Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Isabella’s POV
I couldn’t sleep.
I’d been tossing and turning for hours, staring at the ceiling of my small room while my mind refused to quiet. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw him—Dimitri leaning over me in his office, dark eyes intense, his scent filling my lungs and eroding every shred of common sense I possessed.
I’d replayed that moment a hundred times since returning to the mansion four hours ago.
The way his hand had wrapped around my wrist, thumb pressing against my racing pulse.
The deliberate slowness with which he’d pulled the pin from my hair, letting it fall around my shoulders.
The way his forehead had pressed to mine, his breath hot against my lips.
And the words he’d said…
“I don’t care about anything other than what you taste like.”
God. My entire body flushed at the memory.
What would have happened if he hadn’t pulled away? If he’d closed that final breath of distance and kissed me the way every cell in my body had begged him to?
That was the second time Dimitri and I had found ourselves in a compromising situation.
Well, compromising might be too strong a word. The first time wasn’t much of anything—at least, not to him. I think I was the only one feeling something.
I remembered coming home from school and heading straight to the garden to do my homework.
I liked the quiet there—the hum of bees, the soft rustle of petals, the way the air smelled like sunlight and lavender.
It helped me think better. And I needed that, because calculus was eating my brain alive.
After two hours of staring at the same math problem, I’d let out a loud yawn and tilted my head back in frustration—and that’s when I saw him. Dimitri. Standing at his window, watching me. The second our eyes met, he disappeared.
But a few minutes later, he came downstairs and asked if I needed help.
I said no. He sat beside me anyway. And the next thing I knew, we were solving equations together.
Well, he was solving them. I was too busy pretending to care about numbers when all I could think about was how close we were, how our fingers almost touched every time we reached for the same pencil, how intoxicating his scent was.
He smelled like warm sandalwood, with hints of coffee and whisky mixing together.
And beneath the musk of his cologne trying to mask it—his own masculine scent that only I seemed to smell, that made my wolf prowl restlessly beneath my skin anytime she caught it, like she’d just found something she wanted to claim.
When the lesson was over, he went back to being his usual self—cold, distant, unreadable.
And that pretty much summed up our relationship over the years. Moments of warmth that flickered, and then vanished before I could believe they were real.
And now this happened.
I pressed my palms against my burning cheeks. This was ridiculous. I was twenty years old, lying in bed fantasizing about my stepbrother like some lovesick teenager.
Except he wasn’t really my stepbrother. Not by blood. And the way he’d looked at me tonight—that hadn’t been brotherly. That had been hunger. Pure and primal.
I threw off the covers, suddenly needing to move, to do something other than torture myself with what-ifs.
Work. I’d work. Lose myself in contracts and projections until my brain was too exhausted to think about Dimitri Ravencrest and his dark eyes and his capable hands and—
Stop it.
I grabbed my one-size-fits-all bag and rummaged through it for the Castellanos merger file when I remembered that I’d left it in his study yesterday when he’d called me in to discuss next week’s meeting.
I could retrieve it now, review the terms, and make notes. Anything to distract myself from him.
It was past midnight. Everyone would be asleep—Maia in her wing, Dimitri presumably in his. The house would be silent and empty.
Safe.
I pulled on a cardigan over my tank top and sleep shorts, not bothering with anything else since I wouldn’t run into anyone. My bare feet made little sound on the cool marble as I made my way downstairs.
The halls were dark and quiet, only emergency lighting guiding my path. When I reached the study, I turned the door handle slowly, carefully, intending to slip in and out like a ghost.
I froze.
The room wasn’t empty.
And the very air seemed to shift—growing thin and heavy all at once due to the sight before me.
Dimitri sat behind his massive oak desk, wearing a simple black t-shirt that clung to his body perfectly, revealing those forearms that had haunted my thoughts when he drove me to the office the other day. In his hand was a glass of amber liquid—scotch, probably.
He looked up the instant the door sighed shut, and the air snapped tight.
Exhaustion carved sharp lines around his mouth, hollowed the skin beneath those strong, dark brown eyes, but it only made the rest of him look dangerous—stubble catching the lamplight, chest rising once, slow and deliberate, like he’d just tasted something forbidden.
