Chapter 16
RAPHAEL
The iron gates swung open at our approach, and my wolf finally relaxed. He had been pacing since we found that rose on her pillow.
The manor rose against the sky, its windows dark except for the light in the entrance hall where Alice would be waiting. She always knew. Some instinct told her when I was coming, when something was wrong, when to have whiskey waiting and questions absent.
Lena sat beside me in the back seat. As Parsons guided the car up the long drive, I felt her shoulders ease. We were coming home.
She would not be returning to that hotel until Michael was dead.
Her fury simmered beneath her silence. Not fear. She had moved past fear somewhere between finding that rose and walking out of her violated bedroom. What remained was cold and sharp and utterly certain.
She wanted him dead as much as I did.
Good, my wolf rumbled. She understands.
Parsons pulled to a stop at the front steps. Alice stood in the doorway, silver hair gleaming in the light behind her, her face composed in that particular expression she wore when she understood everything and would ask nothing.
“Your room is ready,” she said as we climbed the steps. Her eyes moved to Lena, softening.
Lena’s hand tightened on her bag strap. “Thank you, Alice.”
“Tea is waiting in the library. Or something stronger, if you prefer.”
“Stronger,” I said. “And have Parsons confirm the perimeter. I want guards at the gate, the service entrance, and the garden wall.”
Alice nodded, no questions, no hesitation. This was why she had survived decades in a wolf’s household. She understood when to speak and when to simply act.
Inside, the manor wrapped around us with familiar scents. Wood polish and old books and the faint hint of the fire Alice kept burning in the library. And underneath it all, layered into every room over the past months, her.
Lena. Her scent had seeped into the very walls. Into the leather of the study chairs where she curled up to read, the silk of the bedroom curtains, the stone of the hearth where she sat on cold mornings with her coffee and her bare feet tucked under her robe.
This house had been a prison before she came. A monument to my my fears, to the life I had been forced to build alone. Now it was something else. Something warmer. The kind of home I had not known since my mother died.
My wolf settled further. She was here. In our den. Where every guard was loyal to me. Where there was one entrance, one gate, one point of access that I controlled.
The hotel had been her territory. It had too many people, too many entrances. Staff and guests and deliveries moved through constantly, any one of them a potential threat. But this place was mine.
Ours, my wolf corrected. Ours now.
Lena moved through the entrance hall with the ease of familiarity. She knew this house. Knew which stairs creaked, which windows stuck, which chair by the library fire was most comfortable for reading. Somewhere in the past months, my cold prison had become her home too.
She paused at the foot of the stairs, her hand on the banister.
“I’m not running,” she said without turning around.
“I know.”
“This is strategy, not surrender.”
“I know that too.”
She looked back at me then, her blue eyes blazing. “Good. Because when we find him, I want to watch.”
My wolf surged at her words, and I felt pride rather than horror at her darkness. She had stopped running. My mate had grown fangs of her own.
“You’ll have a front row seat,” I promised.
Something fierce and satisfied moved through our bond, her approval bleeding into my awareness like heat. She was not shocked by my darkness. She welcomed it. Needed it, even, the way I needed her softness to balance the violence that lived in my blood.
She nodded once, then climbed the stairs toward the bedroom that had become ours. I watched her go, tracking her scent until it faded into the upper floors, before I turned toward my study.
There was work to do.
The study door closed behind me with a solid click. I did not bother with the lights. The darkness suited my mood, suited the wolf pacing beneath my skin.
The grounds stretched out below, the gardens silver in the moonlight, the tree line black against the sky.
Michael was out there, circling, savoring his invisible victory.
He had no idea.
I crossed to my desk and opened my laptop. The hotel’s security system loaded with my credentials, forty-seven cameras across six floors feeding into a grid on my screen. I had installed this system myself after our wedding, state of the art with comprehensive coverage.
Michael had walked right through it.
I pulled up the footage from this afternoon, scrubbing through the feeds until I found the service corridor near the hotel loading dock.
There. A maintenance worker in hotel uniform, face angled away from the camera, pushing a cart toward the staff elevator.
