The man from the corner table had been working up his courage through two rounds of drinks, and he finally spent it on me.
"Lovely lady — would you care to dance?"
Every head turned toward me, including the one across the table. Victor's. I'd felt it land like a hand on the back of my neck before I even looked.
I blinked once, gathered myself, and gave him the smile I keep for passengers who try to bring full liquor bottles through security. "That's kind of you. No, thank you."
The man took it gracefully — a little laugh, a shake of the head, back to his friends. I lifted my wine and, over the rim, made the mistake of meeting Victor's eyes. My wrist froze halfway to my mouth.
He wasn't glaring. That was the problem. He was just looking, steady and unhurried, the way he used to look at me across a breakfast table, like I was the only fixed point in a turning world.
Keane, bless his oblivious heart, chose that moment to raise his glass my way. "Luna, you know you're not the first person at this table to get lucky tonight."
Victor's eyes went dark. Under the table, something thumped. Keane yelped like a stepped-on tail.
"Ahh —" He was baring his teeth at Victor, then saw Victor's expression, and immediately converted the bared teeth into a supportive grin.
"And it's true!" Joey chimed in from down the table, delighted. "Before you got here, Captain, like four different women asked for your number. One of them pretended to spill her drink on herself."
Daisy glanced at me, saw no reaction worth having, sat up straight, and cleared her throat with the precision of a professional. "Toasts! We're doing toasts! New roster, new routes!"
The table obligingly drowned the moment in alcohol. But in the laughter that followed, I kept catching Victor's gaze across the candles — and anyone with eyes could see the air between us humming, bent and strange, like the pressure drop before weather.
"Daisy." I leaned close to her ear. "I need the restroom."
I was gone maybe twenty seconds when I heard the scrape of a chair behind us. Keane's voice, startled: "Where are you going now?"
"My mother's on the phone," Victor said, mildly, flourishing his cell.
I did not hear him follow me. I did not hear anything over the restaurant's noise, which is how an Alpha as large as Victor Ironclaw managed to catch my arm at the corridor's turn and pull me sideways through a doorway into a private dining room, closing us both inside it.
My body knew what to do before my mind caught up — I twisted his arm and wrenched against the hold, but it was like shoving a loaded aircraft. Then the scent reached me. Cedar. Storm. Him.
My hands went still on their own.
"...Victor?"
He had me pressed back against the door, his warm chest a hand-span from mine, the wood cold behind my shoulders. The room was dark. No lights, only the city's neon sliding up and down the floor-to-ceiling window on the left, striping the space in pink and blue every few seconds.
In the dark, every other sense got louder. His breathing. My heartbeat. The fact that neither of us had moved.
"What do you want?" I asked.
He lifted a hand, and his fingertips brushed the side of my neck — lazy, delicate, a touch that had no business being that careful coming from a man who'd just dragged me across a restaurant. He leaned in a little closer.
"Sweetheart."
The word came out low and ruined, in the exact voice he used to use in the dark, in our bed, a hundred mornings of a life I'd packed into boxes. My whole body shivered before I could stop it.
"Victor. We're — we're finished. You don't get to call me that."
A short, quiet laugh moved through his chest. Then he stepped back, one full pace, and the sudden absence of his warmth was worse than the pressure had been. He slid both hands into his pockets and tipped his head at me, and when he spoke, something was being held down hard in his voice.
"Then answer me this. You disappeared for three years. So why come back? Why my airline, my city, my route?"
I straightened my spine and looked at the window instead of him. "Where I go is my freedom."
"Sure. Your freedom." He repeated it slowly, tasting each word, and then, quietly: "What about me? Where did you put me?"
I didn't answer. Silence has always been my best uniform.
He crossed the space between us again until one finger of air was all that remained. His hand rose and gathered a loose strand of hair that had come free of my clip, and he tucked it behind my ear, slow and precise, the way he used to fix my collar before briefings. The tip of my ear went hot everywhere he almost touched.
"Do you remember the night, four years ago?" he said.
My brain lurched awake and my mouth got ahead of it, the way it always does with him.
"If that night, the person who walked into your room had been someone else — anyone else — would you be doing this now?"
A brow lifted in the dark. "Doing what, exactly?"
I looked up at him, and everything I might have said dissolved somewhere on the way to my tongue.
He watched it happen. Of course he did. Then he leaned in — closer, closer, angled exactly toward my mouth — and at the last instant turned aside, his lips stopping a breath from my ear.
"Sleeping with you. And then marrying you." A pause, long enough for my heart to misfire. "But sweetheart — those are things I only want to do with you."
He let the last word stretch, his breath warm against my ear, patient and merciless, like he had all night and three years of interest to collect.
My face was on fire. My knees were considering their options.
And then my phone rang.
The vibration went off in my clenched fist like a fire alarm. I shoved him — hard — and my forearm exploded in pain where the turbulence had opened it, and I didn't care, because Daisy's name was glowing on the screen and I needed a witness before I did something three years of discipline would regret.
"Daisy—"
"Luna! You've been gone forever! Are you okay?"
"I'm fine. Coming back now." I was watching my own feet, one hand pressed over the bandage.
Behind me, in the dark, Victor took my injured wrist and lifted it. Gentle. Absurdly gentle. His fingers found the edge of the small gauze pad and peeled it back a millimeter at a time, in the light of the passing neon, inspecting the cut like it was a flight control fault he intended to sign off personally.
"Luna? Luna, you there? Is the bathroom signal bad?"
"Y... the signal's fine," I managed.
He bent his head and breathed out, slow and warm, across the wound. Heat bloomed up my arm. Alpha breath — the old trick, the one that used to work on scraped knees and bad landings and me. I stopped feeling my fingers.
"Signal's fine? Then why aren't you talking?" Daisy puzzled aloud, and in her background, Keane's voice arrived like the cavalry, distant and gleeful:
"Signal's fine. She's just busy."
"Busy with what?"
"I'll put it this way — who was the other person who vanished from this restaurant at the exact same time as Luna?"
"Um... Captain Victor?" Two seconds of Daisy thinking. Then Keane, laughing so hard the phone crackled: "Mystery solved."
I hung up on all of them. My face had gone past red into some new color that hasn't been named yet. I pulled my wrist back; Victor let it go the instant he felt resistance, hands up, harmless as anything six feet of apex predator can be.
"Get that re-dressed tonight," he said quietly. "It needs cleaning."
"It's none of your concern, Captain."
I yanked the door open and fled — actually fled, heels and all, down the corridor with what dignity I had left in a small trail behind me.
Behind me I heard the door catch before it could swing shut, and then nothing. When I risked a glance back at the corner, he was leaning in the doorway of the dark room, watching me go, and his mouth had that faint, infuriating curve.
I made it around the corner before I stopped, hand pressed to the wall, heart going like stick-shaker.
Four years ago. The night. He remembered it too.
He kept the memory, said a voice from behind the locked door where I keep my wolf. Quiet as ash. Three years silent, and she chose this, here, now, in a restaurant corridor that smelled like his aftershave. He kept it the way I kept yours.
Don't, I told her.
Mate, said Wren, and went quiet again, and left the word sitting in the middle of my chest like an unexploded device.
I smoothed my dress, checked my face in the mirrored wall, and walked back to the table wearing my very best professional nothing.
Under the table, my wrist was still warm.