By the time the banquet wound down, I still hadn't found Blaire anywhere.
Some best friend. She'd promised to drag me here to court investors, and then vanished like smoke.
My phone chimed. Blaire.
They kidnapped me for the after-party, I'm SO sorry. I called you a car, it's waiting out front. Silver-black, impossible to miss!
Below the message sat a crying emoji the size of a dinner plate. I laughed despite myself and typed back: Got it. Go sleep it off.
I closed my phone, meaning to find Kieran and say goodbye first. But when I turned, the seat where he'd spent the evening was empty, and I felt the absence before I could name it — a small, stupid dip in my chest that I chose not to examine.
Outside, the streetlamps had gone amber, and the silver-black car stood at the curb exactly as promised, gleaming like something carved rather than manufactured.
I rubbed my brow. My heels had stopped being shoes an hour ago and were now a form of slow torture. Every wolf at that banquet had smelled like money and intention, and my social muscles were spent.
Exhausted, aching, I pulled open the door, dropped into the seat, closed my eyes, and recited my address.
The car didn't move.
The silence had a texture to it. Wrong. Too warm, too still, the held-breath quiet of a room with a predator already in it.
I opened my eyes.
The driver was staring at me in the mirror like a man watching a deer climb into his truck.
And beside me — my peripheral vision caught him before my brain did. Broad shoulder. Long fingers resting on a tablet. I turned my head slowly and met a pair of familiar dark eyes, and they were amused. Deeply, patiently amused.
"M… Mr. Vale." My mouth did something complicated. "I got in the wrong car. I'm so sorry, I'll just—"
I reached for the door.
Click.
The locks dropped. All of them.
An arm settled across my waist before I'd finished the motion, not crushing, not pulling, just there, immovable as a seatbelt made of iron. Cedar and smoked wood poured into my breath — his scent, close and warm, the one my body had catalogued days ago and never filed away again.
I know this scent, something deep in me said, and it wasn't fear. That was the alarming part. My wolf — the brand-new, three-days-old, supposedly fragile wolf — had gone utterly, bonelessly calm, the way prey animals go still when the leopard isn't hunting yet.
Kieran leaned down. His lips stopped a breath from my ear.
"I'll take you home."
A shiver ran down my neck. I shrank into my collar, absurdly aware of my own pulse. "You— you could just tell the driver to drive."
"He knows where I'm going." A pause. "Now so do I."
The city slid past the window in strips of neon. I sat straight-backed in the far corner of the seat, hands folded, and watched him sideways like a coward. He was reading something on the tablet, brow faintly furrowed, profile carved and unreal under the moving light — the kind of face that made you understand why old packs used to draw their gods instead of describing them.
"Your stop," the driver said at last.
Kieran looked up. Our eyes met in the window's reflection, and I looked away first, fast, missing whatever his mouth was doing.
"Thank you. For tonight. And the ride." I reached for the handle with all the dignity I had left.
"You weren't calling me Mr. Vale earlier," he said lazily, cheek against his hand, watching me. "What is it? Use me, then throw me away?"
My eyes went round. My hands went up. "No! No, I— there were just— people around—"
He laughed — a real one, low and quiet — and waved me off. "I'm teasing. Go. It's late."
I escaped. I stood on the pavement, flushed to my ears, and watched the silver-black car pull away, and my phone immediately buzzed.
"You NEVER got in the car!" Blaire's voice was pure panic. "Where are you? Did Hugo's people bother you?!"
"I got in the wrong car," I admitted, rubbing my nose like a child caught stealing. "But it was fine. The owner was... polite. He drove me home."
"Polite." A pause full of eyebrows. "A man with a car like THAT was polite. Uh-huh. Go to bed, Romeo's clerk. We'll debrief tomorrow."
I hung up, tipped my head back, and looked at the moon for a long moment, breathing.
The moonlight didn't sting anymore. That was new. Three days old and already the night felt less like a sentence and more like a doorway.
New life. Starting now.
The next morning I reached for my gray work uniform out of pure habit — and my hand stopped mid-air.
In the corner of the closet hung a red dress. Blaire's birthday gift from last year. I'd worn it exactly once, and Hugo had looked at me that evening like I'd tracked mud into his house. Not office-appropriate. You look desperate. It had hung there ever since, exiled.
I took it off the hanger.
Halter neck, deep V, skirt like poured wine. On a plain woman it would have been pretty. On me — on whatever I'd become since a stranger's kiss cracked something open in my blood — it was a flag planted on a hill. My skin had never looked whiter, my waist had never looked smaller, and the black heels finished the sentence.
I put on red lipstick and walked into Blackstone Tower like I owned the deed.
The office went quiet floor by floor. I heard the whispers trail me like weather: Is that— no. It is. That's Aria. The girl they'd spent three years not seeing, suddenly impossible to look away from.
I pushed open Hugo's office door.
He glanced up, annoyed at the interruption — and then his brain caught up with his eyes, and his face went through surprise, appreciation, and fury in the space of a second.
"Who told you to dress like that?" His voice snapped into the command register, the Alpha note that had bent my spine for three years. "Go change. Now."
The words hit me.
And slid off.
I waited for the old flinch, the automatic lowering of my eyes. It never came. Something inside me — something awake, warm, and quietly furious on my behalf — simply looked at his command the way a grown wolf looks at a leash it has outgrown.
"I didn't dress for anyone's approval," I said, and tossed the resignation form onto his desk. "Sign it. Then we never have to see each other again."
Hugo's jaw tightened. His eyes narrowed, scanning my face like I was a contract with a hidden clause.
"Aria." His mouth curled, mean and certain. "Playing hard to get was cute for a week. Keep it up and you'll just bore me."