6. Leo
LEO
Villa Nine is exactly as advertised. The Onyx Suite. Black stone. Floor-to-ceiling windows. A lake outside gone silver under the churning sky, lightning crawling through the clouds in slow, impossible patterns.
It’s also, I notice immediately, a problem.
Two bedrooms, but one is sealed behind a shimmering curtain of failed warding, the magic flickering like a dying bulb. The air in there tastes burnt.
That leaves one bedroom.
One bed.
I stand in the doorway and feel my evening rearrange itself into something I know I won’t survive cleanly.
The front door opens behind me.
“Oh good,” Brynn says. “They sent me the grumpiest roommate in the building.”
I turn. She’s dragging a suitcase that’s clearly fighting back, hair falling out of whatever she pinned it with this morning, a smudge of glitter on one cheek I refuse to find charming.
“This isn’t my doing,” I say.
“I know. I know. The resort’s been throwing us at each other ever since you got here. I’m sure you’ve noticed.”
I’ve noticed everything. That’s the problem.
She walks past me, surveys the place, and clocks the bedroom situation in about two seconds.
“One bed,” she says.
“One bed.”
“I’ll take the couch.”
“You won’t.”
She turns slowly. “Was that an order?”
“It was a fact. The couch repels anyone under six feet during storms. Resort safety thing.” I have no idea if that’s true. It sounds true.
“That’s the worst lie I’ve ever heard, and I work in a building that lies professionally.” She drops the suitcase and chuckles. “But sure. Let’s both pretend the couch has standards.”
“It has more than your suitcase. What’s in there, a body?”
“Snacks. Spellbooks. A backup outfit in case the first one catches fire, which happens more than you’d think.” She flops into the heavy chair by the window. “Don’t worry, Ice King. I’ll stay on my side of the bed. I’ll build a pillow wall. A really judgmental one.”
“I sleep on the left.”
“You sleep standing up in a coffin, I’d guess.” She tilts her head. “Do you even sleep? Or do you just power down and recharge off the suffering of your employees?”
“The suffering of my employees is a renewable resource. It’s very green of me.”
She blinks. Then she laughs, surprised out of her, head tipping back. And something in my chest does a slow, dangerous thing I have no use for.
Dinner arrives by way of the villa’s kitchen, which cooks itself. Brynn finds this delightful and tells the saucepan so. The saucepan plates the food with what I’d swear is enthusiasm.
We eat at the long table by the windows. I keep my walls up for exactly four minutes.
Then she starts talking, and the walls don’t fall so much as get talked around.
“So your whole family is like this?” She gestures with a fork. “The growling. The brooding. The matching tragic backstories.”
“Tristan doesn’t have a tragic backstory. Tristan has a tragic personality.”
“And you?”
“I have a schedule.”
“That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard, and I once watched a vampire cry at a wedding.” She steals bread off my plate without asking. “Here’s my read on you. You’re not cold. You’re tired. There’s a difference.”
“Is there?”
“Cold people don’t move the heavy chair away from the window so the glass can’t get me if it breaks. You did that twenty minutes ago. Thought I didn’t see.”
I didn’t think she saw. Nobody sees. That’s the arrangement. My brothers never look closely. They never have to.
“"You built walls to keep people out... but somehow you've spent your whole life protecting everyone inside them,” she says, soft now, and it lands somewhere under my ribs and stays there.
“You talk too much.”
“Only when I’m nervous.” She pops the stolen bread in her mouth. “Or comfortable. Haven’t decided which one this is yet.”
“Pick faster. The suspense is ruining my dinner.”
“You don’t have suspense. You have a schedule, remember?” She grins. “Maybe I’m pencilling myself in. Eight to nine. Annoy the Alpha.”
“That slot’s full.”
“With what?”
“You. Since Tuesday.”
That shuts her up for a second, which I count as a personal victory until I see her fighting a smile, and then I’m not sure who won.
Outside, the storm presses on the windows. The lake throws light across her face, and she’s relaxed now, finally, that frantic resort energy bleeding out of her, and I watch her stop performing.
It does more to me than the laugh did.
It happens over the wine.
She reaches for the bottle the same moment I do. My hand closes over hers.
That’s all. A hand over a hand.
The world detonates.
Not loud. A pulse rolls up my arm, into my chest, down into the place where my wolf has been pacing for three days. The magic in the air pulls taut like a wire, and every candle in the villa flares at once.
Brynn goes still. Her eyes lift to mine.
“Did you feel that?”
I can’t speak. My wolf is at the surface, riding the front of my skull, and every instinct I’ve caged for thirty-six years is screaming one word.
Mine.
I don’t move my hand. I should. I think about it for a long time and do nothing.
Her pulse kicks under my fingers. I can feel all of it. The warmth of her skin. The little tremor she’s hiding. The way her breath has gone shallow.