The uniform was perfect. The badge clipped to his chest which he used to scan in and unlock the door was real, probably stolen or borrowed from someone who owed him a favor.
But the walk was wrong.
I knew that walk. Had watched it across ballrooms and charity galas and in the hotel corridors when he hovered around Lena at meetings, always too close, always watching her with that hungry possessive stare he thought no one noticed.
The particular gait of a man who believed himself untouchable, who thought he was the smartest person in every room.
Michael had gotten sloppy. Or perhaps he had wanted me to see. Perhaps this was another move in his twisted game, another way to remind us that he could reach us whenever he wanted, that no security system or locked door could keep him out.
Either way, he had made a mistake. Because now I had proof. Now I had his face on camera, his method of entry, the timestamp of his violation. And soon I would have his throat in my jaws.
My wolf slammed against my ribs, demanding out. Demanding blood. The wood of the desk groaned under my grip, and I forced myself to breathe through the red haze clouding my vision.
He had been in our bedroom. He had stood over the bed where I held her, touched her pillow where her head rested against mine every night.
Kill him. Find him and tear out his throat and watch him choke on his own blood.
But not yet. His time would come soon enough.
I froze the frame and studied the timestamp.
2:47 PM. Lena had been in a staff meeting.
I had been going over entrances and exits in the lobby office.
Twenty minutes of vulnerability was all it had taken for this cockroach to slip through like smoke and violate the only place that was supposed to be safe.
I switched to the loading dock camera. Rewound further. Found him entering through the delivery bay at 2:31, blending with a catering shipment. He had timed it perfectly, arriving during the lunch rush when the dock was chaos.
The exit was harder to find. I scanned forward through every feed, every angle, every timestamp, but found nothing. He had vanished somewhere inside the building.
Which meant he knew where the cameras were. Which meant he had memorized the blind spots during his years as GM. Which meant he could do this again, anytime he wanted.
Unless I changed the game.
I pulled up the hotel’s booking system and scrolled to next week. A Thanksgiving charity gala Lena had mentioned, some foundation dinner she was obligated to host. Black tie. Two hundred guests. Chaos and crowds and a thousand opportunities for a man who knew the building’s secrets.
I created a new entry in the staff scheduling system, backdated to look routine.
A note from Lena to her assistant manager that she would be staying late after the gala to review the quarterly reports.
Alone. The security detail would escort guests out at midnight, then take their break while she worked in the office.
It was a lie, of course. Lena would be here at the manor, surrounded by wolves.
But Michael would not know that. Michael would see the schedule, see the opportunity, see his chance to finally corner her alone.
And I would be waiting.
I saved the entry and sat back, letting my thoughts unwind.
Michael’s pattern was not random. Looking back now, I could see it clearly.
The dead corgi had come when Lena was starting to feel safe at the hotel, finding her footing after her father’s death.
The heating sabotage when she had weathered the initial crises and was beginning to believe she could manage.
The paparazzi leak when she had started to trust me.
The blood in the fountain when our marriage seemed to be stable.
And now the white rose. After we had returned from the safe houses, after Viktor had killed Max, after we had finally come home thinking the worst was behind us.
Every strike came when we relaxed. When we let down our guard. When we allowed ourselves to hope.
He was not hunting us. He was herding us.
The realization settled into my chest like ice water. Michael was not desperate anymore. Not the unraveling stalker making mistakes in his frenzy. He had evolved. Colder now. More patient. More dangerous.
He enjoyed this. He fed on the fear, the waiting, the power of making us jump at shadows.
This was not about Lena anymore, not really.
It had never been about her. It was about control.
About proving to himself that he was more than the illegitimate son of Richard Hughes.
That he was smarter than everyone else, that he could manipulate us like puppets on strings, that he deserved what he thought had been stolen from him.
Men like Michael never saw their victims as people. They saw them as possessions, as symbols, as proof of their own worth. Lena was not a person to him. She was a prize to be won, a validation he needed to feel complete.
That made him dangerous. But it also made him predictable.