19. Lena #3
“Just processing some things.” I tucked the folder under my arm, pressing it against my side. “Going through my father’s old files.”
Something crossed his face. There and gone so fast I might have imagined it. A tightness around his eyes, a brief hardening of his jaw.
“Finding anything interesting?”
“Just hotel records. Nothing important.” I did not know why I lied. Instinct, maybe. The same instinct that made me want to step back from his grip, though I did not let myself.
“Well, you know you can tell me anything, right?” His smile was warm, the same smile that had steadied me through crisis after crisis. The same smile that had been there when I found out about the debt, when the stalker’s first message arrived, when my father died. “I am not going anywhere.”
The words echoed in my head. Familiar. Comforting. But something about them nagged at the back of my mind.
I pushed down the unease and forced a smile. “Thanks for always being here.”
“Always,” he said, and the intensity in his eyes made me look away.
My phone buzzed as I was gathering my things to leave. Clara’s name on the screen.
“Hey.” I tucked the phone between my ear and shoulder, reaching for my bag.
“You sound different.” Clara’s voice was sharp. Assessing. “What happened?”
“We went to the cabin. He told me some things about his past. About his family.” I hesitated, aware that I was skirting the edges of secrets that were not mine to share. “We talked.”
“Talked.” The word was flat with disbelief. “You sound like you did before, Lena. Before the contract ended. Before the rejection. Before all of it.”
Before he destroyed me, she meant. Before I had a reason to hate him.
“Clara.”
“Are you falling for him again?”
The question hit like a slap. I opened my mouth to deny it, to offer some explanation about strategic softening and calculated intimacy and playing the long game she had taught me.
Nothing came out.
“I thought so.” Clara’s voice softened, but the edge remained. “Lena, listen to me. This man engineered your family’s destruction. He used you for a year and threw you away. He forced you into a marriage you didn’t want. None of that has changed just because he’s shown you some vulnerability.”
The mental ledger tried to surface. Apex Lending. “Adequate.” Dad dying while I was in his bed.
But the words felt distant now. Worn thin by everything that had happened since.
“The gala is tomorrow,” Clara continued. “You were going to end it after. You were going to tell him the truth. That it was all an act. That you felt nothing.”
I had forgotten. Not forgotten, exactly, but the plan had become background noise beneath everything else. The wolf. The cabin. The claiming bite he was afraid to give me.
“I know.”
“Do you still want to?”
The silence stretched between us. I thought about the speech I had rehearsed in my head for weeks. The words I had sharpened like knives.
You wanted to know if I loved you. Here’s your answer: I never stopped hating you. Every moan was a performance. Every ‘yes’ was a lie. How does it feel to be adequate, Raphael? To be nothing but a means to an end?
A month ago, those words had felt like justice. Like the only power I had left.
Now they felt like cruelty for its own sake.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly.
Clara was quiet for a long moment. “Just make sure that’s still what you want. Before you do something you can’t take back.”
“I will.”
“Call me after the gala. Whatever you decide.”
I hung up and sat in my office, staring at the leather folder of my father’s secrets. The speech echoed in my head, the words I had planned to use like weapons.
How does it feel to be adequate?
He had used that word against me once. Thrown it in my face like garbage. The memory still burned.
But he had also carried me to bed last night. Held me while I slept. Told me about his mother with his voice breaking and his eyes raw with a vulnerability he had never shown anyone.
The ledger kept score of his sins. But the ledger did not account for the man who had emerged from behind the masks. The one who was terrified of becoming his father. The one who pulled back from the claiming bite because he loved me too much to risk hurting me.
Every touch was a performance.
Was it? Had any of it been performance? Or had the performance become real so gradually that I had not noticed the moment it stopped being a lie?
I did not have answers. Not yet. But the speech felt wrong in my mouth now, the words too sharp for a target I was no longer sure I wanted to hit.
Tomorrow was the gala. Whatever happened after, I needed to decide who I wanted to be when the music stopped.
The manor was quiet when I arrived that night. I found Raphael in his study, surrounded by files and photographs spread across his desk. Crime scene photos. Witness statements. The investigation that still had no solution.
“What did you learn?” He looked up as I walked in, reading my face the way he always seemed to. His nostrils flared slightly, scenting the stress on my skin.
I told him about Maya. The fourth-floor suites. The secrets my father had helped people keep and the leverage that created.
“Your father ran a blackmail operation.” Not a question.
“I think so. Maybe not actively, but he had the material. The knowledge.” I sank into the chair across from him, suddenly exhausted. “How did I not see it?”
“He did not want you to see it.” Raphael leaned back in his chair. “Men like your father build walls around the things they are ashamed of. Especially from the people whose respect they need.”
“Did you know? About the suites?”
He was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was careful. “Yes.”
The word landed like a stone. “You knew my father was running a blackmail operation and you never told me?”
“I knew before we met. It was one of the reasons I targeted him initially.” Tension corded his neck. “When I realized what you meant to me, I buried it. I could have exposed him. Destroyed his reputation, taken the hotel through scandal instead of debt. But that would have destroyed you too.”
I processed that. Another secret he had kept to protect me.
“You protected him to protect me.”
“I protected your image of him.” His voice was rough. “The father you loved, even if he did not deserve it. I did not want to be the one to take that from you.”
The weight of my father’s legacy settled over me like a dark cloud. The hotel I had loved, the man I had mourned, the complicated reality of who Richard Hughes had really been.
Raphael rose from his desk and crossed to where I sat. His hand found my shoulder, squeezed, and then he pulled me up and into his lap. I went without resistance, tucking my head against his chest, breathing in the familiar warmth of him.
“The investigation?”
“Nowhere.” His frustration vibrated through the word.
“You will find them,” I said again, because I did not know what else to say.
“I will.” His arms tightened around me. “I just need to figure out what I am missing.”
We sat there as the evening deepened outside the windows, wrapped in each other. My husband the wolf. My father the blackmailer. The hotel full of secrets I was only beginning to understand. The world had shifted beneath my feet, and I was still learning where the solid ground was.
Eventually, exhaustion caught up with me. The weight of everything I had learned, everything I had accepted, dragged at my limbs until I could barely keep my eyes open.
Raphael noticed before I did. He stood, lifting me with him as if I weighed nothing, and carried me up the stairs to the bedroom.
I let him. My arms around his neck, my face against his throat, breathing in his scent. No resistance. No pretending I did not want this.
He laid me on the bed and stretched out beside me, his body curving around mine. Protector. Predator. Partner.
“The bite,” I murmured, already half-asleep. “We do not have to talk about it again. I just wanted you to know I would say yes. When you are ready.”
His arms tightened around me. His lips brushed my temple, soft as a promise.
“When I am ready,” he repeated, and his voice held cautious hope. The first real hope I had heard from him.
I fell asleep with his heartbeat steady against my back and the question hanging between us. Unanswered but not forgotten.
A door that stayed open.