CHAPTER TEN
THE SCREEN IN HIS OFFICE was dark, and Alexei was staring at it the way a man stares at a door he knows he shouldn’t open.
The city below was quiet. Sunday-morning quiet. Silence that should feel peaceful but didn’t, because silence had a different texture now. Before Zia, silence was familiar. An old companion. Something he’d made his peace with long ago in a fortress that echoed with nothing.
After Zia, silence was an absence. A held breath. A room where her voice should be and wasn’t.
He had smelled it yesterday. On the road leading to the fortress, the access route that existed only for those who knew how to find it, a scent that didn’t belong. Faint. Old enough to be from a passing car, not a visitor. But distinctive. Wolf shifter. Young. Male.
Billy Stein had been near his home.
Not at it. Not yet. But close enough to learn the route. Close enough to study the timing. Close enough to understand the pattern of a fortress that existed in a pocket dimension and didn’t welcome uninvited guests.
The boy was watching.
And Zia had been hiding phone calls for days.
The two facts arranged themselves in his mind with the clean, terrible logic of a proof he didn’t want to solve.
She had been receiving messages. She had been blocking them.
She had lied about it, once, on the couch, with a stammer and a scent of deception so sharp it had stopped the humming in his chest.
She was in contact with Billy. And Billy was finding his way to the fortress.
The conclusion was simple.
The conclusion was unbearable.
He could have confronted her. Could have asked, directly, the way he did everything, without ambiguity, without games. He could have said I smelled deception on your skin and I need you to tell me the truth.
He didn’t.
Because the truth, if it was what he thought it was, would require him to hear her say it.
And he could survive many things, had survived many things, had survived the annihilation of his entire race, had survived decades of solitude in a fortress that echoed with nothing, but he could not survive hearing Zia say that she wanted someone else.
So instead he lied.
The Bellecourts. A Sunday negotiation. He kissed her forehead, not her mouth, because if he kissed her mouth he would not leave, and he needed to leave, because Billy Stein’s scent was on the road to his home and the boy deserved the chance to come to her without the obstacle of a husband who could break him in half.
If she wanted Billy, Alexei would not be the wall between them.
He would be the door she could walk through.
His chest ached.
He ignored it.
Twenty minutes after leaving the fortress, he accessed the surveillance system.
The fortress had cameras in every public space: hallways, the main rooms, the grounds. Not the private quarters. Never the private quarters. The system was a security measure, installed decades ago, and Alexei had used it exactly twice in all that time, both for external threats.
This was not an external threat.
This was the worst kind of threat, the kind that came from inside the walls, from inside his own marriage, from a boy with dark eyes and a voice that cracked on Zia’s name.
He found Billy in the living room. The wolf shifter was standing by the window, looking around the space with an expression that Alexei recognized because he had worn it himself, once, from the back of a car across from a coffeehouse.
Longing.
The boy was longing for what he saw.
Alexei watched Zia enter the room. Watched Billy move toward her, reaching for her face. Watched Zia step back, quick, sharp, and something in his chest lurched with a hope he immediately crushed.
She stepped back because he was watching. Because the boy had shown up uninvited and she was startled. It meant nothing.
He watched the conversation. Billy’s apologies, the declarations, the I waited for him to leave that confirmed what Alexei had already known. Zia’s face, cycling through shock and anger and something he couldn’t name.
Then Zia excused herself. Left Billy in the living room. Walked down the hallway toward the library.
Alexei switched cameras.
The library. Zia was alone. Pacing. Her phone pressed to her ear.
Maryah. She was calling Maryah. He could hear the tinny warmth of Maryah Celestini’s voice coming through the speaker, and Zia was pacing the way she paced when she was working through a problem, quick and tight, her free hand gripping her elbow.
“I don’t know how to break the truth to him,” Zia said.
Alexei’s hand went still on the screen.
I don’t know how to break the truth to him.
Him.
Not Billy. Him. Her husband. The man she’d married two weeks ago in a hidden garden, the man whose chest hummed for her, the man who had knelt on her bedroom floor and told her I love you and meant it with every molecule of his being.
