**Declan’s POV**
The moment she walked in, I forgot about the champagne in my hand.
Moon-silver dress, silk that moved with her like water finding its level.
Her hair loose at her shoulders, that particular shade of hers catching the chandelier light differently from everyone else in the room.
And the way she walked — that compressed, contained quality, power folded down into every step — it didn’t disappear just because she was wearing a formal gown.
It just changed the language it was speaking.
Dante went still in my chest for exactly one second.
Then he started moving, and he didn’t stop.
That pull — I’d been calling it unsettlement, been calling it curiosity, been finding other names for it because the real name was one I wasn’t ready to use.
Tonight it was none of those things.
Tonight it was just a force, direct and constant, the kind that doesn’t negotiate.
Celeste said something beside me.
I caught about half of it.
My eyes were following the silver dress through the crowd, watching her move through the whispers without breaking stride, watching her keep her chin at that particular angle I’d already learned to recognize, watching her arrive at our table and give us each exactly one nod — not deference, not warmth, just the minimum required courtesy delivered with complete precision.
Then she turned and walked toward the terrace.
Celeste’s fingers tightened on my arm.
I looked down at her hand.
At the blue of her sleeve against the black of my jacket.
At the careful perfection of her appearance — everything in exactly the right place, everything constructed and maintained and performing exactly the function she’d intended for it.
Something in my chest shifted shape.
Quietly, without announcement.
“I need some air,” I said. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
I moved her hand, gently but clearly.
“Declan—” Her voice went up slightly, the register of someone who has realized a conversation is leaving without them.
I was already walking toward the terrace.
The night air hit me when I pushed through the doors — pine resin and cold and the specific clean smell of mountain air at altitude, the kind that bypasses politeness and goes straight to the lungs.
I crossed to the stone railing and put both hands on it, looked out at the dark line of the ridge against the sky, and made myself breathe.
The full moon was directly above the mountain line.
Enormous, close, doing what it always did over this territory — pulling at everything below it with that indifferent, ancient gravity.
Dante was almost unbearable.
I gripped the railing and let him move, because trying to contain him tonight was a battle I was losing anyway.
He paced and surged and kept orienting in the same direction, toward the same thing, with a certainty that six years of suppression hadn’t touched at all.
Six years.
I’d told myself the story so many times it had worn grooves.
*Celeste was in that room.
The chain was the proof.
The photographs confirmed the location.
What you felt that night was grief and alcohol, and memory is unreliable, and the responsible thing — the only honorable thing — was to accept the account you were given and carry the weight of it like a man should.*
I’d told myself that story until it ran on its own, until I didn’t have to actively believe it anymore because it had become the default, the foundation everything else was built on.
And then Savannah Cole walked into my training base, and the foundation started making sounds.
Not because of anything she’d said.
Not because of any evidence, any confrontation, any logical sequence I could trace from point to point.
Just because Dante — who had been a low, persistent ache for six years, a wolf searching for something he couldn’t name — had gone *completely still* the first time she walked into the training yard.
The same stillness. The source of this chapter is g.com.
The same quality of recognition.
The same thing he’d done the night I walked into room 302.
I pressed my palms harder against the cold stone of the railing and looked at the moon and tried to think clearly, which was difficult because the part of me doing the thinking was the same part that was also doing the wanting, and those two things were interfering with each other in ways I didn’t have the tools to separate.
Celeste had the chain.
Celeste had the photographs.
Celeste had come to me with a story I’d accepted without question because I was twenty-two and guilty and she had given me something to hold that felt like an answer.
But Dante had never accepted her.
Not once.
In six years of dinners and phone calls and her hand on my arm at exactly these kinds of events, Dante had been present and tolerating and nothing more.
No recognition.
No pull.
No stillness.
Only with Savannah.
Only tonight, watching her walk through a crowded ballroom in a silver dress that moved like moonlight, her chin level and her eyes steady and her presence landing in the room like something that had always been supposed to be there—
*What is happening to me.*
I said it quietly, to the dark, to the treeline, to the moon sitting enormous and unhelpful above everything.
The pine forest below the terrace didn’t answer.
The moon didn’t answer.
Dante made a sound that was not quite a howl and not quite a word and was somehow both.
The most honest thing he’d made in six years — not a question, not confusion, not the low frustrated searching of an animal that can’t locate what it’s looking for.
Something else.
Something that knew.
The terrace door opened behind me.
I turned around.