"You think I'm playing hard to get?"
I laughed. I actually laughed, leaning forward over his desk, close enough to watch the shock flicker in Hugo's eyes when he found nothing there but ice.
"I don't play games with you, Hugo. I don't have to. We're done."
"We are NOT done." The words came out of him like something breaking. "How many times do I have to say it? Marrying Vivian changes nothing for us. You keep your position. You keep your— allowance. What exactly are you trying to do?!"
He was almost shouting by the end. I looked at this man — the one I'd loved for three years, the one whose scent used to mean home before home meant a locked door and his voice through it — and mostly I felt tired.
"Let me say it one more time, slowly." I kept my voice level. "I broke up with you. I'm not asking. I'm informing."
"I don't accept!" His palm cracked against the desk as he surged to his feet.
I tipped my head and smiled the way Blaire smiles at bad interior design. "Breakups don't require consent, Hugo. Dating was never a contract. The job, on the other hand, was — and HR is processing my resignation now. You just have to sign."
Something moved behind his eyes. Three years of me — soft, warm, folding itself around his moods like ivy around a fence — and he couldn't reconcile that girl with the one standing here bored of him.
He rounded the desk fast, caught my wrist, and hauled me against his chest.
"I said enough!" His breath was hot against my hair. "Keep this up and the second I sign, you're done in this city. No pack will touch you. No pack that answers to Blackstone, anyway."
Disgust hit me like a physical thing. I wrenched against his grip, claws of panic rising in my throat — not the old panic, the wolf's panic, Nyra surging up my spine with her hackles up, and Hugo's nostrils flared at whatever my scent did in that instant.
"Let go of me!"
"I left on my own," I snarled at him. "Not being able to come back here is a gift—"
He seized my chin and forced my face up to his, and his mouth came down—
I jerked my head aside with everything I had. His kiss landed in my hair, and the sound he made — frustrated, animal — was worth every year I'd wasted on him.
He was still dragging my chin back around for a second attempt when the door clicked and a voice gasped:
"What— what are you two doing?!"
Hugo let go of me like I'd caught fire. I turned, unhurried, and found Vivian in the doorway with a bag of takeout boxes in her hands and her whole face arranged into wounded disbelief. Her eyes flicked from my hair — his mouth-print practically stamped into it — to Hugo's hands, and something small and vicious lit up behind the hurt.
"Aria." Her voice shook with rehearsed disappointment. "You have no shame at all, do you? I've heard everything about you and my fiancé. If you're so desperate to marry up, I could introduce you to someone in your own league. Keep clinging to Hugo and you'll find out what I'm like when I'm not nice."
So that was the story he'd told her. I looked past her to Hugo, and let my voice drip. "That's really what you told her?"
He stepped between us, fast, blocking her view of my face like a man shielding a crime scene. "You're dressed like that anyway," he snapped at me, loud enough for her to hear. "Fine. Tonight's dinner with Alpha Fenmore — you'll go in my place."
"Why would I?" I let the bafflement show. "I came here to resign. Why would I attend anyone's dinner?"
Behind his shoulder, Vivian had gone very still at the name Fenmore. Her gaze crawled over me — my skin, my throat, the unreadable blooming warmth of my scent — and I watched jealousy move through her like a tide. A wolfless girl, her eyes said, should not look like that. Should not smell like that.
"You want to resign?" Vivian's voice turned sweet, which is how I knew the trap was already built. "Of course, darling. Policy says one month's notice, though. So. Work your month. Or —" she looped her arm through Hugo's, all generous reasonableness — "you attend tonight's dinner, close the deal like a good assistant, and Hugo signs your papers the moment you're done. Right, sweetheart?"
I looked at her. Then at him.
One dinner. One signature. One clean break from Blackstone forever.
"Send me the time and place," I said. "I'll be punctual."
Vivian's smile followed me out of the office.
The door had barely shut before it dropped off her face entirely. "Hugo." She turned, and the trembling bride was gone. "What was I just looking at?"
"It's not—" He spread his hands, calibrated, reasonable. "She's capable. She knows too much about our operations. I think she's leaving suddenly because someone's poaching her, that's all."
Vivian studied him for a long, silken moment, and I'm told — because he told the story later, hand pressed to his chest like a survivor — that the silence was the worst part.
"Because that's not what I heard," she murmured, sliding her arms up around his neck. "I heard you two have been together for years. Behind my back."
"It's— nonsense—"
"Then prove it." She smiled up at him, dewy and absolute. "She's coming to dinner tonight. Alpha Fenmore has a taste for pretty she-wolves — he's bought three pack alliances that way already." Her hand dipped into her bag and came out with a small brown bottle. "A few drops in her wine. Wolfsbane tincture — hospital grade, it just quiets a wolf for the night. She'll be docile. Grateful. Yours to handle however he likes, and he'll sign anything for a night with her."
Hugo looked at the bottle. Then at her. His face did something I would have paid to see.
"Vivian." His voice came out wrong. "She's still a— her reputation. If this goes wrong—"
"If it goes wrong she gets a generous severance and a story nobody believes." Vivian's voice cooled by degrees. "A wolfless girl from a half-pack family, crying scandal? They'll laugh her out of the district." She tilted her head. "Unless. Unless it's all true, what people say about you two. In which case I should go home and tell Father. And Grandfather. You know how Grandfather feels about liars."
Hugo knew exactly how Alpha Theodore felt about liars.
"All right." He closed his hand around the bottle. "All right. Once. Just once, Vivian."
She beamed and kissed his jaw.
And Hugo stood there with wolfsbane in his fist, telling himself the story he needed: just this once, to kill her suspicion — and afterward I'll have all the time in the world to wash that other man's scent out of Aria's skin.