I had the strangest sense that he'd been waiting for this question much longer than two days. When he finally spoke, all the lightness had drained from his voice. "Because you said you wanted a quiet home," he said, "and I believe I can make one for you." My throat closed. "I'm not asking you to fall in love with me," he said. "Then what are you asking for?" He didn't answer that either. "You don't have to answer tonight," he said, and ended the call. I sat on the edge of the bed among the clean laundry and the smell of detergent, and for one whole minute I let myself want what he'd offered. Then I put the feeling under a rock, where it couldn't get me killed. He didn't know my history. And history was the only thing I owned.

Wendy's POV Three years ago, I still believed love was supposed to feel like being chosen. His name was Drexel Pace, the Bloodmoon Pack's Alpha heir, handsome and certain of himself in the way only wolves born to power ever are. I had loved him the way you love a fire when you're freezing-too close, and grateful for the burn. He didn't like me speaking to other males. He didn't like me leaving the den without him. "You belong to me," he used to murmur against my hair, and I let it warm me, because no one else in the Whitlock Pack had ever wanted to keep the Alpha's scentless daughter at all. I mistook his possessiveness for devotion. I mistook being watched for being loved. I was young, and I had spent my whole life being treated like a flaw in an otherwise perfect bloodline, so when a strong wolf held me too tightly, I called it safety. Then he betrayed me-with my stepsister, a she-wolf who shared no blood with me at all. The pain arrived before the proof did. Wraith moaned inside me, a low, broken sound I had never heard her make, and the mate bond told us the truth in the language of the body long before my eyes could confirm it. I found Mabel's door unlocked, too careless even to hide it, and when I pushed it open the room swallowed me whole. Mabel was astride him, crying out, and Drexel was driving up into her with a focus that made bile climb my throat. I wanted to scream. I wanted to tear the smile off Mabel's face with my hands. But when I lunged forward, he shoved me back and put himself between us, shielding her. "An Alpha heir can't take a defective wolf as his Luna," he said, unhurried, as if he were explaining weather. "You'll accept your place. The same as your stepsister accepted hers." He told me what that place would be: Mabel's servant, his mistress, the Luna in name only if I knelt and begged him for the privilege. If I agreed, my pack would receive Bloodmoon funding and I would be permitted to stay at his side. I refused. I refused the command, and I refused the bond that fate had chained me to. Only then did his eyes widen. It didn't soften him. It enraged him. He struck me across the face, and when I still would not kneel, he told Mabel to get me out of his sight. She dragged me the whole way through the territory, and the Whitlock Pack came out to watch. I searched every face for one that might stop this. I found my father instead. Alpha George Vance stood among them, unmoving, while I called out to him. "Wendy violated pack law and attempted to attack the Bloodmoon heir," he said, loud enough to settle the crowd. "She will be punished." My heart dropped into ice. My own father had chosen Drexel and the stepdaughter who shared none of his blood over the child who did. Mabel leaned close as she hauled me toward the tree line, her breath warm against my ear. "You should be grateful," she whispered, smiling for the crowd. "A scentless little ghost like you was never going to be missed." Then she pushed me through the gap in the fence, into the old hunting grounds we'd called the killing forest as children-the place where nothing ever came back. Snow was already falling when the first beast found me. I fought it the only way a small wolf can, shifting into fur and teeth and grief, tearing at anything that came close, my silver coat soaked black with cold and blood. There were more of them than I could count, and I felt myself failing, felt the forest narrowing to a single point of white-and then something enormous pressed down over the whole of the woods. The beasts around me broke and fled into the dark, and I was left shaking on the frozen ground, alive, saved by a power I never saw and could not name. When I could stand, I lifted my head to the black sky and spoke the words that severed me from everything I had been. "I renounce the Whitlock Pack." I felt the bond to my father's line snap like a tendon, felt the last thread of home go dark. The storm swallowed the moment whole, and I ran until the Whitlock territory was behind me and the human district swallowed my scentless body into its endless noise. I changed my number. I found a job. I learned which store marked down its bread after eight and built a life small enough that no one could ever take it from me again. For three years it held. For three years the killing forest stayed a scar I only touched in dreams. Then my phone lit up on the counter, and the past reached through the glass and put its hand around my throat. [I know you survived.] Drexel. My hands went cold. I told myself it could be anyone, a cruel accident, a wrong number. Then the second message arrived. [Wendy. Come home before I come to you.] The phone shook in my hand. He had found me. A single unmarried woman with no pack and no name meant nothing under Bloodmoon law-they could file a claim, send wolves, drag me back through the same silence that had thrown me out, and no one would raise a hand to stop it. Alone, I had no shield at all. But a wolf bound by law to another Alpha's pack was a wolf even Drexel could not simply reach out and take. Cassian's contract was still folded in my bag. Either party may leave without penalty. A man who had handed me an unlocked door before I'd even agreed to walk through it. I called him before the fear could talk me out of it. "I'll marry you," I said when he answered. A pause. "Are you sure?" "Yes. But I want to do it tomorrow." Another pause-shorter this time. He sounded unsurprised, as if he'd already made room for whatever I needed. "Then we'll go to the registry in the morning," Cassian said. And for the first time since the phone had lit up, my hands went still.

