Chapter 3 #2
I’d been three years old, hiding in the coat closet, watching through the slats.
My grandfather had arrived with lawyers and NDAs and enough money to make the whole thing disappear. The official story was a murder-suicide. Tragic. Unexplainable. The senator’s daughter and her unstable foreign husband.
No one mentioned wolves. No one mentioned the little boy who’d witnessed it all.
Senator Prescott had looked at me once. Just once. I remembered his eyes. Cold and distant and already calculating how to minimize the damage.
Then he’d signed the papers that sent me to boarding school in Vermont. Paid in advance through my eighteenth birthday. A trust fund for expenses. No visits. No contact. No acknowledgment that I existed.
I was an inconvenience. A reminder of his daughter’s shameful choice. So he’d erased me.
“And now you’ll erase him,” Max said when I finished. His voice held no judgment. He understood revenge. He’d built his own empire on it.
“His career. His legacy. His precious reputation.” I stood and walked to the window. The forest stretched dark and endless beyond the glass. “I’ll take everything he values. Let him spend his final years knowing that the grandson he threw away destroyed him.”
“What about the girl?”
I didn’t turn around. “What about her?”
“Don’t play games with me, Raphael Antonovich.” Max’s voice sharpened. “I heard your heartbeat change when you mentioned her. I can smell her on you even now. You want her.”
Yes, the wolf growled. Want. Need. Claim.
“She’s leverage,” I said flatly. “Richard Hughes spent his whole life controlling that girl. Sheltering her from anything useful. She doesn’t know how to run the hotel. She doesn’t know about the debt. When he dies, she’ll have nothing.” I turned to face my Pakhan. “Except me.”
Max studied me for a long moment. His wolf was close to the surface. I could see it in the amber flickering at the edges of his pupils.
“Human attachments are dangerous,” he said quietly. “You know the rules. Romance creates weakness. Distraction. It gets people killed.”
“I know.”
“If she becomes a liability, you’ll have to deal with it. One way or another.”
The wolf snarled at the implication, but I kept my voice steady. “She’s a tool, Max. That’s all. A means to an end.”
He held my gaze for three long seconds. Then he nodded and rose to refill our glasses.
“Good. Then I give you my blessing to proceed. But Raphael.” He pressed the vodka into my hand. “Be careful. The mate bond is not easily ignored. Your father learned that the hard way.”
I drank without tasting.
We said our farewells at the door. Max gripped my shoulder, a gesture that meant more than words between us. Then I was back in the car, Parsons pulling away from the compound, the dark trees swallowing the headlights.
The drive home was torture.
Her scent clung to my memory like smoke. I couldn’t stop seeing her face. The delicate line of her jaw. The way her lower lip had trembled when she realized who I was. The flutter of her pulse beneath that pale, perfect skin.
Mine, the wolf insisted. Go to her. She’s alone. Frightened. She needs her mate.
She wasn’t my mate. She couldn’t be. I wouldn’t allow it.
I pulled off the highway and sat in the dark for a long moment, hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel. The wolf was clawing at my insides, desperate to turn the car around. To find her. To wrap myself around her and never let go.
This was what my father must have felt. This consuming, irrational need. This certainty that one woman was the center of everything, that nothing else mattered, that he would burn the world to keep her.
And then he’d lost control. One moment of rage, one flash of the beast, and he’d torn out her throat.
I remembered the blood. I remembered her eyes, still open, still surprised. I remembered my father’s howl of anguish as he realized what he’d done.
Whatever curse ran in my blood, whatever monster lived beneath my skin, I would not inflict it on another innocent woman. I would use Lena Hughes. I would break her if I had to.
But I would not claim her.
The penthouse was dark when I arrived. I moved through the rooms without turning on lights, my wolf’s vision more than adequate.
Past the sculpture gallery where my mother’s pieces stood like ghosts.
Past the piano I’d never learned to play.
Past all the beautiful, empty things I’d filled this place with, trying to prove I was more than the broken boy they’d thrown away.
The city glittered beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows. Somewhere out there, she was sitting in a hospital room, watching her father die. Alone. Terrified. With no idea that the man who’d orchestrated her ruin was standing in the dark, thinking about her.
