12. Raphael #3
The Pakhan would see this as proof of distraction. Proof that I had allowed a woman to cloud my judgment, to make me soft. He would see the chaos at the hotel and calculate exactly how much of my attention was split between pack business and protecting my mate.
And he wouldn’t be entirely wrong.
“I’ll deal with the Pakhan,” I said. “Focus on the vampires. If they’re behind this, I need proof before the Pakhan decides to make an example of my failure.”
Viktor held my gaze for a moment longer than necessary. Whatever he saw there made him nod once, sharply, before leaving without another word.
An hour passed. Two. I was reviewing security footage when I caught the movement through the window.
The hotel’s parking lot stretched out below, mostly empty this early in the investigation. But there, near the edge of the property where the lot met the service road, I spotted Michael.
He was talking to someone. A man. Young, well-dressed, gesturing with the kind of agitation that suggested an argument.
I squinted, trying to make out the face.
Joe Bishop.
My wolf snarled, hackles rising. What the hell was Michael doing talking to Lena’s obsessive ex-boyfriend?
I watched as Michael placed a hand on Joe’s arm, calming him, speaking words I couldn’t hear but could imagine.
The general manager dealing with a pest. Protecting his employer’s wife from unwanted harassment.
Joe nodded at whatever Michael said, his shoulders dropping from their aggressive hunch. After another moment of conversation, he turned and walked toward the street, his head down.
Michael watched him go, then turned back toward the hotel.
Good. At least someone was keeping that pest away from her.
The afternoon ground on. More reports. More dead ends. More questions without answers.
The sun was setting by the time I left the hotel.
Orange and gold bled across the mountains, painting the peaks in colors that should have been beautiful.
I didn’t see them. My mind was still in that storage room, cataloguing details, searching for the pattern I had missed.
The killer’s scent. The disabled cameras.
Why Stephanie had agreed to meet someone alone in a part of the hotel without witnesses.
She had trusted whoever killed her. That was the part that kept circling in my head. Not a stranger. Not a threat she had seen coming. Someone she knew well enough to feel safe with.
The investigation was ongoing. Detective Marsh had interviewed half the staff and would return tomorrow for the rest. My men continued their parallel work, digging into the Diamantis angle while the police chased whatever leads they found.
I had caught glimpses of her throughout the day.
Lena on the phone with a reporter, her voice calm and measured while her free hand gripped the edge of her desk.
Lena walking a sobbing housekeeper to the break room, one arm around the woman’s shoulders.
Every time I looked, she was moving, solving, holding someone else together while her own seams strained.
I had watched her from a distance, never approaching, never intruding.
Giving her the space Alice had recommended.
But I had seen the moments when her mask slipped.
The way her hand trembled when she thought no one was looking.
The way she had paused outside the storage room door and closed her eyes before walking past.
She was grieving. For Stephanie, for the safety of her hotel, for the illusion that she was in control of anything.
But that look. The one we’d shared across the hallway, the acknowledgment of last night and everything unspoken between us. I carried it with me on the drive home.
The manor was quiet when I pulled into the drive. Her car was already there.
Alice met me at the door.
“She came home an hour ago. Went straight to her room.”
I nodded, loosening my tie as I walked past her toward my study. Reports waited on my desk, but I ignored them. The whiskey I poured went untouched.
Alice appeared in the doorway twenty minutes later with a plate of food I hadn’t asked for. Roast chicken, vegetables.
“You need to keep your strength up,” she said, setting it on my desk.
I looked at the plate without appetite. “Later.”
She didn’t push, but she didn’t leave either. Just stood there, watching me with those eyes that had seen too much of my life to be fooled by any mask I might wear.
“She’ll be all right,” Alice said finally. “She’s stronger than she looks.”
“I know.” That was part of the problem. She was strong enough to survive without me. Strong enough to hate me forever if she chose to.
Alice left the food and closed the door quietly behind her.
My wolf was restless.
Mate in danger. Can’t find the source. Can’t protect what I can’t see.
That familiar scent from the crime scene nagged at me. I ran through everyone I knew, mentally cataloguing. Bratva contacts. Enemies I had made over the years. The Diamantis vampires who had been probing hotel security. The kind of threats I had been trained to hunt. Nothing clicked.
The hotel staff barely registered as suspects. They had been here for years, most of them. Loyal to the Hughes family, loyal to Lena. My security assessment had flagged no concerns.
I tried again. Vendors who visited regularly. Delivery drivers. The maintenance contractors who came in monthly. The scent wasn’t any of them, but it wasn’t unfamiliar either.
The scent was there, a ghost at the edge of recognition, refusing to solidify into a face or a name.
Whoever had killed Stephanie had been in that room. Had left their mark on the scene even as they tried to cover their tracks. My wolf knew that scent, had encountered it somewhere, and couldn’t place it.
The frustration was maddening. I paced the length of my study, trying to force the connection.
The hotel was a crossroads of a thousand scents every day.
Guests, vendors, delivery drivers, maintenance workers.
Anyone could have been in that storage room over the past week, their traces layering over each other until individual threads became impossible to separate.
My wolf growled, wanting a clear trail to follow. But this wasn’t the forest. This was civilization, where prey knew how to hide among the crowd.
I needed evidence, not instinct. Whoever had done this would slip up eventually. They always did.
Above me, I heard footsteps. Her footsteps, moving through her room, the shower turning on.
Was she trying to wash off the day the way she had tried to wash off last night?
The thought of her under that water, the spray running down skin I had tasted just hours ago, made my wolf whine with a need I couldn’t satisfy.
I didn’t go to her.
Last night she had come to me because she chose to. If I went to her now, it would be me pushing, me demanding. She had made it clear she needed to set the pace. That single flinch when I had touched her face, that one word. Don’t.
She wasn’t ready for tenderness. Not from me. Not yet.
So I waited.
The house settled around me, quiet except for the occasional creak of old wood. I listened to her footsteps overhead, tracking her movements the way my wolf tracked prey. Kitchen. Hallway. Back to her room.
She didn’t come downstairs.
I told myself it didn’t matter. I told myself that one night didn’t mean she had forgiven me, that hate-sex was just bodies, that I had no right to expect anything more from the woman I had betrayed.
But she had said it. Not to me, but I had heard it anyway. In the rhythm of her heartbeat when she had come to my study. In the way her scent had changed when I opened the door.
This was the only place that was safe.
She hadn’t meant for me to know. The words had been internal, a thought she believed was private.
But wolves hear things humans don’t. We feel the pulse of blood through veins, catch the subtle shifts in scent that betray emotion, sense the vibrations of words spoken only in the mind.
And the bond building between us carried her truth to me like a whisper across a crowded room. Whether she acknowledged it or not.
She had come to me because I was safe. Not despite what I was, but because of it. The monster she should fear was the one she had turned to when everything else fell apart.
She’ll come again. When she’s ready. And I’ll be here, waiting, patient as only a wolf could be when guarding what mattered most.
I finished the whiskey I had poured and stared at the empty glass. Somewhere in Paradise Peaks, a killer was walking free. Someone who knew this hotel, knew its secrets, had taken a life to protect whatever agenda they were serving.
I would find them. I would tear them apart. And then I would lay the answer at Lena’s feet like the offering it was.
This was the grovel she couldn’t see. The protection she didn’t know she needed. The devotion I couldn’t explain because the truth would only make her feel obligated rather than loved.
But someday she would understand.
Someday she would see all of it.
And maybe then, she would let me touch her face without flinching away.