She didn’t know how to break the truth to him.
He terminated the feed.
The screen went dark.
He did not need to hear anything else.
For one hour, Alexei Lykaios sat in his empty office and did not move.
Not a finger. Not a breath that wasn’t automatic. He sat in the chair he’d occupied for a decade of board meetings and negotiations, and he was absolutely still, the stillness of a body that has run out of instructions.
The city below went about its Sunday. Cars moved. People walked. The world continued in its ordinary, relentless way, indifferent to the fact that in an office on the top floor of a glass-and-stone tower, a man was learning what it felt like to lose the only thing he had ever wanted.
He had promised her.
I am not that boy. I will never hurt you.
He had promised, and she had believed him.
She had said yes with a voice that broke.
She had let him hold her and touch her and learn the geography of her body and the music of her laugh.
She had named his espresso machine and played his piano and put throw pillows on his couch and filled his fortress with sounds that made the silence retreat into the corners.
And all along, from the very first text she blocked and didn’t tell him about, she had been hiding something. Not an affair. Not a betrayal. A boy who wouldn’t let go, and a heart that was too kind to crush him.
But Alexei couldn’t see that. Not through the scent of deception. Not through the stammer and the blush. Not through the terror of a man who had found something he didn’t deserve and had been waiting, every day, for science to correct its mistake.
All he could see was that she had chosen to hide Billy’s name from him. And there was only one reason to hide a name.
Because it still mattered.
He would not keep her. He would not be the cage. He would not be the prince who trapped a woman in a marriage she didn’t want because his pride couldn’t survive the alternative. He would be the door.
Alexei stood. He straightened his jacket. He composed his face into the mask that had served him his entire life, the prince, the last of his kind, the man who needed nothing and no one.
And he drove home to let her go.
She was waiting in the living room.
Standing by the window where Billy had stood, though Alexei tried not to think about that, and when she heard him enter, she turned, and her face...
Her face was radiant.
The loveliest smile. Bright, warm, full of something that looked so much like happiness it made his chest crack along a fault line he hadn’t known existed.
She opened her mouth to speak.
“There’s been a mistake,” he said.
The smile faltered.
“A mistake?”
“I had our compatibility numbers rechecked.” His voice betrayed nothing. The voice of a man delivering a briefing, not a man whose world was collapsing one word at a time. “By Etienne Hirsche. I’m afraid our compatibility isn’t as ideal as Maryah’s system initially indicated.”
The color drained from her face.
“Oh. I...”
“Would you prefer a divorce or an annulment?”
The words hung in the air between them. Her lips parted. Her eyes, those wide, dark eyes that he had spent two weeks memorizing in every light, in every mood, in the golden haze of morning and the blue dark of 2 a.m., filled with something that looked like the world ending.
“I...I...”
She swallowed.
“May you excuse me for a moment?”
“Of course.”
She walked past him. Down the hallway. Her footsteps, quick, light, slightly uneven because she always walked faster on the left, receded into the silence of the fortress.
He listened until he couldn’t hear them anymore.
Then he stood in the empty living room and waited.
Five minutes. He stood by the window. The mountains were white against a winter sky and the light was flat and the room smelled like her, like warmth and coffee and the particular note that meant home, and the scent was everywhere and it was killing him.
Ten minutes. He moved to the center of the room. His hands at his sides. His composure intact, his face a mask, his body the picture of a man in control, and underneath the mask there was nothing but a boy standing in the ruins of a kingdom that no longer existed, watching everyone leave.
Fifteen minutes. The tightness in his chest became an edge. A blade pressing inward. She was not coming back. She was somewhere in the fortress, somewhere he couldn’t hear her, and the absence of her sounds was louder than anything he had ever heard.
Twenty minutes. He began to pace. Alexei Lykaios did not pace. He had not paced in his adult life. Pacing was the behavior of a man who could not contain himself, and he had built his entire existence on containment.
He was pacing.
Twenty-five minutes. The fortress was silent in a way it hadn’t been since before her. Not the old silence, the familiar companion. A new silence. A silence that had teeth.
