Chapter 2 — "Three Years"

The nightmare always ends the same way.

Lila on her knees in the mud. Rain plastering her hair to her skull, dripping down her face indistinguishable from tears. The silver cord inside her chest ripping apart fiber by fiber, a sensation like being flayed from the inside out while still breathing. Lucian's voice, flat as a blade: *"I, Lucian Blackwood, Alpha-heir of the Mooncrest Pack, hereby reject you, Lila Winstone, as my fated mate. You are released from the bond. You are released from the pack. You are released from my protection."*

Three sentences. He'd memorized them. Practiced them. Said them like he was reading a weather report.

And Cassandra. Behind him. Hand pressed to her mouth in mock sympathy, eyes bright with victory. The other pack members watching from the tree line, none of them stepping forward, none of them speaking. The rain turning the dirt road to slurry beneath Lila's knees.

The silver cord *snapped.*

She woke gasping.

---

Aurelia Chen sat bolt upright in bed, one hand clawing at her chest, the other braced against the mattress. Her heart hammered so hard she could feel it in her throat, her temples, behind her eyes. The room was dark. Silent. No rain. No mud. No crowd.

Just her. Alone. In a bed that cost four thousand dollars and had never been shared.

She forced herself to breathe. In through the nose for four counts. Hold for seven. Out through the mouth for eight. A technique her therapist had taught her in the first year after the rejection, back when she was sleeping in that twenty-four-hour laundromat in Queens, using folded towels as a pillow, jumping at every shadow.

It worked. Mostly. Her heartbeat slowed from *panic* to *merely anxious*. Her hand dropped from her chest. She looked at the clock on her nightstand: 3:47 AM.

Same time as every other night this week.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood. The floor was cold against her bare feet — heated bamboo, because she'd designed the apartment herself and she refused to compromise on temperature control. Her reflection stared back at her from the dark window across the room. A woman she'd built from scratch. Different bone structure — subtle, but there. She'd lost fifteen pounds in that first brutal year and never put them back on. Her face had sharpened, cheekbones cutting shadows, jaw tight. Her hair was longer now, falling past her shoulder blades. She'd stopped dyeing it two years ago — the natural black had grown back, streaked with a single silver strand at her left temple. A permanent mark from the rejection, her wolf's mourning made visible.

She looked nothing like Lila Winstone.

That was the point.

---

The apartment was a museum of cold precision. Open-concept, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Windfall City skyline. Gray concrete walls. A black leather sofa that had never been sat on by anyone but her. A kitchen island made of polished quartz, completely clean except for a single mug with cold coffee in it — she never finished her coffee. An office nook with three monitors arranged in a curve, schematics still open on the central screen: the next-generation prosthetic knee joint she was developing for NovaTech's Q4 release.

Everything in its place. Everything controlled. Nothing soft.

She padded to the kitchen and poured the cold coffee down the sink, watching the dark liquid spiral into the drain. Her phone buzzed on the counter. A notification from her security system: *Motion detected — exterior hallway, 3:52 AM.*

She froze.

Her security system was custom-built. Not off-the-shelf, not connected to any cloud service, not vulnerable to the kind of hacks that compromised commercial systems. She'd coded the firmware herself, soldered the sensors herself, tested it against seventeen known attack vectors. It didn't false-positive.

Someone was in her hallway.

She didn't reach for her phone. Didn't turn on the lights. Instead, she slipped silently to her office nook and pulled open the bottom drawer of her desk. Inside, beneath a fake panel she'd installed herself: a compact SIG Sauer P365, loaded, safety on. She'd gotten her concealed carry permit eighteen months ago, after a pack scout found her address and left a note under her door: *"The Alpha wants to talk."*

She'd moved apartments three times since then. The SIG had come with her every time.

She chambered a round silently, the metallic click barely audible even to her own ears. Then she moved to the wall beside the front door, pressing her back against the concrete, SIG raised, breathing slow.

A second buzz. *Motion detected — exterior hallway, 3:53 AM.*

And then a knock.

Three sharp raps. Deliberate. Unhurried.

She didn't answer. Didn't breathe. Her finger rested against the trigger guard, not the trigger — she was trained, not reckless.

A voice came through the door. Low. Male. Familiar in a way that made her stomach drop.