Wendy's POV "He shook your hand." She pressed her fingers to her mouth. "That's the saddest sentence I've ever heard." "You set this up," I reminded her. "Ninety-nine of ninety-nine. This one's on you." "I set up a date, not a wedding!" she whispered furiously. "I pulled his profile like everyone else's. Cassian Vey. Handles acquisitions. Clean record, no fish photos. That's all it said. I figured he was a consultant. I did not think you'd marry him by Tuesday." "You told me to stop giving up on marriage." "I meant eventually!" Cassian came out of the records office then, sliding the certificate into a folder as calmly as if signing his life away were something he did every Tuesday. "The mating ceremony can wait," he said before I could ask. I blinked. "You're the one who wanted to marry in a day." "Marriage can be undone on paper. A bond can't." He met my eyes without flinching. "You should be certain when we make it. Not frightened into it." I wanted to tell him I was a little of both, and that I'd stopped being able to tell them apart somewhere around the registry. I didn't. I let him hand me the black card instead. I tried to give it straight back. "I can pay for my own things." "I know." He closed my fingers over it, unbothered. "Because you're my wife. Not because you owe me anything. Use it or don't. I won't ask you to account for a single dollar." He nodded to Nell, said he'd see me at the apartment, and left. The second the elevator doors shut, Nell rounded on me. "Rich. Terrifyingly polite. Won't touch you until you want him to. Wendy-what's the catch? That agency vets applicants. Men like that do not fill out relationship questionnaires." "You picked him." "I thought I picked a consultant. That card was blacker than my future. What kind of consultant hands a woman he's known two days a card with no limit?" "He never told me his pack," I admitted. "I didn't ask." Nell stared at me. "You married a man and neither of us knows his pack?" She muttered, "I'm the worst matchmaker alive. I set you up with a mystery." Neither of us knew how right she was. His apartment did nothing to solve it. Spare to the point of severity. No photographs. A study off the main room, files ordered like a war table, a door he closed before I could read a label. He gave me the master bedroom and took the guest room across the hall-as if a wife sleeping behind her own locked door were the most ordinary arrangement in the world. That night I lay in a stranger's sheets, wrapped in a stranger's silence. I had always been the kind of person who waited faithfully for my alarm to rouse me, yet that morning I woke long before it. The house was quiet, save for the distant rush of water from the shower. A plated breakfast sat untouched on the kitchen counter. I assumed it was his, laid out before he'd stepped inside the bathroom. My throat tightened at the thought of running into him face-to-face. I grabbed my coat, pulled it on in a hurry, and did not linger. I fled the tense, unfamiliar walls of this house at once. Somehow, despite everything, I was still expected at my desk by nine. I'd barely shed my coat and settled into my chair when Anne rolled up to my aisle, buzzing with uncontained excitement. "Did you hear? We got bought. Overnight. The whole company, by an outside pack." She dropped her voice. "And not just anyone. They're saying the new Alpha is from the Crestwood Group. Everyone's wondering if it might actually be the mysterious Alpha who rules the largest group himself-the one the rumors call brutal, with a face too terrifying to show in public or on camera." "Good for him," I said. "I have a sales report." Some mysterious Alpha buying the building had as much to do with me as weather in another city. "Vance." Talia Wade, our temporary supervisor, appeared at my shoulder with her usual look of faint disappointment. "Fix your face and find your spine. The new Alpha CEO walks in within the hour, and I won't have this department embarrassed by a scentless assistant who can't hold eye contact." "Understood," I said. "I mean it. Men like him can smell weakness across a room." She smiled thinly. "Well. On most people they can." I let the insult slide off. I'd had years of practice. I was still sorting her files when the whole floor went quiet at once. Every wolf turned toward the elevators. And beneath the toner and the coffee, one scent reached me before I even looked up. Black cedar. Cold smoke. Rain-soaked stone. I went cold from the scalp down. The elevator opened, and the lie died in my throat. Cassian stepped out, flanked by executives scrambling to keep his pace. He did not scramble for anything. His black suit was cut as sharply as the coat he'd worn yesterday, and the entire floor bent toward him without being told. "Alpha Vey," someone whispered. The name passed through the office like a current. Beside me, Talia breathed, "Oh wow. Is that our new Alpha boss? He's gorgeous." Cassian's gaze swept across the floor with cool authority. Then it found me. "This is my first day here," he told the room. "I expect everyone to follow the rules. No exceptions." His eyes returned to mine. "Miss Vance. Bring the revised acquisition file to my office." "Yes, Alpha Vey," I managed. I turned before my face could betray us both. I had taken three steps when his voice reached me-low enough that only I could hear. "Why didn't you eat the breakfast I made?"