Chapter 3
NASH
Ishift as soon as the sun is down and run until my lungs burn.
The woods bordering the Giovanni estate are old growth.
Dense oak and black pine press in from every side; the kind of forest that’s been here much longer than the city it borders.
Wide paths have been cleared through it, leaving a soft floor of pine needles beneath my paws.
My wolf doesn’t give a shit about the aesthetics.
He just needs to move. To burn off whatever this is crawling under my skin before I do something I can’t walk back from.
Like knock on her door.
With muscles on the verge of cramping, I push harder.
Branches whip past. The moon has crested the ridge, throwing silver light in broken patterns across the ground, and my wolf catches each flash of it like fuel.
He’s been keyed up since the moment we walked out of that office and found her standing there.
Found her. Like I didn’t know exactly where she’d be.
Like I hadn’t imagined that exact moment over and over again. Mostly with my hand wrapped around my dick. I hadn’t pictured a scenario where she pretended not to know me, but I’m not surprised. Mia Reyes likes to be in control.
She’s probably cursing me right now for surprising her like that. And it might have been amusing if I weren’t so twisted up about her. Because when I walked out of that meeting, and she was standing there, something in my chest locked into place with a quiet, terrible certainty.
It’s a problem I’m currently trying to outrun.
I’ve run ops in hostile territory. I’ve stood in boardrooms with men who were planning to kill me before the ink dried on whatever they were pretending to negotiate.
Hell, I built an elite war college from the ground up out of sheer will and an inherited property that was one bad season away from foreclosure. I don’t rattle easily.
Mia Reyes rattles the fuck out of me.
Two years. Two years of my wolf going quiet and cooperative, of meetings and logistics and building something real in Crossvale, and I’d almost managed to convince myself what I remembered about her was exaggerated.
That I’d been romanticizing a single night.
That no one is actually that irresistible.
Then she straightened her shoulders in the corridor and looked at me like she wanted to set me on fire, and I knew I’d been lying to myself the entire time.
Whatever I remembered, she’s more.
My wolf snarls at that, and I give myself over to his frustration, losing my humanity since at least that quiets my mind temporarily. For the next mile, I’m pure instinct. Wind. Speed. The creak of branches and the distant sound of the river threading through the lower ravine.
But even my wolf can’t outrun this.
He slows at the ridge overlook, nosing at the air.
The city spreads below us, the lights of Indigo Hills blinking like scattered embers against the dark mountain basin.
I’ve seen a hundred cities from a hundred vantage points, and most of them left me cold.
I saw everything as strategy. Assets and liabilities.
Entry and exit points. A catalog of vulnerabilities.
This one is different. Maybe because I know what it cost her.
I’ve been watching Indigo Hills for years; the way Franco Giovanni ran it like a personal fiefdom, the way corruption filtered down from his table to every corner of city life.
The way the mafia pack preyed on the weak because there was no structure in place to stop them.
When Grey Diavolo reached out through quiet back channels two weeks ago with news of their change in leadership, I paid attention.
Not just to the tactical opportunity. To what he was trying to build. How he was going about building it.
A city like this one, hidden, insular, bruised from decades of bad leadership, doesn’t heal overnight.
But it heals faster when the alpha at its center is the kind of man who actually gives a damn about the people in it rather than what they can produce for him.
Grey’s the real thing. His mate is too. Watching Lexi Giovanni stand at the head of a pack that had every reason to reject her, watching her hold it together through sheer force of will and character, I understood what Crossvale was being asked to protect.
What they’re creating here is something worth protecting.
I’d have offered the alliance even without Ramsey’s approach.
His attempt to recruit me only confirmed the decision.
He came to me offering money and territory and the quiet promise of violence against anyone who stood in the way of whatever empire he was constructing from the rubble of Franco’s leftovers.
He pitched it like a business deal and watched my face the whole time, looking for the moment I’d calculate the margin and say yes.
I said no.
He just nodded slowly, like he was filing the information away, and said he hoped I’d reconsider before things got complicated.
I don’t like men who issue soft threats and call them advice.
