We went through the list together and came up empty.
"Could it be Vale?" Hugo said at last, not quite able to keep the name steady.
Vivian frowned. "I had the same thought. So I had him checked. Last night." She tapped her nails on the table. "Kieran Vale runs a small foreign-trade firm. Small, Hugo. He's nobody's war chest."
She wasn't wrong on the surface. That was the maddening thing — every record on the man said ordinary, and every wolf with a nose said otherwise. Even Grayson — the Grayson, heir of a house that rivaled Moonridge, a young Alpha who looked down his nose at the entire district — clapped Kieran on the shoulder like an equal and once passed him the wine list first.
But Vivian had done her arithmetic and closed the book. "Even if it were him, he's a minnow. He can't touch Moonridge." She flicked her hair back, satisfied. "Men like him don't chase girls like Aria for long. A week. Two. He'll get bored, she'll be broke and alone, and then—"
She didn't finish, and she didn't need to, because Hugo was already finishing it for her, inside his own head, where the picture had gone soft and sick: Aria, discarded, coming back to the only man who ever really loved her. Begging.
He smiled at Vivian with the smile she wanted. "You're right. We wait."
And when he steered the conversation to his frozen financing, she reached across the table and squeezed his hand. "Tell me how much you need. I'll speak to Grandfather."
Hugo's eyes shone. Choosing Vivian — that, at least, had been correct.
I woke up to a white ceiling and ten missing hours.
The last thing in my memory was the wine going down, then the shutter coming down inside me. I braced for a hotel room. For the worst. For Hugo's cologne.
Instead: Blaire, asleep in a chair, gripping my hand like a luggage handle.
"Blue?" My voice came out ruined.
Her head snapped up. She stared at me for one full second, and then her whole face crumpled and she fell onto my shoulder, sobbing. "You IDIOT— you don't go anywhere, with anyone, ever again, without sending me your location—"
"Blaire. Blaire— I'm fine, I'm—"
"You're not fine, you were pumped, do you know what that's—" She sat up, dragged a sleeve across her eyes, and suddenly grinned through the wreckage. "Good news, though. You'll love it."
She wiped her nose. "Blackstone lost the Larkfield contract. Their client's Alpha heard Hugo's secretary had resigned and pulled out of the deal on principle. Ten million, gone. Poof."
I stared at the ceiling, and a laugh came out of me that hurt my throat. Good.
"Also—" Blaire's grin turned sly, settling in for the real subject. "Since when do you know men like that? Because I have questions, Aria. I have so many questions."
"Men like what—"
"The gorgeous one who carried you out of a den of wolves and paid for this room and told me, quote, we're friends." She folded her arms. "You don't have friends like that. Friends like that have titles."
I opened my mouth — and had nothing. I'd assumed it was Blaire's driver, some accident of timing. Kieran Vale had been there. At that dinner. At the exact hour. Watching exactly the right door.
"He called you," I said. "Your number. My emergency contact."
"And then he left before I could get a word out, like some— some beautifully tailored ghost." She leaned in. "Who is he, Aria?"
The door opened.
He came in with a sheaf of white lilies, and the morning window laid a bar of sunlight across him, gilding one shoulder, and I saw it for the first time, straight on, unhidden:
His eyes were amber. Not dark brown in good light, not a trick of the corridor — clear, pale, liquid gold, the color I had only ever seen once before, in water, looking up at me from my own reflection the night my wolf woke.
Ah, said Nyra, from the warm dark, in a voice like a struck bell. There he is.
"You're awake." He set the lilies in the vase like a man who had done it before, in some other life, with the same unhurried precision. "How do you feel?"
"Like I lost a fight with a teacup." My voice was still gravel, but it held. "Yesterday. You—"
"I happened to be there," he said. "It was nothing."
Happened to be there. I looked at him for a long moment. He met it, calm as still water, lying to me so gently it felt like being covered with a blanket.
Blaire, mercifully, could not be silenced by calm. "She's planning to open a design studio, you know. The moment she's out of here. Interior design. Very exclusive, very in-demand designer, sitting right there in the free gown."
"Interior design." Something moved through his expression — I'd have sworn it was interest, actual interest, filed away behind the calm. He took a card from his breast pocket and held it out. "Go see this man. If you like his storefront, the entire fourth floor can be yours to lease."
Blaire took the card, because my hands were still experimental. She read the name on it and her mouth fell open.
"Aria." Her whisper had gone reverent. "This is Silvercreek Row. The building with the waiting list. People queue to lease a corner unit—"
She looked up at him. She looked at me. She looked at the card again, and I watched the arithmetic detonate behind her eyes.
"Who are you?" she said.
He smiled, faint and unreadable, and did not answer — which was, I was learning, his native language.