“Leo.” My name in her mouth is a problem I’ll be dealing with for the rest of my life.
I turn her hand over. Slow. Run my thumb across the inside of her wrist, where the pulse is wildest, and watch her lips part.
“You should tell me to stop,” I say.
“I should.” She doesn’t. Her fingers curl around mine. “Why aren’t I?”
“Because the bond’s louder than your good sense.”
“My good sense left the building two days ago.” Her voice has dropped low and rough. “It saw you walk in and went looking for a new witch to haunt.”
I should laugh. I don’t. I draw her hand to my mouth and press my lips to the soft skin inside her wrist, and the noise she makes goes straight through me like a current.
The candles burn higher. Window-latches rattle across the villa, magic chasing magic through the walls. The whole resort leans in to watch.
She rises out of her chair. Or I pull her. Neither of us decides. Then she’s standing between my knees with my hands at her waist and her fingers in my hair, and my wolf is howling, and her mouth is an inch from mine.
“This is a terrible idea,” she breathes.
“Catastrophic.” I close the distance.
She tastes like wine and honey.
The first touch of her mouth undoes something in me I didn’t know was load-bearing. She gasps against my lips, and I swallow it, and then her hands are fisted in my shirt and she’s pulling me up out of the chair like she’s the one in charge here.
Maybe she is.
I back her into the table. Plates rattle. Neither of us cares. She kisses like she argues, all heat and no surrender, biting at my lower lip until I groan and drag her closer, one hand spread across the small of her back, the other in her hair.
The magic goes wild around us. Candles gutter and flare. The windows hum.
“If you stop,” she says against my jaw, “I’ll set you on fire.”
“Noted.”
That’s all the permission my wolf needs.
I lift her onto the edge of the table and she wraps a leg around me, and the next kiss is filthy, deep, both of us past pretending this is anything but what it is.
Her fingers scrape down the back of my neck.
My control is a thread, and she’s holding the other end, and she’s laughing into my mouth like she knows it.
Then I drag my lips down her throat to taste the wild flutter of her pulse.
And everything stops.
Because this close, with my mouth at her skin, I scent her deeply for the first time.
Witch. Yes. The clean, bright resonance I’ve been drowning in for two days, the magic that made the candles flare.
But underneath it. Buried deep. There’s something older.
Something I haven’t scented in years. Something my bloodline has hunted, and feared, and made treaties to contain. A scent the Van Alstein archives describe in warnings written in blood.
Covenant blood.
Not the harmless chaos she hides behind. Something old enough to predate every accord my family ever signed, something we locked away for reasons nobody bothered to write down where I could reach them.
I don’t know what it means. Not yet.
I only know two things. It’s dangerous. And someone has worked very hard to keep it secret.
My wolf doesn’t recoil from the scent.
My wolf wants it more.
And that terrifies me more than the blood does.
I pull back so fast the chair behind me topples.
The cold comes down over me like a blast door. It’s the only thing that’s ever kept anyone safe from what I am. I grab it with both hands.
“This was a mistake,” I say.
Brynn blinks up at me, flushed, kiss-swollen, one strap sliding off her shoulder.
“I’m sorry. Run that by me again.”
“The bond. It’s making us both stupid.” I step back and straighten my shirt like that’ll put the last ten minutes back where they belong.
“None of this is real. It’s chemistry the resort cooked up to hit a quota. I don’t make decisions based on chemistry.”
I watch the words land. I watch them do exactly what I need them to.
“Manufactured,” she says, flat. “Right. So the candles. The magic. The part where you said my name like it meant something. That was the resort.”
“Yes.”
“You’re a bad liar for a man who lies for a living.”
“And you talk too much for a woman with this many secrets.” It’s cheap. It’s cruel. It’s the fastest exit I have.
“Whatever you’re hiding under that witch magic, keep hiding it. I don’t want it in my bed.”
That lands harder than I mean it to. Something flickers across her face before she slams a wall up to match mine. Good. One of us should be safe.
She slides off the table and folds her arms. “Wow. The rumors really undersell you. They said cold. They didn’t mention coward.”
“Careful.”
“Or what? You’ll growl? Brood at me? Reorganize my trauma alphabetically?”
She steps in instead of back, chin up, eyes bright and furious. “You scented something. Right before you turned back into a filing cabinet with a face. What was it?”
“Nothing.”
“Tell me.”
“Goodnight, Brynn.”
I don’t trust myself to stay in this room with the smell of her in my lungs and my wolf tearing at the inside of my skull to go back and finish what we started. So I do the only thing left.
I walk out.
Into the storm.
The wards scream a warning as I cross the threshold. Lunar lightning splits the sky over the lake, the wind nearly takes me off my feet, and I keep walking anyway.
Because the most dangerous thing on this entire resort isn’t the storm.
It’s the woman I just left, the secret buried in her blood, and the part of me that already knows I’ll come back for both.