Chapter 23 Raphael #2
The hotel wouldn’t survive the exposure.
Five generations of Hughes family legacy, reduced to a crime scene.
The investors would flee. The guests would cancel.
The staff she was fighting so hard to protect would lose their jobs, their livelihoods, their trust in the woman who’d promised to save them.
And she would be left with nothing but the knowledge that her father had been a monster, that the hotel she’d sacrificed everything for had been built on suffering, and that the man she’d trusted had known the truth and said nothing.
My hand hovered over the keyboard. One click. That’s all it would take. Years of planning, a lifetime of rage, distilled into a single motion.
The wolf snarled, low and threatening. Not at the Senator. Not at the enemies I’d spent my life preparing to destroy.
At me.
Don’t. The word ripped through my skull like claws. She is ours. You will not hurt what is ours.
I closed the folder.
The motion was automatic, instinctive, and it took me a moment to understand what I’d done. I’d pulled my punch. After fifteen years of planning, fifteen years of dreaming about this exact moment, I had chosen to leave my revenge incomplete.
Because of her.
Because the thought of hurting her, even indirectly, made my chest seize with a pain I didn’t know how to name. Because I’d rather let my grandfather’s legacy survive in some diminished form than watch her face when she learned the truth about her father. About me.
I poured another whiskey. Drank it too fast, let the burn distract me from the recognition crawling up my spine like cold fingers.
I was compromised. Fatally, irrevocably compromised.
The woman sleeping in my bed had become more important than the revenge I’d built my entire life around, and I hadn’t even noticed it happening.
Hadn’t noticed the way she’d slipped past every defense I’d built, every wall I’d constructed, every careful boundary between myself and anything that could make me weak.
The phone rang, shattering the silence.
Viktor. I answered before I could think better of it.
“The Senator’s finished.” His voice was flat, professional, the voice of a soldier reporting to his commander. “Andrew is already putting out statements distancing himself. Social media is in full meltdown. Phase one is complete.”
Andrew. My cousin. The Senator’s legitimate grandson, raised in the spotlight while I rotted in that school, groomed to carry on the Prescott political dynasty as Mayor of Paradise Peaks. Of course he was distancing himself. Rats and sinking ships.
“I know.” I kept my own voice neutral, controlled. The voice of the man I’d been before she’d walked into my life and burned it down around me. “I’m watching.”
A pause. Too long. Too knowing.
“You don’t sound like a man celebrating.”
“There’s still work to do.”
Another pause. When Viktor spoke again, his tone had shifted. Harder. Warning.
“Your woman. She’s becoming a problem.”
The wolf rose so fast I nearly choked on it. Fangs pressing at my gums, aching to descend. Claws threatening to split my fingertips. The urge to reach through the phone and tear out his throat for even mentioning her, for letting her name touch his lips.
I forced my voice flat. “She’s not your concern.”
“Max is concerned.” The Pakhan’s name landed like a threat, heavy with implication. “You know the rules about attachments. You know what happens when wolves get distracted.”
“I said she’s not your concern.”
The silence stretched, taut as a wire about to snap. I could hear Viktor weighing his options, deciding whether to push. He was my brother in arms, one of the few wolves I trusted with my back in a fight. But even trust had limits in the Bratva. Especially when the Alpha was watching.
“Be careful, Raphael.” His voice was almost gentle. Almost kind. The tone of a man delivering a warning he wished he didn’t have to give. “Attachments make us weak. And weakness gets people killed.”
He hung up before I could respond.
I sat in the cold study, surrounded by the evidence of my obsession, and felt the walls closing in.
Viktor was right. Max was right. The rules existed for a reason.
I’d seen what happened to wolves who let themselves get attached to humans.
I’d lived through the aftermath of my father’s particular brand of love.
I should tell her. I should wake her up, tell her everything, give her the truth she deserved. She would hate me. She would run. But at least she would understand what she was dealing with. At least she would have the information to protect herself.
Tell her. The wolf was howling now, desperate and furious. Truth. She deserves truth. Our mate deserves truth.
But if I told her, she would leave. And if she left, she would be unprotected.
The stalker was still out there, still watching from inside her own hotel.
Whoever had killed her friend’s dog, sabotaged her heating, leaked her private information to the press.
My people hadn’t been able to identify them yet, but I knew they were close.
Too close. Watching. Waiting. Patient in a way that made my wolf’s hackles rise every time I thought about it.
If she ran from me, she would run straight into danger.
I couldn’t allow that.
She’s safer not knowing. When the threats are eliminated, when the stalker is found and the Senator is finished and the dust has settled, then she can know. Then I’ll tell her everything. The justification tasted like ash.