Go to her.
I poured myself a scotch instead. Checked my messages.
The surveillance report was waiting. My people had been watching her for months, documenting her routine, her relationships, her weaknesses.
I knew her schedule better than she did.
Knew about the spa girl she confided in, the opera singer who taught her piano, the cousin she talked to on the phone every Sunday.
I knew what she ate for breakfast and how she took her coffee and which route she walked through the hotel every morning.
I knew everything about Lena Hughes except what it would feel like to have her underneath me.
Tonight’s update included a detail that made me set down my glass.
She’d rejected a marriage proposal.
The boy. Joseph Bishop. Soft hands and old money and a face I wanted to rearrange. I’d seen the photos of them together. The way he looked at her like she was a prize to be won, a trophy for his mantelpiece. The way she smiled at him without ever quite meeting his eyes.
He’d asked her to marry him over dinner. And she’d said no.
She’s saving herself. That’s what the file said. That’s what everyone in Paradise Peaks whispered about sweet little Lena Hughes.
Virgin.
The word hit my bloodstream like a drug. My cock thickened instantly, straining against my zipper.
I was in my bedroom before I made the conscious decision to move. The door slammed behind me. I didn’t bother with the lights. Didn’t bother making it to the bed.
I shoved my pants down and fisted my cock, already leaking at the tip. Thick. Aching. Desperate for something it couldn’t have.
Ours, the wolf crooned. Untouched. Pure. Ours to ruin.
I braced one hand against the floor-to-ceiling window and stroked myself hard. Brutal. The way I’d fuck her when I finally got inside that tight virgin cunt.
Her face materialized behind my lids. Those blue eyes wide with fear and confusion as I spread her legs. That sweet mouth falling open on a cry as I pushed inside her for the first time. She wouldn’t be ready. She’d be too tight, too small, too innocent to take a cock like mine without pain.
I’d make her take it anyway.
She’ll cry, the wolf purred. She’ll cry and she’ll beg and she’ll come so hard she forgets her own name.
My hand moved faster. Rougher. Pre-cum slicked my grip as I fucked my fist, imagining it was her. I thought about forcing her legs apart and burying my face in her pussy. Licking her until she screamed. Making her come on my tongue before I made her come on my cock.
I thought about her on her knees. Those pretty lips wrapped around me. Tears streaming down her face as I hit the back of her throat.
I thought about bending her over my desk and pounding into her from behind. Watching her ass ripple with every thrust. Leaving handprints on her hips. Filling her with my cum until it dripped down her thighs.
She’d never had a man inside her. Never felt a cock stretch her open. Never been fucked until she couldn’t walk.
I’d be her first. Her only. Ever.
Ours, the wolf snarled. To break. To ruin. To remake in our image.
I came with a roar, slamming my fist against the glass. Cum splattered across the window, streak after streak as my cock pulsed in my grip. My vision went red. My fangs punched through my gums. The wolf howled in savage triumph as the orgasm tore through me.
When it finally stopped, I stood there panting, forehead pressed to the cool glass, my spent cock still in my hand. The city lights blurred through the mess I’d made on the window.
Fuck.
I hadn’t come that hard in years. Hadn’t wanted anyone this badly since… ever. I’d fucked my way through half the socialites on the Eastern Seaboard and none of them had made me lose control like this.
She hadn’t even touched me. Hadn’t done anything except exist.
This was supposed to be about revenge.
She was supposed to be a pawn. A weapon. A means to destroy the people who’d destroyed me.
But the wolf had other plans.
Mate, he whispered. Whether you claim her or not, she’s ours. And we will have her.
I cleaned myself off and stood at the window, watching the lights of Paradise Peaks glitter in the distance.
My reflection stared back at me from the glass. Dark eyes. Hard jaw. The face of a man who’d clawed his way up from nothing, who’d built an empire on patience and ruthlessness, who’d never let anyone close enough to hurt him.
The face of a predator.
Somewhere in that hospital, Lena Hughes was about to lose everything. Her father. Her legacy. Her illusion that the world was safe.
And I was going to be the one waiting when she fell.
The wolf settled in my chest, finally quiet. Finally satisfied with the promise of what was to come.
The hunt had begun.