2. Leo
LEO
The chandelier is still glowing red above my head.
Every guest in the Eclipse Resort atrium is staring at it. Then at me. Then back at the words burning across the crystal in letters the size of my hand.
MATING BOND DETECTED.
“Oh, this is the best day of my entire life,” Tristan says.
I don’t look at him. If I look at him, I’ll do something the lawyers will have to clean up.
“Leo.” He’s grinning. I can hear it. “Leo. Brother. Light of my life. You bonded with the matchmaker’s assistant in under ten minutes. That has to be a record.”
“It’s a malfunction.”
“It’s destiny.”
“It’s a faulty compatibility system.” I straighten my cuff. My hands are steady. My hands are always steady. “Someone will fix it, and we’ll pretend this never happened.”
Dominic drops into the velvet chair beside the fountain like he owns it. He doesn’t own anything. That’s sort of his whole thing.
“I’m just saying,” he says, “you walked in here this morning swearing you’d rather chew off your own arm than do a ritual. And the resort heard you. And it laughed.”
Evander says nothing.
Evander never says anything. He stands near the marble column with his arms crossed, watching the witch who caused all of this.
I follow his gaze before I can stop myself.
Brynn Fairmont is on her knees in front of a shattered compatibility mirror, sweeping glass into a velvet pouch with her bare hands.
Her blond hair has come loose. There’s a smudge of soot on her cheek.
She’s muttering to herself, fast and low, and the air around her keeps sparking like a struck match.
She glances up.
Our eyes meet across the entire atrium.
And my wolf goes very, very still.
The way a predator goes still when it’s decided something.
Mine.
I shove the word down so hard my jaw aches.
“The board meets Thursday.”
Evelina has appeared at my elbow. My mother moves like that, silent and sudden, in a gown the color of a moonless sky. She’s holding a glass of something blood-dark and looking far too pleased.
“I’m aware of when the board meets,” I say.
“Then you’re aware your father’s seat is still empty.” She sips. “And that all four of you are technically eligible.”
“I’m acting CEO of this company.”
“Acting.” She lets the word sit there. “How fragile that sounds.”
Tristan laughs. “She’s not wrong. I could run the company. I’m extremely charming.”
“You once forgot which continent a meeting was on,” I say.
“I was still very charming about it.”
Dominic snorts. Evander’s mouth twitches, which from him is a full belly laugh.
“Here’s my pitch.” Tristan spreads his hands. “Tristan Van Alstein, face of the empire. I smile. I shake hands. The treaties sign themselves. Leo glowers in a back room doing the actual work.”
“That’s the current arrangement,” I say.
“See? I’m a natural.”
“None of you understand what the seat is,” Evelina says.
The bar goes a little quieter. She has a way of doing that. Dropping a single sentence that turns a joke into a room holding its breath.
“It isn’t a desk,” she goes on. “It isn’t a stock portfolio. Your father didn’t run a bank. He held a bloodline together with his bare hands, and when his grip slipped, things got out of it that should have stayed buried.”
“Mother.” Even Dominic has stopped smiling. “You never talk about that part.”
“I’m talking about it now.” She turns the dark glass slowly in her fingers.
“The treaties only hold because a Van Alstein Alpha enforces them. The vaults only stay sealed because the blood that locked them still rules. A weak heir, a divided heir, and our enemies start counting the cracks.” Her gaze settles on me.
“The board knows this. They want a CEO who won’t shatter under pressure.
Someone whose wolf is grounded. Settled. ”
“Bonded,” I say flatly.
“I didn’t use that word.”
“You’ve been circling it since I walked in.”
Tristan whistles low. “He’s not wrong, Mom. You’ve got the matchmaking face on.”
“I have a mother’s face on.”
“That’s the same face.”
Evelina’s smile is serene and entirely without mercy. She sets her glass on the bar and looks at all four of us in turn, the way she did when we were boys and she’d already caught us at something.
“Do you know where you are?” she asks. “Truly?”
Nobody answers. We learned a long time ago that her questions aren’t really questions.
“Eclipse Resort exists between realms,” she says.
“It surfaces for the lunar convergence and then it’s gone again.
No humans. No phones that work past the wards.
No press, no cameras, no escape. There is one way in and it’s the portal, and the portal only opens when the moon allows it.
” She lets that settle. “There is nowhere on either side of the veil safer for what your bloodline needs right now.”
“And what does it need?” Dominic asks.
“You.” Her voice softens, which is somehow worse. “All of you. Your wolves are slipping. Don’t pretend they aren’t. Evander hasn’t slept in a month. Tristan laughs to keep from coming apart. And Leo.” Her eyes find mine. “Leo hasn’t let anyone close enough to notice he’s barely holding the line.”
I don’t give her the satisfaction of a reaction.
“This place was built for exactly this,” she says.
“Fated bonds. Compatibility. Healing for shifters whose instincts have outrun them. It stabilizes the blood. It always has. So here’s what’s going to happen.
” She picks her glass back up. “You will all four complete the rituals. The full process. Not the version where you sulk in the corner and sign nothing.”
“Mom,” I start.
“You will go through the matching,” she says over me, gentle and immovable.
“Every one of you. And if fate has a mate waiting, you won’t turn from her out of stubbornness.
That’s the price of the seat. That is the price of the family surviving the next hundred years.
” She smiles. “Consider it a condition of your inheritance.”
“And if there’s no mate?” Tristan asks. For once he isn’t joking.
“Then you’ll have lost a week.” Her gaze drifts, very deliberately, toward the glowing chandelier above my head. “Though it seems fate has already saved one of you the trouble.”