But he’s not the first and won’t be the last. The only thing that left me unsettled was his wolf.
He’s an alpha all right, but there’s something off about his dominance.
Something forced. It’s an unknown, and that’s my least favorite kind of risk.
My wolf huffs against the night air as if to agree, and I feel the pull of the city below. More specifically, I feel pulled toward the center of downtown where a certain penthouse catches the moonlight and throws it back like a dare.
I know which apartment is hers. Grey mentioned it when he was outlining the pack’s structure and its officers. I filed the information away as tactical and told myself that was all it was.
My wolf doesn’t believe me either.
Mia looked at me that night like no one ever has. Not like an alpha. Not like a resource or a threat or a useful connection. Like a man she was curious about and slightly annoyed by and maybe, underneath all that armor, wanted to know better.
She looked at me like a man who’d just given her what I’d like to think was the best damn orgasm of her life.
And then she made me promise to leave her forever.
We were strangers bordering on enemies back then. I told myself it was better to keep it that way. Cleaner. She was embedded in Indigo Hills, and I had Crossvale to think about.
All true.
All completely irrelevant now.
Now, we’re allies.
My wolf stirs again. Wanting her. Urging me to go to her now. It’s not the mate bond—if it were, I doubt I’d be able to resist it—but something adjacent to it. Something that sits just beyond the boundary of reasonable.
I should go back to the room at the estate Grey’s staff prepared for me. Review the patrol grids. Finalize the rotation schedule I promised to have ready by morning.
Instead, I find myself moving through the tree line toward the city lights below. The night is quiet. The city breathes in its slow, stubborn way—this place that almost broke itself and chose to survive instead.
I have a feeling she won’t sleep tonight either. Maybe this is the only way.
The doorman at her building doesn’t question me. I'm not surprised. I have the kind of presence that tends to make people step aside first and ask questions later, and if that fails, Grey and Lexi’s names open nearly every door in this city.
Mia’s door is different.
I knock twice and wait.
A long pause. Long enough that I know she’s checked the monitor she’s bound to have as part of her security setup. Long enough to think over whether or not to answer.
Finally, the door opens.
She’s changed out of her suit, but that’s not what has me drinking her in like water in the desert.
It’s the exposed skin, bared like an invitation.
The shorts she’s wearing—if they can be called that—might as well be panties, considering how nonexistent they are.
Her loose white shirt slides off one shoulder.
Hair down and gleaming red. Legs for days, smooth as velvet.
She looks softer like this, which I know she’d hate me for noticing. Her expression, however, is anything but.
If I didn’t possess the dominance of an alpha, I’d run.
“What are you doing here?” she demands.
“Visiting an old friend.” It comes out like a question. A cheeky one. She doesn’t crack a smile. Not even close.
“It’s late,” she says.
“I know.”
“I didn’t invite you.”
“No, you didn’t.”
I try not to reveal how much I’m enjoying watching her try to figure this out. The little slant in her brow as she considers possible options for my presence here is fucking adorable.
“Did something happen with the patrols?”
“No.”
Her green eyes flash sharply. Always cataloging. Always assessing. “Then why are you at my door? And why are you dressed like a fortune teller?”
I grin as she takes in the flowing pants that barely reach my ankles but are wide enough for two of me in each leg and a baggy blouse—navy blue with shooting stars woven in gold throughout. “It was either this or naked. Do you prefer the latter?”
“What?” Her cheeks flush. “Of course not.” She tries to look disgusted, but her scent tells another story.
It’s divine.
Or it would be if I could get a taste.
“Aren’t you going to invite me inside?” I ask.
Another pause. Longer this time.
Then she steps back and lets me in. Grudgingly, from the look she wears.
The apartment hits me all at once—vivid color, clean lines, light even at night from the glow of the city pouring through the floor-to-ceiling windows.
The walls are decorated with abstract canvases in cobalt and gold and a deep arterial red that somehow manages not to clash.
It’s deliberate; the colors, the boldness, all of it.
Intentional in the way that her suits are intentional.
She built this space like armor, and it tells me more about her than she’d want it to.
I take my time looking.