Chapter 7

FREYA

The air in the room changed the moment he stepped inside.

I could smell him before I could think straight, that same overpowering scent from the hotel lobby, but closer now, wrapped around me like something physical. My wolf surged toward him without permission, every instinct in my body screaming at me to close the distance between us, and it took everything I had to stay rooted where I stood.

Dante didn’t move either. His eyes were fixed on me with an intensity that made my skin feel  tight, his jaw locked so hard I could see the muscles working beneath it. Neither of us spoke. The silence stretched long enough that I could hear my own pulse in my ears, could hear his breathing change, slow and controlled in a way that felt deliberate, like he was fighting something.

I broke first, as I always did.

“Why did you save me?”

The question came out smaller than I wanted it to, but I needed to know. I’d spent the last hour building theories in my head, each one more foolish than the last, each one ending with some version of him caring, of the bond meaning something. I hated how badly I wanted that to be true.

Something flickered across his face, there and gone so fast I might have imagined it. Then his expression closed over completely, cold and distant in a way that reminded me sickeningly of Lucian.

“Because letting you die would have been inconvenient,” he said.

The words landed exactly where he must have wanted them to land, straight through the center of my chest. I felt my face go hot, then cold, the humiliation of the podium and the hotel and my father’s chambers all crashing back into me at once. Of course. Of course this was just another man who would look at me and see nothing worth keeping.

“Inconvenient,” I repeated, and I was proud of how steady my voice came out. “Right. Wouldn’t want a dead she-wolf cluttering up the palace grounds.”

“Something like that.”

I lifted my chin and forced my expression into something flat, I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of watching me crumble a second time in front of a Hamilton. I’d already done that once with Damien, half-dressed and shaking and grateful. I wasn’t doing it again.

“Then I suppose I should thank you and let you get back to your very busy schedule of inconveniences,” I said.

His eyes darkened, a flash of something sharper than irritation, and for one unsteady second I thought he might argue, might take the words back. Instead his hands curled into fists at his sides and he took a step back toward the door, putting distance between us like the room itself had become dangerous.

“You should rest,” he said, and his voice had gone rough at the edges. “The healers said you need it.”

“Don’t pretend you care how I heal.”

“I don’t,” he said, too fast, too sharp, and then he was gone, the door shutting hard enough behind him that I felt it in my chest.

I stood there for a long moment, staring at the space where he’d been, my whole body still humming with a bond that refused to care how badly its owner had just spoken to me. My wolf paced beneath my skin, unsettled and confused, unable to reconcile what she felt with what I’d just heard. Some animal part of me wanted to chase him down the hallway. The rest of me wanted to burn every memory of the last two days and start over as someone else entirely.

Inconvenient.

I sat down hard on the edge of the bed, pressing the heels of my hands against my eyes until colors bloomed behind them. Two mates now. Two men who’d looked at the bond between us and found it easier to be cruel than honest. What was wrong with me that I kept ending up here, wanting people who only knew how to make me feel smaller?

DANTE

He made it halfway down the corridor before his steps faltered.

He didn’t look back. Looking back would undo whatever fragile control he still had, and he needed that control now more than he’d ever needed anything, because the alternative was turning around, walking back into that room, and doing something he had no business doing with a woman who wasn’t his to want.

His chest ached in a way that had nothing to do with the fight from the palace. He kept hearing his own voice saying it, kept seeing the exact moment her face had shut down, the flicker of hope draining out of her expression like he’d reached in and pulled the plug on it himself.

He had. That was the worst part. He’d done that on purpose.

It would have been easier to tell her the truth. That he’d felt her collapse three floors and half a mile away like something inside him had been struck with a hammer. That he’d put four grown men on the ground without thinking twice, without a single calculation of consequence, because none of that had mattered next to getting to her. That he’d sat outside the healer’s room for six hours doing absolutely nothing but listening to her heartbeat through the wall, because some feral, ungovernable part of him needed the proof that it was still going.

He couldn’t say any of that. Saying it made it real, made it permanent, made it the kind of thing a man couldn’t take back once it was out in the world. And Dante Hamilton did not do permanent. He’d built his entire life on not needing anyone enough for their absence to matter, and some drunk stranger’s daughter, some woman he’d known for a single day, was not going to be the exception that unraveled twenty-eight years of careful discipline.

Better she hate him. Better she thought him cold and unfeeling and undeserving of whatever the goddess had tried to hand him. It would keep her safe from him, from his family, from the war his father had been itching to start with hers for longer than Dante had been alive. It would keep him safe from the terrifying, bottomless thing currently trying to claw its way up out of his chest.

He told himself this the entire walk back to his own wing, and he almost believed it by the time he reached his door.

FREYA

I didn’t cry.

I told myself that was progress, some small, stubborn victory in a day built entirely out of losses. I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the door for a long time after he’d gone, and it was only when I finally stood to find something to eat that I caught it.

Faint, but unmistakable, clinging to the air where he’d been standing.

Perfume. Not mine, not anything I owned or recognized, something floral and expensive layered underneath his own scent like it had been there recently, pressed close.

I went very still.

Whoever she was, she’d been near him. Close enough to leave her mark on him the way I apparently hadn’t managed to, not even with a bond screaming between us loud enough to make guards fall.

I sat back down slowly, that small ember of hope I’d been trying so hard to smother finally, mercifully, going out.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​