Chapter 2 #2
“He showed up at her house last night, before our dinner. Grabbed her arm and threatened her.” Rage kicks through my system like adrenaline. My hand curls into a fist on the desk. “I threw him out, but he’s a problem that needs solving.”
“How?”
“Permanently.”
“Damien.” Cade leans forward, his voice taking on that lecturing quality I hate. “We don’t kill innocents. Animal abusers. Child predators, when we come across them. The genuine monsters of the world. That’s our code. That’s what separates us from common murderers.”
“He’s an asshole who threatened Luna.”
“We can’t kill him just because he’s a shitty person.”
Cade is right, but the visceral need to eliminate any threat to her drowns out the logical part of my brain.
“He threatened her. He is a threat to her. Therefore, he’s forfeited his right to breathe.”
“Then we watch him.” Cade leans back in the chair.
“You weren’t able to find him two months ago. You said he was a ghost with no digital footprint for over a year.”
“But now he’s shown his face. I’ll backtrack. You should have called me last night. I could’ve gotten a jump on it. What kind of vehicle does he drive?”
“I didn’t notice. Check the exterior cameras and get the plate. Track him. I want eyes on him twenty-four seven until I decide what I want to do with him.”
My eyes drift back to the screen behind Cade’s head.
Luna and Maren have finished eating but are still at the table talking.
Something Maren says makes Luna throw back her head and laugh, and my chest tightens again.
Her friend can be a little much sometimes, but the joy she brings to Luna’s life is priceless.
Luna’s fingers drift to her mouth as she speaks, and my lips pulse with the echo of hers, a phantom sensation that won't quit. I can still taste the sweetness clinging to her tongue, along with the small catch in her breath when I pulled her closer and she melted against me.
That kiss didn’t just change everything. It obliterated me, stripping away every lie I’d told myself, then rebuilt me from the wreckage.
My father’s voice echoes in my head. Weakness, attachment, and vulnerability.
All the things he beat out of me by the time I was ten.
I’ve spent years building walls no one could scale, convinced that part of me had been burned away with everything else in the wasteland of my childhood, long before I understood what it was.
Love.
I roll the word around in my mind like broken glass, cutting myself on its edges.
What pulses inside my chest defies every clinical definition I know.
It’s not possession, though I want to own every breath Luna takes.
It’s not obsession, though she consumes every waking thought.
It’s something that gnaws at my bones, a fever that burns without breaking.
The realization explodes inside my skull and leaves me bleeding and raw. She’s pulled me under her spell, and I’m suffocating on the sweetness of it, and I’m fucking drowning in her. There’s no surface to break through, and no air to breathe that isn’t her.
“You seem more distracted than usual today.”
Cade's voice pulls me back. My head jerks, and my gaze snaps to his face. But he’s not looking at me. His eyes are locked on the screen.
On Maren.
His expression holds that same granite composure he wears like armor. It only cracks when his daughter Mary Jane enters a conversation or during those rare childhood visits when she’d light up his office with her presence. She turned twenty-two recently, though I haven’t seen her in years.
But then his face shifts as Maren crosses the kitchen, his eyes tracking her with the intensity of a hunter watching prey, absorbing every detail and every angle. The naked desire in his gaze is unsettling. I'm seeing something he didn't intend to share, something that wasn’t meant for witnesses.
What the fuck?
This can’t be the first time he’s seen her.
He monitors Luna’s system, checking the camera feeds every couple of days to ensure nothing is amiss.
Except for the ones inside Luna’s house.
Those belong to me alone. But Maren lives all over that sanctuary.
He’s had to see her dozens, if not hundreds, of times by now.
I file that observation away for later consideration. Whatever obsession is brewing behind Cade’s eyes, it’s the last thing Maren needs in her life. It spells trouble for a woman who isn’t even aware she’s being hunted.
“You’re the one who seems distracted.”
His head snaps toward me, eyes flashing with irritation I’ve seen maybe a handful of times in twenty-five years, the look he saves for when I’ve crossed a line he didn’t know he’d drawn.
“How’d dinner go last night?” The question comes out smooth, designed to pull attention away from his fixation on Maren.
“Mind your own fucking business, Cade.”
His eyebrows rise, but his expression remains otherwise unaffected.
Luna’s mouth crashes through my memory—soft, yielding, perfect—then the crushing weight of guilt follows like a tidal wave. Every lie I’ve fed her sits heavy in my chest, two sides of myself at war until I can’t breathe. My tie constricts around my throat. I tear it free.
