**Savannah’s POV**
The air inside the ballroom had started to feel like something I was wearing rather than breathing.
I set my empty champagne glass on a passing server’s tray and turned toward the corridor that led back to the main hall.
Three minutes of fresh air had been enough to reset, and I was ready to find a quiet corner, sit through the rest of the evening, and consider my debt to Leo fully paid.
He came from the left, which is the direction I hadn’t been watching.
Jack Maxwell.
Storm Pack heir — I’d seen the name in Alliance files, attached to a record that was impressive on paper and said very little about character.
Tall, broad, the kind of physical presence that was used to being the largest thing in most rooms.
He positioned himself in my path with the casual precision of someone who had practiced that particular maneuver and expected it to work.
Too close.
The cologne arrived before he did — expensive, heavy, the kind of scent designed to announce territory.
“Silver Creek’s wandering princess,” he said.
That particular tone, practiced and easy, designed to sound like nothing while meaning everything.
His eyes moved over the silver dress in a way I recognized immediately — not admiration, inventory.
“Came alone tonight?”
“I did.” I kept my voice pleasant, my pace unbroken.
“Excuse me.”
His hand closed around my arm.
The contact registered in my skin before my brain had finished processing it — that specific quality of touch that doesn’t ask, that assumes permission it was never given.
My whole body went cold and absolutely precise in the way it did right before a fight I’d already decided the outcome of.
I stopped walking.
“Don’t rush off,” he said, and his voice dropped a register, that calculated intimacy men used when they wanted to create the impression of something private in a public space.
He leaned slightly forward.
“A lone She-wolf who’s lost her bond, at an event like this — showing a little… *friendliness* to an Alpha heir seems like a natural choice, doesn’t it?
Given your situation.”
I turned my head and looked at him directly.
“Take your hand off me,” I said.
He laughed.
That specific laugh — the one that’s already decided there are no consequences coming, that’s already written the end of this story before it’s finished playing out.
“So cold.
Relax, I’m just—”
“I said.” My voice dropped one full register, the tone I used in the ring when I’d already located every pressure point and was informing my opponent of that fact.
Quiet.
Absolute.
No room in it for misreading. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
“Take your hand off me.”
He looked at my eyes.
Whatever he found there, it was enough.
His hand opened.
I turned and walked toward the terrace doors without looking back.
Pushed through them into the night.
The air outside was real in a way the ballroom hadn’t been.
Pine resin, cold mountain air, the specific smell of altitude and dark sky.
I crossed to the stone railing and put both hands on it and let the night move through me, let it take the feeling of that uninvited grip with it.
My hands were steady.
They’d been steady the whole time — that was the training, six years of it, teaching the body not to shake when it was furious.
The fury was still there, it was just organized.
Compressed into a clean, cold shape I could carry without spilling.
I stood there and breathed until the cold of the stone railing had fully replaced the sensation of Jack Maxwell’s hand on my arm.
“You and Leo.”
I turned around.
Declan was in the terrace doorway.
He’d come through it quietly — I hadn’t heard the door, which meant he’d been standing there for some portion of my time at the railing.
His jacket was dark against the lit interior of the ballroom behind him, and with the moonlight coming from above and the ballroom light behind, his face was in the kind of shadow that made his expression difficult to read.
Those amber-brown eyes were darker in this light.
Deeper.
He stepped out and let the door fall closed behind him, and then we were both in the moonlight.
“What kind of relationship do you two have?” he said.
His voice was even, but there was something underneath the evenness.
Something that was working to stay that way.
I looked at him for a moment.
That question.
The weight of it arriving out of the context I’d been expecting — not a professional question, not something about the training base or the Alliance or any of the things that were technically his business.
Personal.
Specific.
Something moved in my chest, small and quick, and I didn’t examine it.
“That’s not your concern,” I said.
My voice was level, clear, the same tone I used when I was drawing a boundary I intended to hold.
“My personal life isn’t Iron Ridge business.”
He didn’t answer immediately.
He moved to the railing, not beside me — a few feet of space between us — and looked out at the dark ridgeline the way I’d been looking at it.
His hands went to the stone the same way mine had.
The silence sat between us without being uncomfortable, which was its own kind of problem.
Silences with most people required management.
This one just existed, and I was aware of it in the way you’re aware of your own heartbeat — constantly, without being able to stop.
The moon was overhead and slightly behind us, throwing our shadows forward and down across the stone floor of the terrace.
His shadow and mine, side by side, the right distance apart, not touching, not overlapping.
“Leo’s a friend,” I said finally.
I wasn’t sure why I said it.
I hadn’t decided to.
“That’s the whole answer.”
Declan’s hands shifted on the railing.
A small movement, barely visible.
“Inside,” he said, and his voice had changed texture, gone quieter, “when Maxwell had his hand on your arm—”
“I handled it.”
“I know you did.” A pause.
“I saw.”
The admission landed differently than I expected it to.
Not possessive, not performative — just a statement of fact from someone who had been watching and was now telling me he had been, without dressing it up as anything other than what it was.
I looked at his profile.
The angle of his jaw in the moonlight, the line of his shoulders, the way he was looking at the mountains like they owed him an answer to something.
“You should go back inside,” I said.
“Celeste will be looking for you.”
He didn’t move.
“Probably,” he said.
He still didn’t move.
The night air moved between us, carrying pine and cold and the distant sound of the string quartet through the ballroom walls.
The moon threw our shadows long and clear across the terrace stone.
Close.
Not overlapping.