One
DOREN
I’d been watching her for six weeks.
She was careless. Reckless. A lamb wandering through wolf territory without the slightest awareness of the teeth in the shadows.
It infuriated me.
It also stirred dark hunger in my chest—a craving I’d tamped down years ago.
Tonight, she’d made a mistake. A small one, by most standards. She’d accepted a drink from a man at the pub near her flat. A handsome man with a forgettable face and eyes that tracked her movements with the kind of focus I recognized all too well.
I recognized it because I’d been watching her with that same focus for forty-two days.
The difference was that I knew what I was. What I wanted. What I was capable of.
The man buying her drinks didn’t have the self-awareness to understand his own darkness. He just knew he wanted something from her, and he was used to taking what he wanted.
Not tonight.
I intercepted him in the alley behind the pub, after he’d slipped something into her second glass of wine. The confrontation was brief and efficient. I left him breathing—barely—and returned to find Lillet swaying on her barstool, confusion clouding her turquoise eyes.
“Time to go,” I said, sliding onto the stool beside her.
She blinked and tried to focus. “Do I…know you?”
“No.” I steadied her with a hand on her elbow. “But you’re about to.”
I told myself I was taking her somewhere safe. I told myself this was protection—that leaving her in that pub, drugged and vulnerable, would have been unthinkable. That any decent person would have done the same.
But decent people would have called the police. Decent people would have taken her to hospital, or found her friends, or done any number of things that didn’t involve carrying her unconscious body to a car with tinted windows and driving four hours into the Scottish countryside.
Decent people wouldn’t have brought her here.
The cottage sat at the end of a private road, surrounded by twenty acres of woodland that belonged to a shell company that belonged to another shell company that eventually, if you traced the paperwork far enough, connected to a name I hadn’t used in fifteen years.
No one would find her here.
No one would find us here.
I carried her inside and laid her on the bed in the main room—a massive thing with wrought iron posts.
She looked small against the dark sheets.
Fragile. Her ink-black hair spread across the pillow like spilled silk, and her plump lips were parted, breath coming slow and even as her body processed the drugs that bastard had slipped her.
I should leave. Lock the door, sleep in the other room, wait for her to wake and then explain.
Explain what, exactly? That I’d been watching her for weeks?
That I’d become obsessed with the way she bit her lower lip when she was concentrating?
That I knew her coffee order, her favorite author, the playlist she listened to on her morning walks?
That I’d fantasized about this—about having her here, in my space, unable to leave—more times than I could count?
I pulled a chair to the side of the bed and sat down.
And watched her sleep.
—Lillet—
I woke to unfamiliar darkness and a headache that felt like someone had driven a railroad spike through my temple.
For several disorienting seconds, I couldn’t remember where I was. My flat in Edinburgh? No—the bed was wrong. Too large. The sheets too soft, carrying a scent that wasn’t mine. And it definitely wasn’t female.
Memories crashed in fragments. The pub. A glass of wine I hadn’t ordered, delivered by a man with a forgettable face. And then—nothing.
I sat up too fast and my head spun. I gripped the edge of the mattress, waiting for the dizziness to pass, and forced my eyes to adjust to the dimly lit room.
It was sparsely furnished with stone walls and heavy curtains that blocked what might have been windows.
There was a closed door to my left, and another to my right that was ajar, revealing what looked like a bathroom.
An empty chair sat beside the bed, but the cushion bore the impression of someone’s weight.
I still had the jeans and blouse on that I’d worn to the pub, but that gave me no comfort. The fact that I hadn’t been undressed didn’t mean I was safe.
The door to my left opened.
A tall, broad-shouldered man filled the frame.
He had dark hair that fell across a face that was almost offensively handsome.
His jaw was sharp, his mouth almost sinfully full, and cheekbones that could cut glass.
That he was, objectively, the most beautiful man I'd ever seen made it worse, somehow. His gray eyes—or were they blue? I couldn’t tell in the dim light—fixed on me with an intensity that made my skin crawl.
He wasn’t the man I remembered from the pub.
“You’re awake.” His voice was low and controlled, with an accent I couldn’t place. English, but with an unfamiliar dialect. “How do you feel?”
“Where am I?” My voice was raspy, rough from whatever had been in my wine. “Who are you? What—”
“You were drugged.” He stepped into the room, and I pressed myself against the headboard instinctively. He noticed. “I intercepted the guy who did it before he could—”
“Before he could what? Do exactly what you’ve done?” I scrambled backward on the bed. “Where the fuck am I?” I shrieked.
He stalked forward and gripped my chin with his big hand. “I will not tolerate filthy words spoken from those beautiful lips.”
My mouth gaped. “You won’t tolerate…” I tried to pull away but his grip was iron.
“Settle down, sweet Lillet.”
I gestured at the stone walls, the heavy door, the bed with its iron frame. “Settle down? What is this place? A dungeon?”
“A cottage.” He moved to the chair beside the bed and sat down with the easy grace of a predator settling in to watch its prey. “Remote. Private. Safe.”
“Safe.” I cackled more than laughed. “You kidnapped me and brought me to a remote cottage in the middle of nowhere. And you want me to believe I’m safe?”
“You’re safer here than you would have been with him.”
“Safer. It isn’t what one would call a high bar.”
A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “No. I suppose it isn’t.”
We stared at each other across the space between the bed and the chair. My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my throat, but I refused to let him see how frightened I was. Whatever game this man was playing, showing fear would only make it worse.
“What do you want?” I asked. “Money? Information? If this is about my work at the bureau—”
“I don’t want your money.” He crossed one ankle over the other knee. Casual. Relaxed. Like he had all the time in the world. “And your translation work, while impressive, isn’t what brought you to my attention.”
“What did?”
His gaze traveled over me slowly, deliberately, making me feel stripped bare even fully clothed.
“I’ve been watching you,” he said simply. “For weeks. And I’ve come to a conclusion.”
“Which is?”
“That you belong to me.” He said it the way someone might comment on the weather—calmly, factually, as if he were stating an obvious truth rather than the ravings of a lunatic. “You just don’t know it yet.”
“I don’t even know your name.”
“You can call me Snow,”
“Your name is Snow? Seriously?”
“You’ll get the rest when you’ve earned it.”