Both versions of myself want her with equal desperation. The polished executive wants her laughter over wine and her smile when she heals an animal in her care. The wolf wants her gasps in the dark and her back arching under his touch.
But beneath both burns something more fundamental. The need for her to see through every mask and choose to stay.
“Just do your fucking job.” I turn my attention back to the monitors.
Cade doesn’t back down. Never has, not since that night twenty-five years ago when he walked in on something he wasn’t supposed to see.
I was twenty-one, just starting to refine my methods.
Still green enough, still careless enough that my COO pieced together what his young boss did when the sun went down.
He figured out what lived beneath my skin, what I became when no one was watching.
“I was thinking about Desert Storm yesterday.”
I freeze. Cade rarely brings up his military service, and never the incident that ended his career. The classified mission that went sideways, the one that left him with blood on his hands and a discharge that looked honorable on paper but destroyed everything he’d worked for.
“Why?”
“Because it reminded me why I do this. Why I help you.” His voice takes on that haunted quality it gets when he talks about the war. “Some people deserve to die, Damien. They trade away their right to breathe when they choose cruelty.”
It’s the same conversation we had that night in 2000, when he walked into my office after hours and found me cleaning blood from under my fingernails.
Instead of calling the police, he’d looked me in the eye and said, “You’re going to need help if you want to keep doing this without getting caught. ”
He was thirty then, already carved hollow by things he’d done in service to his country.
I was just a kid with too much blood money and vengeance that ate me alive from the inside.
He became my right hand, my cleaner, and the voice of reason when mine drowned in fury.
Twenty-five years later, he’s the closest thing I have to family.
Which makes his protective behavior both touching and fucking infuriating.
“I know what I’m doing with Luna.”
“Do you?” His gray eyes search my face. “Your survival is my business, Damien, and you’re getting careless. All for a woman you barely know.”
I look back at the screen, where Luna is filling the dishwasher, but the tension in her shoulders remains.
That bastard of an ex is still affecting her even when he’s not here, and that just strengthens my resolve to hunt him down, wrap my hands around his throat and feel his pulse stutter and fade.
“I know every fucking inch of her, Cade. And she’s everything.”
The confession tastes like freedom, but speaking it out loud doesn’t solve the problem burning through my veins. It just makes it more real. It confirms what I’ve been trying to deny and that I was lying through my teeth a second ago. I’m way in over my head.
“I don’t know what the fuck to do.”
“Start by not killing her ex-boyfriend.” He doesn’t miss a beat. “We’ve avoided killing innocent civilians for twenty-five years. Let’s not start now.”
“He’s not innocent.” My jaw clenches so tight that a dull ache spreads toward my temple. “I want every available resource focused on finding him. Wolfe Technologies has the most advanced AI tracking system in the world.”
“And then what?”
Silence stretches between us. We both know the answer. I’ll watch him and wait for him to give me a reason for what’s already decided. If he so much as looks at Luna wrong again, he’s a dead man.
“One more thing.” I glance back at the screen, but Luna’s kitchen sits empty now. “Make an anonymous donation to Luna’s sanctuary. One hundred thousand. Enough to build her bobcat enclosure and then some.”
Cade raises an eyebrow. “Anonymous how? She’ll ask questions about a donation that large.”
With a few quick strokes on my keyboard, the screen changes to inside the sanctuary’s main room. Luna is going about her morning business of greeting and feeding the animals.
“Figure it out. Just not the same trust we used to pay off her debts. And make sure she can’t trace it back to me.” She shouldn’t have to struggle when I have more money than I can spend in ten lifetimes. “And make it today.”
“This is only going to make her more suspicious if she digs.”
“She won’t. She needs the money too much to question its source.” At least, I hope she won’t. But even if she does, it’s worth the risk to see the worry about that bobcat disappear from her beautiful face.
Cade clears his throat as his eyebrow arches. “If you’re done mooning, can we hit today’s highlights?”
I drag my attention back to business as we prepare for the morning meetings that pulled me to Denver, away from the mountains where my heart lives.
But my eyes keep shifting to the screen over Cade’s shoulder.
Luna is feeding what looks like oatmeal to that pervy raccoon of hers, as he keeps trying to grab her breasts.
Part of my mind stays fixed on the impossible problem of loving someone who doesn’t know I’m deceiving her. When she finds out that her wolf and Damien are the same man, she’ll run from me. Never forgive me.
And I’d rather live with this aching deception than lose her. Even if it destroys me.