His gaze dragged from my bare legs to the loose cardigan, lingered on the strip of skin it exposed, then locked on mine with a heat that felt like fingers sliding up my spine.
The glass hovered at his lips; a single drop of scotch clung to the rim, trembled, then slipped free—falling in a slow, deliberate arc to the polished wood between us.
“I-I’m sorry,” I blurted, already backing toward the door. “I didn’t know you were—I’ll just come back tomorrow—”
“Wait.”
The single word stopped me mid-retreat. I hesitated, one hand on the doorknob, every instinct screaming at me to run.
“Don’t go.” He lifted the glass to his lips, draining it in one swallow. When he set it down, his eyes found mine again. “Don’t go, Isabella.”
The smart thing—the safe thing—would be to leave right now. To put distance between us before something irreversible happened.
But something in his voice, in the defeated slump of his shoulders, kept me rooted in place.
I let the door click shut behind me.
“Are you okay?” I asked quietly, taking a tentative step into the room.
“Okay.” He repeated the word like it was foreign to him. His gaze dropped from my eyes to my lips, then lower—to my bare legs beneath the short sleep shorts. His eyes lingered there a moment too long before dragging back up to meet mine. “I don’t know what that word means anymore.”
Heat crawled up my neck. I was suddenly, painfully aware of how little I was wearing. How alone we were. How the air between us felt charged, electric.
My wolf stirred beneath my skin, restless.
She didn’t feel fear, or the need to respect the distance Dimitri had kept between us for years. This was something else. Since that almost-kiss in his office, it was like something had snapped in her. She wanted me to move closer. To close the distance. To touch him.
I clenched my hands at my sides, trying to hold her back. This was Dimitri—the boy who barely looked at me, who had spent years keeping his distance. And yet my wolf didn’t care. She recognized something in him that I didn’t. Something that made her stir with excitement.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I moved closer despite every warning bell in my head.
He shook his head. “Talking won’t change anything. Nothing will change anything.”
I rounded the desk until I stood beside him, close enough to see the red rims around his eyes, the tension in his jaw, the way his hands gripped the empty glass like it was the only thing keeping him grounded.
He looked…lost.
“Dimitri.” His name left my lips softly. It was the first time I’d ever called him by his first name to his face.
Something flickered in his eyes.
“What happened?” I asked.
For a long moment, he didn’t answer. Just stared at me.
Then, quietly, he said, “I’m getting engaged.”
The words hit me like a physical blow. The room tilted. My knees went weak, my chest suddenly too tight to breathe.
“Oh.” The sound came out broken. I blinked once, twice, too many times, trying to process. “When?”
“The announcement will be at my Alpha ceremony. One month from now.”
“Who…who is she?” I didn’t know why I needed to know, but the words came out anyway.
“Selene Ashworth.” His voice was flat, emotionless. “It’s a political alliance. Good for the pack.”
“I see.” I didn’t. I couldn’t think of anything other than the ringing in my ears and the way my heart was cracking down the middle.
In one month, he’d be engaged. And I would still be here, working for him, living under the same roof, watching him with her, pretending I didn’t feel like I was dying inside.
“It’s the right thing to do.” He sounded like he was trying to convince himself.
“Duty over everything else. That’s what being Alpha means.
” His voice turned bitter. “That’s what my father never understood.
He abandoned his Fated Mate. He rejected the woman chosen for him by the Moon Goddess, destroyed his family, his pack, everything—for what?
” He shook his head. “I won’t make that mistake. ”
Guilt crashed over me in waves. My mother was the reason he’d grown up like this. The reason Uncle Asher had left him.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered through the tightness of my throat. “I’m so sorry that my mother—”
“Don’t.” He cut me off sharply. “Don’t apologize for her. For him. For any of it. It’s not your fault, Isabella.”
“Then whose fault is it?” Tears burned behind my eyes. “Because everyone acts like it’s mine. Like I’m the living reminder of your father’s betrayal.” My voice broke.