13. Brynn
brYNN
There’s a coffee on the table when I wake up, and it’s exactly how I take it.
Two sugars. A splash of cream. Cinnamon on top, which nobody does because nobody knows I like it.
I stare at it like it might be cursed.
“It’s not poisoned,” Leo says from across the suite. He’s already dressed. Black shirt. Sleeves pushed up. Reading something on a tablet like he didn’t just commit a small act of devastation with a mug.
“How do you know how I take my coffee?”
“I heard you order one the other day when I was standing nearby.”
“Oh.”
I sit. I drink the coffee. It’s perfect, and I’m furious about it.
Breakfast arrives without me asking. A whole cart of it.
There are the pastries the kitchen pretends don’t exist. The ones I joked about. There’s fruit cut the way I like it and not the way the resort plates it for guests.
“You ordered all my snacks.”
“You said you wanted them.”
“I was being annoying.”
“You’re always being annoying.” He finally looks up. “I ordered them anyway.”
I should have a comeback. I have nothing. I shove a pastry in my mouth so my face has something to do.
He watches me chew like it’s the most interesting thing he’s seen all week.
The tablet keeps buzzing.
He keeps answering it in two words and putting it face down.
After the sixth time, I lean over and read the top of the screen before he can flip it.
EAST RIDGE SHELTER. RENEWAL CONFIRMED.
He turns it over. Too late.
“What’s the East Ridge Shelter?”
“Nothing.”
“It says renewal is confirmed.”
“It’s a building.”
“Leo. Tell me.”
He sets the tablet down. His jaw works like he’s deciding whether honesty costs him anything.
“It’s a refuge,” he says. “For shifters who’ve gone feral and can’t come back on their own. The ones nobody wants to fund because they don’t recover well and it looks bad in a portfolio.”
I put my pastry down.
“And you fund it.”
“The bloodline funds it.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
He’s quiet for a second. “I fund it. Quietly. Under a name that isn’t mine.”
I think about every cold thing he’s ever said to me.
I think about the way he looks at people like they’re problems to solve. The way the whole resort flinches when he walks in.
And then I think about a man paying, in secret, for the wolves everyone else gave up on.
“Why hide it?” I ask.
“Because the second it has my name on it, it becomes a strategy.” He says it flat. Tired. “A donation becomes leverage. Kindness becomes a press release. So I keep it off the books and it stays what it’s supposed to be.”
“Which is?”
“Help.” He shrugs like it’s nothing. “That’s all.”
It’s not nothing. It’s the least nothing thing I’ve ever heard.
A knock interrupts before I can ruin myself by saying that out loud.
It’s a junior staffer. Young. Shaking. She works the night desk, and her hands won’t stay still.
“Mr. Van Alstein, I’m so sorry, I logged the ward failure wrong and the auditor flagged it as my error and...”
“Stop.” Leo’s voice cuts clean. Not cruel. Just final. “What’s your name?”
“Priya.”
“Priya. The ward failure wasn’t your error. It was sabotage. You logged what you saw. That’s the job.” He stands. “Send the auditor to me. If anyone gives you trouble about it, send them to me too.”
She blinks at him like he’s spoken a language she didn’t know existed.
“Thank you,” she breathes, and she’s gone before he can change his mind.
He sits back down like nothing happened.
“That was a nice thing you did for her,” I say.
“I did that because the auditor’s wrong.”
“You did that,” I say again, “for her.”
He doesn’t argue this time. That’s how I know I’m right.
I’ve been calling him an Ice King in my head since the day I met him. The cold, the silence, the way he refuses to be touched.
I had it backwards.
He’s not cold because he doesn’t feel things. He’s cold because he feels everything, and feeling everything in a family like his is a liability. So he built a wall and put a caretaker behind it.
I see the whole man for one second, and the wall doesn’t matter at all.
It’s a dangerous thing to notice about a person.
Then my magic wakes up.
It’s not a flare this time. It’s a hum. Low. Under my breastbone, like a string going taut.
I go still.
“Brynn.” Leo’s already standing. He reads my body before I read it myself now. “What is it?”
“Give me a second.”
I close my eyes. The hum spreads. The Resonance reaches past the walls of the suite, out into the resort, and it starts to read.
Bonds. Dozens of them. Couples here for the matchmaking, threads of light running between them.
Most of them feel like what they are. Warm. Real. Two people pulled toward each other and choosing it.
But some don’t.
Some of the threads are wrong.