"Miss Chen. I know you're awake. Your lights were on until 2 AM every night this week. Pattern suggests insomnia."

A pause.

"The name's Marcus Webb. I work for Kincaid Group. My employer would like to discuss a business proposition. He's waiting in the car downstairs."

She did not lower the SIG.

"Your security system is impressive, by the way. Took my guy twenty minutes to identify the sensor array, and he's ex-NSA. You built it yourself, didn't you?"

The words hung in the air. She processed them. Kincaid Group. Damon Kincaid. The billionaire who'd been circling NovaTech for acquisition talks — talks she'd personally stonewalled for six months because she didn't trust anyone with her company, didn't trust anyone *period*, and certainly didn't trust a man whose net worth exceeded the GDP of small countries.

But she hadn't mentioned the sensor array to anyone. Not in any meeting. Not to any investor. The fact that his ex-NSA guy had clocked it in twenty minutes meant they were good. Or they'd already been watching her.

Both possibilities made her skin crawl.

"I'm not interested in business propositions at four in the morning," she said. Her voice came out steady. She was proud of that.

A soft laugh through the door. "Mr. Kincaid said you'd say that. He also said to tell you —" A pause, like he was reciting from memory. "— 'The board's trying to squeeze you out, and I'm the only buyer who won't carve NovaTech up for parts. You have until the quarterly shareholders' meeting. After that, your options get worse. Think about it.'"

Silence.

"He also said to give you this."

A piece of paper slid under the door. White. Plain. She waited until she heard footsteps receding down the hall, then the elevator ding, before she approached.

She picked it up, SIG still in her other hand.

A phone number. Handwritten in sharp, slanted cursive. And beneath it, two words:

*Call me.*

She stared at the paper for a long time. The sky outside began to lighten, gray bleeding into the dark, and she still hadn't moved.

---

She didn't call him.

She did, however, spend the next four hours in front of her monitors, pulling up everything she could find on Damon Kincaid. Public records. Financial disclosures. Tabloid articles. A *Forbes* profile from eighteen months ago that described him as "the most feared man in private equity" and included a photo of him in a charcoal suit, standing on the roof of his building, looking down at the city like he owned it.

He was handsome in a way that made her uncomfortable. Not pretty. Not soft. Sharp angles and winter-gray eyes, a mouth that looked like it knew things it shouldn't. The kind of face that didn't belong in business magazines but on the cover of something darker.

She closed the browser tab and opened her calendar instead.

The quarterly shareholders' meeting was in three weeks.

She had three weeks to figure out how to keep her company. Her life. The careful structure she'd built around herself, brick by brick, so that nothing could touch her again.

Her phone sat on the desk, dark. The paper with the number was tucked into her pocket.

She didn't call him.

But she didn't throw the paper away, either.

---

At 8 AM, she showered. Dressed in a navy pantsuit that cost more than her first car. Pulled her hair back into a tight ponytail. Checked her reflection one last time — no trace of Lila Winstone, just Aurelia Chen, CEO and founder of NovaTech, a woman who had crawled out of the mud and built an empire with her bare hands.

She grabbed her bag. Her laptop. The cold coffee she'd forgotten to remake.

And she went to work.

The morning commute was five minutes — her apartment building was connected to the NovaTech office via a pedestrian bridge she'd negotiated into the lease. She walked through the glass corridor, the city waking up below her, the sun just cresting the skyline. Commuters. Delivery trucks. A world that didn't know she existed, didn't know she was a werewolf, didn't know she was running from a past that still bled.

She preferred it that way.

The NovaTech office was a converted warehouse in the arts district, all exposed brick and open floor plans and natural light. Fifty-three employees. A prototyping lab in the basement. A break room with a Keurig that was always broken. She'd started the company with four people and a prototype she'd built from salvaged parts, and now it was worth forty million dollars.

Forty million dollars that a board of investors was trying to take from her.

She walked through the open-plan office, nodding at the early arrivals. Martinez, her lead software engineer, was already at his desk, headphones on, typing furiously. Priya, her head of marketing, was on the phone in the corner, gesturing emphatically about something called "brand synergy." The smell of cheap coffee and ozone from the soldering station in the back.

She reached her office — glass walls, frosted halfway up, a view of the lab floor — and closed the door behind her.

