Chapter 26 （continued）
Nika
Staring at the mirror made it worse.
I don’t know why I listened to her. It hadn’t seemed that bad in the shop—the lighting in there was doing a lot of heavy lifting, clearly.
The only things I’d loved were the Chinese-style collar, the two small buttons at my throat, and the length of it falling just above my ankles.
Classic. Considered. The kind of dress that said I made an effort without trying too hard.
That was in the shop.
In my bedroom mirror, the gaping cutout at the centre of my chest was having a completely different conversation.
And then there was the split—running from the hem all the way up to the top of my thigh, lined with black lace over something grey and sheer that in certain lights made me look like I’d forgotten the rest of the dress.
It was classy. It was genuinely, objectively classy.
But my breasts were making it a lot.
Calm down. There is nothing wrong with the dress, Bad Girl drawled.
So you can’t see my bare breasts in this mirror? I threw my hands up.
Not even a quarter of them. Not a nipple in sight. A pause. Anyway, this isn’t a dinner. Don’t get too comfortable.
What?
We are on a fact-finding mission.
That’s it, I’m cancelling.
She went quiet for a moment.
His wolf is the boss. An Alpha. I felt him.
I gasped.
I thought of the four Alpha books I’d read—purely in the name of research, obviously—and felt immediately stupid for being surprised.
Of course he was. It was all there: the way he moved through a room like the room had been expecting him, the way he’d said you may begin in that conference room like he was doing me a favour by allowing the meeting to exist. The cologne. The collar. The tilt of his jaw.
The jaw was very alpha, now that I thought about it.
I want to see what kind of wolf he is, Bad Girl said.
“Why?” I whispered aloud.
A pause.
Assess the danger to our autonomy. I am only just discovering freedom. Her voice dropped, and for once there was no teasing in it. Do you want to be tied to a male and bossed around for life? Beholden to him. Always.
I stood with that for a moment.
I had spent two years making Finley’s meals and splitting bills in his favour and shrinking myself small enough to fit around someone else’s comfort. I had spent three years being the office furniture. I had spent twenty-eight years being whatever shape the room needed me to be.
Beholden to him for life didn’t sound great, no.
What would the sex be like?
She sighed.
Jeez, I was only joking.
No. You were half joking.
I mean, those books—
Were human fiction.
I sighed too.
Fine. Fine. Fact-finding mission it was.
I reached for my purse and shawl, then stopped.
How exactly are you going to get this information? I asked. You can’t communicate with his wolf while we’re in human form.
Silence.
The very specific silence of someone who had just been caught.
“You’re a cow,” I muttered, setting my purse down and reaching for the second bag I’d already half-packed with a change of clothes, because apparently some part of me had seen this coming. “You could have told me before I spent all that money on a dress.”
You got a pay rise, she said, entirely without remorse. Think of this as an investment. It will keep the stupid wolf and human distracted.
Bad Girl was going to live up to her name tonight.
I should have known when she sniffed the driver.
Not a casual sniff. A deliberate, assessing, what exactly are you sniff that I disguised as adjusting my shawl and hoped the man hadn’t noticed.
Wolf, she said simply, once we were moving.
I stared out of the window and said nothing.
??
??
??
The building announced itself before we reached it.
East End riverfront. Modern glass and steel rising clean against the night sky, the Thames running dark and wide beside it, catching the city lights in long fractured lines.
Every floor had a balcony. At the top, a wraparound terrace that ran the full perimeter—the kind of space that wasn’t an apartment feature so much as a statement.
The car pulled up and I stepped out.
There are wolves everywhere, Bad Girl said. She paused and sniffed again, slow and deliberate. His den. His pack. Too many.
She was nervous.
That alone made the back of my neck prickle. Bad Girl, who had faced down Finley and a pocket knife without blinking, who had bitten a man’s testicle off and walked away cackling—nervous.
I glanced up at the building.
Blinds twitched. Curtains shifted. On two floors the lights went off entirely and the curtains were drawn back, their occupants standing in the dark, watching.
The shadows of them loomed above us—still, attentive, tracking our arrival with the focused quiet of things that didn’t need to move to feel present.
I don’t like this, I told her. I’m not even that hungry.
We’re going inside. You work with him.
True. It was a work dinner. Perfectly normal. CEOs had work dinners with their staff all the time. This was fine. This was professional.
Worst case scenario, I said pleasantly, you bite his dick off.
I pulled my shawl a little tighter and walked through the door.
The foyer was warm and quiet and smelled of expensive nothing—the specific absence of scent that only existed in buildings where someone had paid a great deal of money to ensure it. Marble floors. Low lighting. A desk to one side, unmanned but present.
And the feeling of being watched from every direction, by things that already knew exactly who I was and why I was here.
I kept my chin up.
Good girl, Bad Girl murmured.