The lie tasted like the whiskey. Bitter and burning and too easy to swallow.
I knew what I was doing. I knew the justification was hollow. I was keeping her in the dark not to protect her, but to protect myself. To keep her close. To delay the inevitable moment when she looked at me with those clear eyes and saw the monster I really was.
I was controlling her for her own good.
Just like her father had.
The parallel made me sick, bile rising in my throat.
I poured another drink anyway. Let the alcohol blur the edges of the recognition that was eating me alive.
I was no better than Richard Hughes. No better than my grandfather.
I’d told myself I was different, that my darkness served a purpose, that I would never be the kind of man who hurt the people he claimed to love.
But here I was. Building the same prison her father had built around her, just with different bars.
The wolf howled, furious and desperate, clawing at the inside of my skull.
I drank until he went quiet.
The pre-dawn light was gray through the windows when I finally made my way back to the bedroom.
Hours had passed in the study, watching the news cycle feed on the scandal I’d created, tracking the first cracks appearing in the Prescott dynasty.
The Senator’s office had gone dark, no response, no denial.
Political analysts were already calling it the end of an era.
I should have felt satisfied. I felt nothing but tired.
The hallway was cold beneath my bare feet, but the bedroom was warm when I pushed open the door.
She’d shifted in her sleep, reaching for the empty space I’d left behind.
Her arm was stretched across my side of the bed, fingers curled around my pillow like she was trying to hold onto something that wasn’t there.
The sight made something ache in ways I didn’t want to examine.
I stripped off my clothes and slid back under the covers.
The sheets had gone cool in my absence, the warmth she’d generated long since dissipated.
But she turned toward me immediately, her body seeking mine even in sleep, and when I pulled her against my chest she made a small sound of contentment that nearly undid me.
“You were gone.” Her voice was thick with sleep, barely conscious.
“I’m here now.”
She nuzzled into my neck, inhaling, her breath warm against my skin. Even half-asleep, she was learning me. Reading me in ways no one else ever had.
“You smell like whiskey.”
My arms tightened around her. She noticed too much. She saw too clearly. Every day she spent with me, she got closer to the truth I was hiding.
“Go back to sleep.”
But she was waking up now, her body responding to the tension in mine. She pulled back just enough to look at my face, her eyes searching in the gray light filtering through the curtains. Those eyes. Shining and honest and seeing more than I wanted her to see.
“Is something wrong?”
Tell her. The wolf’s voice was ragged, exhausted from howling all night. Now. Tell her now.
“Nothing you need to worry about.”
The words came out smooth, practiced. The lie I’d been telling my whole life, to everyone who’d ever tried to get close. Don’t worry. I have it under control. Everything is fine.
She studied me for a long moment, and I watched the thoughts move behind her eyes.
The instinct to push warring with the desire to trust. She’d spent her whole life being kept in the dark by men who claimed to know better.
Her father. Her ex-boyfriend. Every authority figure who’d ever decided she couldn’t handle the truth.
And now me.
Something in her expression shifted. A decision made. She settled back against my chest, her cheek pressed to my heart, her arm draping across my waist with easy possession.
“Whatever it is,” she said quietly, “you don’t have to carry it alone.”
The words sliced through me like a blade, sharp and clean and devastating.
She was offering me something. Partnership. Trust. The kind of vulnerability I’d always avoided, the kind that got people killed in my world. And I was accepting her offering with hands still stained by the lies I was choosing to tell her.
I held her tighter. Breathed in her scent, that innocent sweetness now mixed with something darker and richer, the evidence of our coupling still clinging to her skin. My wolf settled, appeased by her closeness even as the man understood how little I deserved it.
“Sleep,” I murmured against her hair. “We can talk later.”
Another lie. We wouldn’t talk. I would continue hiding the truth, and she would continue trusting me, and the wall between us would grow higher with every secret I added to it.
She fell asleep within minutes, her breath deepening, her body going soft and heavy in my arms. I envied her that. The ability to let go. To trust. To close her eyes and believe that the person holding her had her best interests at heart.
I didn’t sleep.
I watched the gray light brighten at the windows, marking the start of a day that would bring the scandal to Paradise Peaks. The news would spread. The reporters would come. And slowly, inevitably, the truth would begin to surface.
She would find out eventually. Whether I told her or not, she would learn what her father had been. What I had done. What I was still choosing to hide from her.
I had everything I’d wanted. The revenge begun. The woman in my arms. The Senator’s legacy crumbling like the house of cards it had always been.
And I had never felt more alone.