I feel the trap close.
“No,” I say.
The answer is no. There is no bond. There is a software error and a clumsy witch.
“The board votes Thursday whether you like the timing or not,” she says. “And they prefer to choose someone who’s already bonded. But by all means, keep arguing. Tristan’s taking meetings.”
“I am not,” Tristan calls.
“You took a breakfast meeting with two board members this morning.”
“That was brunch. Brunch isn’t a meeting.”
“It is when you wear the good cufflinks,” Dominic says.
Tristan points at him. “Traitor.”
“I’m just observant.”
“You’re unemployed.”
“By choice.”
Evelina watches all of us turn on each other with the patient delight of a woman who’s already won a game the rest of us don’t know we’re playing. She doesn’t have to lift a finger. She just sips her drink.
Behind me, something crashes.
I turn.
The clumsy witch has knocked over a coat rack. She’s apologizing to it. To the coat rack.
I hate that I want to laugh.
I tell myself I’m leaving. I tell myself I’m going to my villa to make calls and forget this morning ever happened.
Instead I’m standing near the bar, watching her.
It’s my wolf. That’s all. My wolf is fixated and my wolf is wrong, and I’ve spent thirty-six years not letting my instincts run my life. I’m not starting now over a woman with soot on her face.
She laughs at something. The sound carries.
My grip tightens on the glass I’m not drinking.
She’s not even trying. That’s what gets under my skin. She’s not performing for me, not angling for my name or my money the way every other woman in every other room does. She’s just existing, loudly, badly, with her sleeves rolled up and her magic snapping at the air.
I notice the curve of her throat when she tips her head back.
I notice the ink stain on her wrist.
I notice everything, and I don’t want to notice anything, and that contradiction is going to ruin my entire week.
“You’re staring,” Evander says quietly beside me.
“I’m assessing a liability.”
“Mm.” He takes a slow drink. “Is that what we’re calling it?”
A man approaches her.
Tall. Fae, by the cut of him, with that polished glamour they all wear like cologne. He says something. She smiles, polite, distracted.
He leans in.
My wolf surfaces so fast I taste copper.
I’m moving before I make the decision to move. I don’t remember crossing the floor. One moment I’m at the bar, the next I’m three feet from them, and the temperature in the room has dropped, and the Fae has gone pale.
“You’re in my way,” I say.
Brynn blinks at me. “I’m sorry, do you have a meeting with the wine list?”
“I need a word with the matchmaker.”
“Assistant matchmaker. And he was talking to me.”
“He’s leaving.”
The Fae looks at my face. Whatever he sees there, he decides his evening is better spent elsewhere. He inclines his head and goes.
Brynn rounds on me. “Did you just territory him? In a lobby?”
“He was crowding you.”
“He was asking about the moonlight tour.” She crosses her arms. Her magic crackles, bright and irritated, lifting the loose strands of her hair.
“What’s your problem? You’ve glared at me since you walked in here.
Then you embarrass me in front of an entire resort with your malfunctioning fated-mate fireworks, and now you’re scaring off paying guests. ”
“My problem is that the resort’s matching system selected an assistant who can’t keep a mirror from exploding.”
Her cheeks flush. Good. I want her off balance. I want her anywhere but calm, because calm, she has too much of an effect on me and I can’t think.
“That mirror,” she says, “was reading impossible numbers. Off the scale. I’ve never seen anything like it, and trust me, I would rather see anything else than a compatibility score with you.”
“So we agree it’s an error.”
“We agree you’re insufferable.”
“Fix the system.”
“It’s not broken.”
“Then explain why it bonded me to a stranger who talks to coat racks.”
She steps closer. I should step back. I don’t.
She has to tip her head to glare up at me, and this close I can scent her under the soot and the magic. Something warm. Something that makes my wolf press against my ribs like it wants out.
“You felt it too,” she says. It’s quiet. It’s an accusation. “When we touched. Don’t stand there in your eight-thousand-dollar suit and tell me that was a software glitch.”
My silence is the wrong answer and we both know it.
“That’s what I thought,” she breathes.
The Fae’s been replaced now. Another guest, a shifter, drawn by the noise the way they always are. He reaches past me toward her, friendly, careless.
His fingers close around her arm.
And the world goes red.
I have his wrist before I’ve decided to move. Bone shifts under my grip. The shifter makes a sound, low and startled, and his knees start to fold, and I let the dominance roll off me in a wave that empties the air around us of everything but my voice.
“Don’t even think about it,” I say.
It isn’t loud. It doesn’t need to be. Every wolf in the atrium feels it land.
I can hear my own pulse. I can feel my eyes burning toward silver, my wolf clawing for the surface over a woman I’ve known for the length of one disastrous morning. Over a touch. A careless touch.
That’s the thought that stops me.
I’ve had this bond for not even one day and it’s already affecting me.
I let go.
The shifter staggers back, cradling his wrist, and disappears into the crowd without a word. The whole room is watching. Tristan’s grin is gone. Even Evelina has gone still.
And Brynn is staring at me like she’s finally seeing the real me under the suit.
“Leo,” she says softly.
I don’t trust myself to answer her.
So I turn and walk out, fast, before my wolf decides it isn’t finished. Before I prove my mother right.
Before I do the one thing I swore I never would, in front of every soul in the Eclipse Resort.
I make it as far as the cold marble corridor before I realize I can still feel her. A bright, warm thread tugging behind my ribs, pulling me back toward the room she’s in.
The bond is awake, and already mine whether I want it or not.