Chapter 23
Conrí
Broken and rejected bonds.
The book lay open on my desk and the words made my chest sink in a way I hadn’t anticipated. Even Kael was still. Not watchful-still—the other kind. The kind that meant he’d read it too, and it had hit home for him as well.
We were intelligent beings. Our ancestral instincts were what made the Cúallaidh Pack what it was—not brute strength, not numbers, but the deep alignment between wolf and human that allowed us to think and feel and choose rather than simply react. Our wolves were born with those instincts intact.
To survive. To hunt. To raise our pups together and defend what was ours.
I knew every pup’s name and age in the building. Not because an alpha was expected to—because I wanted to. Because they were the next generation and that meant something to me that I’d never felt the need to justify or explain.
And here it was. In black and white.
Why Tadhg’s bond had failed. Why it could happen to us.
Not every wolf was aligned to their human side.
Not every mind was whole. Natural selection favoured the strong—but strength meant nothing if the bond itself was broken before it had the chance to form.
If Nika was our mate and she rejected us—if whatever was fractured in her wolf made the bond impossible—that was the end of us.
Not death. Worse than death. Tadhg had lived for decades after his bond collapsed, a wolf without a centre, a man the pack had quietly stopped talking about.
I had always assumed it would be seamless. What my parents had—the reaching across rooms, the shorthand, the mating rituals falling into place the way they were supposed to. I had waited long enough. I had been patient enough. I had earned seamless.
Instead I had a woman who had poisoned my office, bitten her ex-boyfriend’s testicle off, and looked at me in my own conference room like she was calculating the most efficient way to end my life.
My head snapped up before I heard her footsteps.
I slapped the book shut and pulled open the top drawer, sliding it inside.
The door opened.
Nora announced the meeting and then Nika Horvat stepped into my office.
I can smell her, Kael said. He paused. I can feel her wolf now.
Something had shifted. Not in us—in her. Something had changed since the conference room and the change was coming off her in waves, subtle and unmistakable, the way a shift in wind direction was subtle and unmistakable to something that had been reading the air its entire life.
She walked closer.
The soft material of her dress moved with her thighs. The shape of them pulled my eyes somewhere they had no business going and I looked away—but looking away did nothing about the scent. It didn’t stop the assault of it. It was threading through me whether I invited it or not.
She’s sooo bad, Kael panted.
I slipped a finger around my collar and tugged at the material that had, without explanation, begun to feel like it was attempting to strangle me.
Bad girl for exposing us. Bad girl for poisoning the humans, Kael said as we inhaled again. The growl that followed was low and entirely contradicted everything he’d just said. Our Bad Girl.
“You wanted to see me, Mr Gallagher?”
I dragged my eyes to her face.
Her hair was down. Floral and citrus from her shampoo—clean and warm and doing absolutely nothing to help my collar situation. And those eyes. Silver-grey. Not cold the way I’d filed them after the conference room. Not the devil’s.
Ours.
“Please sit,” I rasped.
Her eyes flashed. Grey bleeding to blue at the edges, there and gone in a half second. Her wolf didn’t like being told what to do.
I smiled pleasantly.
Her eyes stayed on me for a moment before she sank into the chair.
That’s it. Ease her in. Nice and slow, Kael murmured.
“I went through your performance reviews since 2023,” I said, straightening some papers on my desk.
She said nothing.
“You were overlooked. Repeatedly.”
Her eyes widened a fraction. Just a fraction—she caught it almost immediately and pulled it back. But I’d seen it. I saw everything.
“I’d like to apologise on behalf of Kilcullen Tech,” I said, the words sitting tightly in my mouth the way any acknowledgement of my management’s failures did.
She gasped.
It was a small sound. Barely anything. Her hand came up and rested against her chest and my eyes dropped before I could redirect them.
I let them stay there for one second longer than was professional.
She was perfect. I could see it clearly now—not the cold and the disdain of the conference room, not the woman I’d been filing under threat and anomaly and problem to be solved. Just her. The line of her throat. The rise and fall beneath her hand.
By the Gods, Kael said, with a reverence entirely uncharacteristic of him.
“Thank you,” she breathed.
Two words. Warm and unguarded, the heat of them reaching me across the desk like something physical.
Heat, Kael said, his attention sharpening instantly. Heat. What can we do to trigger it? Think. There must be something—
He pressed forward and I held him back without making it obvious, which was becoming a full-time occupation.
“I hope you won’t hold it against me.”
She was unsettled—not nervous exactly, but recalibrating. This wasn’t what she’d walked in expecting. The braced quality she’d carried through the door was softening at the edges, replaced by something more uncertain and infinitely more dangerous to my composure.
Good.
“No,” she said, shaking her head.
Those dark brown locks swept back and forth with the movement.
I watched them settle and thought, without meaning to, of the forests outside Cork in late autumn—that specific depth of colour, the way the light moved through it at different angles and pulled out shades you hadn’t noticed until they were directly in front of you.
As if she’d heard something, her small hand came up and tucked her hair behind her ear.
The gesture was so unself-conscious it did something unreasonable to my chest.
“Of course I won’t hold it against you, Mr Gallagher.”
“Please.” I held her gaze. “Call me Conrí.”