16. Raphael #2
I stood at the window for a long time after he was gone, my coffee growing cold in my hand, processing what he had said. The Pakhan was watching. The threat was still active. A killer walked free in my mate’s hotel, and I couldn’t even identify his scent.
And somewhere in the space between those dangers, I had let myself hope for something I had no right to want.
I heard footsteps on the stairs. Light. Hesitant. The particular rhythm of Lena’s stride that I had memorized without meaning to.
My wolf surged to attention. Mate. Here. Ours.
I turned as she appeared in the kitchen doorway.
Her hair was still damp from the shower, and she wore one of my white dress shirts with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows.
The hem hit her mid-thigh, showing off her bare legs, and the top three buttons were undone, revealing the hollow of her throat and the shadow of her collarbone.
The sight of her in my clothes, marked with my scent, lit a possessive fire in my wolf. Made him want to press her against the nearest wall and put his mouth on every inch of visible skin. Made him want to carry her back upstairs and spend the rest of the day making her scream his name.
I stayed where I was. Barely.
“You were gone,” she said. “When I woke up.”
“Coffee.” I held up my cup, though I had barely touched it. “Alice is making breakfast.”
She nodded, but she didn’t move into the room. Her eyes drifted past me to the window, then around the kitchen, taking in the morning light filtering through the glass, the copper pots hanging above the stove, the details of a home I had built from the ashes of everything I had lost.
Then her gaze caught on the doorway behind me. The one that led to the stairs. To my bedroom.
“That sculpture,” she said slowly. “On your nightstand. I saw it this morning.”
My whole body went still.
“It’s different from the ones in the greenhouse.” She took a step closer, her brow furrowed in thought. “Smaller. Rougher. Like it wasn’t finished.”
I set down my coffee cup with exaggerated care, buying myself time to find words for a truth I had never shared with anyone.
The sculpture on my nightstand. The one I had kept beside my bed for nearly twenty years, through pack initiation and the construction of this manor.
The one no one else had ever asked about.
“It wasn’t,” I said. “Finished.”
Lena waited. She had learned that about me, somewhere in the weeks of hostile proximity and grudging truces. That I needed silence to find words for the things that mattered. That pushing would make me shut down, but patience might coax the truth out of me.
She was learning me. The thought was terrifying and exhilarating in equal measure.
“My mother was working on it,” I said. “The night she died.”
A soft intake of breath. She knew about my mother.
Alice had told her, back in the early days of the contract, when Lena was still trying to understand the monster she had sold herself to.
She knew my father had killed her. Knew I had been three years old.
Knew I had hidden in a closet and watched through the slats as my world ended in blood and screaming.
“You know what happened to her.”
It wasn’t a question. I could see the knowledge in her face. The weight of it she had been carrying since Alice’s confession.
“Alice told me.” Lena’s voice was quiet. Careful. “I didn’t want to ask you directly. It seemed…”
“Too raw.”
“Yes.”
We stood there in the morning light, the truth between us, and I did something I had never done before. I spoke about it. Not deflecting. Not changing the subject. Not retreating behind the walls I had built to keep the grief contained.
Just telling her.
“Alice found the sculpture in my mother’s studio, after,” I said.
The words came slowly, dragged from somewhere deep in my chest. “She kept it safe while I was away at school. When I finally came back, eighteen and barely civilized, she gave it to me. Told me my mother had been making it in secret. A gift for my fourth birthday.”
The one I never had. The one that came three days after my mother’s funeral, while I was on a plane to the boarding school that would be my personal hell.
Lena’s expression shifted. Not pity. I would have hated pity. This was recognition. Understanding. The look of someone who knew what it meant to lose a parent and carry the wound for years afterward.
“She kept it all those years,” Lena said softly. “Waiting for you to come home.”
“Yes.” My voice was rough. I cleared my throat, but the thickness wouldn’t leave. “I’ve kept it beside my bed ever since. Alice kept it safe for fifteen years. The least I can do is keep it safe for the rest of my life.”
Lena crossed the room toward me. Not to touch me, not yet. She paused at the doorway that led upstairs, then looked back at me with a question in her eyes.
“Can I see it?”
I followed her up the stairs. Watched her move through my bedroom, her bare feet silent on the hardwood, until she reached the nightstand where the small bronze form sat half-hidden by a lamp and a stack of books I had been meaning to read for years.
She didn’t pick it up. Just looked at it for a long moment, taking in the rough edges, the unfinished lines, the places where my mother’s hands had shaped the metal but never completed the work.
It was barely five inches tall. Abstract enough that most people wouldn’t recognize what it was meant to be. But I knew. I had always known.
“What was it going to be?” she asked.
“A wolf.”
Her eyes met mine. I saw the question forming, the pieces clicking together in her mind. The scars that weren’t made by human hands. The animal I had mentioned. The wolf sculpture my mother had been creating in secret, for a son she would never see grow up.
“You know,” I said, “that there are things about me I haven’t told you.”
“I know.”
“Things that might…” I stopped. Started again. “Things that would change how you see me.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then she reached out and traced the edge of the sculpture with one careful finger, the same gentleness she had shown my scars the night before.
“When you’re ready,” she said. “You can tell me when you’re ready.”
My wolf strained against my ribs. Tell her now. She’ll understand. She touched our scars and stayed. She’ll touch our fur and stay too.
But I couldn’t. Not yet. Not with Viktor’s warning fresh in my mind and the Pakhan’s eyes on us and a killer still loose in her hotel. There were too many ways for this to go wrong. Too many dangers circling, waiting for me to show weakness.
“I have to get to the hotel,” Lena said. “Jessica’s covering the front desk, but there’s a meeting with the summer events coordinator this afternoon.”
“I’ll have Parsons drive you.”
She nodded, but she didn’t move toward the door. Instead, she stepped closer to me, close enough that I could feel the warmth of her body through the thin cotton of my shirt. Close enough that her scent filled my lungs with every breath.
“Last night,” she said. “What you told me. About the punishment.”
I tensed. Waited.
“I don’t know what we are.” Her voice was steady, but I could hear her heart racing. Could smell the uncertainty and the hope tangled together in her scent. “I don’t know what any of this means. But I know I’m not running.”
She pressed her forehead against my shoulder, the same gesture she had made in the darkness after I told her about my scars. The same gesture that had undone me completely.
“I’m not running, Raphael.”
My arms came up around her without conscious thought. I buried my face in her hair and breathed her in, that familiar sweetness that was mine, and let myself believe, just for a moment, that this could last. That I could have this. That the hope wasn’t dangerous, that it was earned.
She pulled away before I was ready. Then she gathered her things from the bedroom floor, and headed to her room.
I sat on the edge of the bed and listened to her footsteps making her way downstairs, to her voice mixing with Alice’s in the kitchen.
Heard Alice’s warm laughter, Lena’s quieter response.
The sound of two women who had found something to like in each other, bonding over tea and shared concern for a man who didn’t deserve either of them.
The hope was dangerous. I knew that. I had learned that lesson in blood and loss and fifteen years of exile.
But as Lena’s footsteps faded down the hallway, as I heard the front door open and close behind her, I couldn’t make myself care about the danger.
I let myself imagine a future.
It terrified me more than anything else ever had. And I wanted it anyway.
My wolf settled against my ribs, content in a way I hadn’t felt in years. She’ll come back, he insisted. She always comes back now. And soon, she’ll stay forever.
I touched the rough edge of my mother’s unfinished wolf and didn’t argue with him.