Sat down.

Stared at her computer.

The quarterly report glared back at her. Green numbers. Growth projections. All the metrics that said NovaTech was thriving.

And underneath it, the email she'd received two weeks ago, flagged in red:

*"The board has received an acquisition offer from Kincaid Group. We strongly advise you to consider this offer seriously, or risk losing your majority stake in the next voting cycle."*

Signed by the board's legal counsel. CC'd to every major investor.

She hadn't responded.

She still didn't know *how* to respond.

---

Her phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number:

*"Changed your mind yet?"*

She stared at it. The audacity. The *balls* of this man, texting her personal phone — how did he even get her number? — at 8:17 AM, like they were old friends.

She typed back: *"Who is this?"*

*"You know who this is."*

*"I don't respond to anonymous texts."*

A pause. Then:

*"Damon Kincaid. There. Now it's not anonymous. Call me."*

She set the phone face-down on her desk and didn't pick it up again for the rest of the morning.

But she thought about him.

The way the *Forbes* reporter had described his voice: *"Quiet. Like a predator that doesn't need to roar."* The way Marcus Webb had said his name, like it carried weight. The way the board had folded the moment Kincaid Group made an offer, like they'd been waiting for someone else to make the first move so they could betray her.

She thought about the piece of paper in her pocket. The phone number. The two words.

*Call me.*

She didn't call him.

But she kept the paper.

---

At 6 PM, she was the last one in the office. The lab was dark. The break room was silent. The only light came from her office, where she sat with schematics spread across her desk, trying to solve a materials problem in the prosthetic knee joint.

It wasn't working. She'd been staring at the same stress-test data for three hours, and the numbers refused to resolve. Her brain was static. Her chest was tight. The nightmare was still under her skin, a low hum of panic that wouldn't quit.

She rubbed her eyes. Stood. Walked to the window.

The city was beautiful at dusk. The kind of view that made people write poetry. She watched the lights flicker on across the skyline and thought about nothing at all.

And then she thought about him.

Damon Kincaid. The man who'd sent a messenger to her apartment at 4 AM. Who'd complimented her security system. Who'd told her the board was trying to squeeze her out, like he was doing her a favor by warning her.

She didn't trust him.

But she also didn't trust anyone.

And the board meeting was in three weeks.

She pulled out her phone. The text conversation was still open. His number was right there.

She stared at it for a long, long time.

Then she typed: *"If I call you, what do you actually want?"*

The reply came almost instantly.

*"To offer you a deal you can't refuse."*

*"That's not an answer."*

*"It's the only one I'm giving until I hear your voice."*

She wanted to throw her phone across the room. She wanted to scream. She wanted to go back to three years ago, before the rejection, before the mud, before she'd learned that trusting someone was the fastest way to get destroyed.

Instead, she took a breath. Steadying herself. Becoming Aurelia again.

*"Fine. I'll call you tomorrow."*

*"I'll be waiting."*

She pocketed the phone. Looked out at the city.

The world kept spinning. The lights kept glowing. And somewhere out there, a man she'd never met was circling her like she was prey.

Tomorrow, she'd find out what he actually wanted.

Tonight, she'd try to sleep.

And if the nightmare came again — and it would — she'd wake up, pour her cold coffee down the sink, and keep moving forward.

Because that's what she did.

That's all she did.

Keep moving.

---

*The office went dark at 8 PM. Aurelia walked home through the glass bridge, the city glittering below her, one hand in her pocket, fingers brushing against the paper with the phone number. She didn't know it yet — couldn't know it yet — but she was already being pulled into an orbit she couldn't control.*

*Damon Kincaid watched the NovaTech building from his penthouse across the city, a glass of whiskey in his hand, the reflection of the skyline in the dark glass. His phone buzzed. A confirmation from his assistant: Marcus had left the note. The Omega had received it.*

*She didn't call. But she texted.*

*He smiled, slow, into the dark.*

*"Good," he said, to no one. "She's smart."*

*His wolf stirred, unawakened, dormant in his blood for thirty-four years, and dreamed of a silver-gray wolf with a white patch over her left eye — a wolf who had been silent for three years, a wolf who had forgotten how to run, a wolf who was about to learn that something was coming for her.*

*Something that wouldn't let her hide.*