Chapter 14: What the Housekeeper Found

Cade's POV

"Stay," I told her. "Sleep. I'll find out what he wants."

Lara stood in my office with her sweater half pulled on and her hair wrecked.

"You'd go alone."

"Vittorio sent for a seventy-year-old man in his nightshirt. He did not send for you."

She looked at me a long moment.

Then she sat down on the leather couch and took her shoes off.

"Ten minutes," she said. "Then I'm coming."

She was asleep in three.

I stood over her with a blanket in my hands, and I did the sum I had been avoiding for ten weeks.

She had a mark on her wrist that belonged to another man.

Tomorrow night the moon would light it in front of every pack, and his wolf would answer, and hers would answer back.

A bond like that does not need a reason.

It had taken her mother at nineteen and held her nine years.

I had watched Lara fix a seating chart, face down a ballroom, and take me apart on a desk.

I still could not make the numbers say she would stay.

So I had decided, somewhere around the second week, that I would not stand in front of it.

She slept with her left hand curled under her chin and the cuff against her cheek.

I put the blanket over her.

I did not touch her hair, though I wanted to.

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