Thirty minutes.
Against every instinct that told him not to, against the voice in his head that whispered let her go, you promised yourself you would let her go, he sat down at the console in his study and accessed the surveillance footage from earlier.
Not the live feed. The recording. The conversation in the library that he had terminated after six words.
I don’t know how to break the truth to him.
He pressed play.
The footage resumed where he had cut it. Zia in the library, phone to her ear, pacing. Maryah’s voice through the speaker, calm and warm.
“Start from the beginning,” Maryah told her.
Zia took a breath. “Billy showed up. Here. At the fortress. He waited for Alexei to leave, Maryah. He’s been watching us.”
“What did you say to him?”
“I told him to leave. I told him I’m married.
But he wouldn’t listen. He kept saying he’d changed, that he fought for me.
” Her voice cracked. “And then he told me something I wasn’t expecting.
He said...he cheated the compatibility score.
Back when we first matched. He wanted me so badly he manipulated the numbers to make sure we’d be paired. ”
“He what?”
“His mother found out. That’s why she broke us up, Maryah.
It wasn’t because I’m human. It was because he cheated, and she couldn’t trust him after that.
But now he’s confessed to her, and she’s forgiven him, and she told him if I can make an honest man out of him, she’s all for it.
” A shaky breath. “And the worst part is I feel sorry for him. Because I know what it’s like to love someone who’s already gone, and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. ”
“But you don’t love him,” Maryah said.
“No.” Immediate. Certain. Not a trace of hesitation. “No. But I don’t know how to break the truth to him without destroying him.”
Him.
Billy.
She had been talking about Billy.
Maryah’s voice, gentle: “Just tell him the truth, Ry-style. Be kind. Be clear. He deserves that.”
The call ended. Zia stood in the library for a moment, steadying herself. Then she squared her shoulders and walked out.
Alexei switched cameras. The hallway. The living room.
Billy was still there. Standing by the window. Waiting.
Zia walked in, and the expression on her face was the one Alexei knew best, the one she wore when she was about to do something difficult with kindness. The expression of a woman who could not be cruel even when cruelty would have been easier.
“Billy.” Her voice was gentle. Firm but gentle. “I need you to hear me.”
The boy turned. Hope written across his face so plainly it was almost obscene.
“You’re wrong about Alexei,” she said. “He didn’t forbid me from talking to you. He doesn’t control me. He doesn’t keep me here.” She took a breath. “He loves me. And I love him back.”
Billy’s face went white.
“I’m so sorry.” Her voice was shaking now, and her eyes were bright, and she was not composed, not delivering a speech, just a girl trying to be kind in the hardest moment she knew how to be kind in.
“I’m sorry that you came all the way here, and I’m sorry about what happened with the score, and I’m sorry your mom had to go through all of that because of.
..” She faltered. Swallowed. “We were never...I’m sorry.
It’s too late. I love Alexei. I always will. ”
Billy stood there. His hands at his sides. His face drained of everything.
“But Billy...” She took a step toward him. “I forgive you. For all of it. The secrecy, the text, the score. Everything. I need you to know that. And I need you to go live your life, okay? Find someone who makes you brave. You deserve that.”
He opened his mouth, closed it, and then he nodded, once, slowly, and walked out of the living room without another word.
Zia watched him go. Then she wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist, and she stood in the empty living room, and the expression on her face was not relief.
It was love.
Love for the man she’d married. Love she was about to come and tell him. Love that was waiting for him in the living room with the loveliest smile when he came home and told her there’s been a mistake.
Alexei did not hear any of it.
He was staring at the screen, and the screen was showing him a woman who loved him, who had always loved him, who had been trying to figure out how to let down a boy gently because she was incapable of cruelty even toward the person who had broken her heart.
And he had just offered her a divorce.
The thing that had been humming for her, the deep signal that meant settled, content, home, was screaming now, and the sound it made was not contentment.
It was anguish.
He had done the one thing he had promised never to do.
I am not that boy. I will never hurt you.
His face, reflected in the dark screen, was hollow.
What have I done?