They look right. They glow. But underneath, the magic is bent in a way I can feel in my teeth. Forced. Welded where it should have grown naturally.
False bonds. Manufactured to look like fate.
I count them. One. Three. Five. More than five.
They’re scattered across the whole resort like a virus nobody’s diagnosed.
“There are bonds here that aren’t real,” I whisper. “Someone made them. The way you weld two pieces of metal that don’t belong together.”
“How many?”
“I lost count past seven.”
Leo goes very still.
“It’s not just one couple,” I say. “It’s not a glitch in the system. It’s everywhere. The resort is full of bonds that were engineered, and nobody knows because nobody can see it except...”
I stop.
Except a Fairmont. Except me.
That’s why I’m here. That’s the thing under the thing.
Someone didn’t just put me in Leo’s path. Someone put me in a resort that’s quietly rotten with fake fate, and I’m the only person alive who can tell.
“Leo, the whole place is compromised.”
He looks at me like the floor just dropped out of the building.
“Then we’re not looking for just one person,” he says slowly. “We’re standing in the middle of an operation.”
The hum fades. I’m left cold and shaking and seen, which is worse than danger.
He crosses the room. Doesn’t touch me. Just stands close enough that the bond settles, warm and steady, real in a sea of fakes.
“Not ours,” he says quietly. “Whatever you’re scared of. Ours is real. I can feel the difference too.”
I want to believe him so badly it frightens me.
The day burns down into a long, tense evening of Evander pulling records and Tristan pretending to be calm and Dominic vanishing twice.
By the time the suite empties, I’m hollowed out.
Leo makes me eat. He makes me drink water. He builds the absurd pillow wall down the center of the giant bed without being asked, because he knows it makes me feel safe, and then he lies down on his side of it like a man guarding a border.
“Sleep,” he says into the dark. “I’ve got the door.”
“You always have the door.”
“Someone has to.”
I fall asleep listening to him breathe, and that’s the last mistake I make tonight.
In the dream, there’s no wall.
We’re in the moon pool caves again, water glowing soft and silver around us, and Leo is looking at me the way he never lets himself in daylight.
No ice. No distance. Just want, written plain across his face.
“You shouldn’t look at me like that,” I tell him.
“Then stop being worth looking at.”
He moves toward me through the water. Slow. Deliberate. His hands find my waist and the touch goes straight through me, hot and electric, the bond singing because for once neither of us is fighting it.
His hand slides up my spine and fists in my hair and I arch into him, water and heat and the low growl building in his chest.
His mouth leaves mine. Drags down my throat. Finds the place where a mating mark would go and lingers there, breath ragged, like he’s holding himself back from something he wants more than air.
“Don’t you dare stop now.”
His hand slides up from my waist. Slow. Asking. When I don’t pull away, he cups my breast, and the sound he makes against my throat is wrecked.
“Brynn.”
He says my name like it’s a curse. Like a prayer. Like he’s been starving for it.
His thumb finds my nipple through the wet fabric and circles, and my whole body bows into his palm. Heat shoots low and sharp. I gasp into his hair.
“There,” he breathes. “Right there. I felt that through the bond.”
He does it again. Slower. Watching my face like he’s mapping every reaction to keep for later.
Then his mouth follows his hand. He pushes the fabric aside and closes his lips over me, and the cave tilts. His tongue works against the tight peak, teeth grazing just enough to make me cry out, and when he sucks my nipple, his name falls out of me before I can stop it.
“Ohh, Leo.”
My whole body lights up.
His hand moves down. Moves his fingers up and down my slit until he finds my clit. Rubs in firm circles there and I arch my hips up into his fingers.
Then two fingers slide inside me.
I’m so wet. I gasp as he works them in and out, faster, the heel of his hand dragging against my clit with every thrust, his mouth still at my breast.
It builds too fast to stop. I’m losing control and then my body explodes.
The bond flares so bright the cave goes white all around us.
I’m yelling his name, over and over, like it’s the only word I have left, my body is still spasming around his fingers.
“Ahh. Leo. Leo. Leo!”
I wake up gasping, with a deep throbbing and wetness between my legs from the amazing orgasm I just had. That’s never happened to me before in my sleep.
The suite is dark. The pillow wall is exactly where it was. My heart is racing like I ran here.
And his name is still on my lips, warm and unfinished, the last syllable hanging in the air between us.
Across the wall of pillows, in the dark, Leo goes completely still.
There’s no way he didn’t hear that.