Victor’s hand snapped open before his brain caught up.
Instinct.
The kind carved into wolf bone.
Submission to the King.
Damon reached out and drew Ava gently to his side.
His gaze dropped to the red marks banding her wrist.
His jaw tightened—just a fraction of a second—then smoothed.
No one else caught it.
Only Ava felt it.
His voice was calm when he spoke again, but each word landed like a blade laid flat against skin.
“Lumis Architects and Sterling Holdings work closely together.
That does not give you leave to harass their staff in the middle of a public street.” A beat.
“You’re dragging my pack’s name through the gutter to do it.”
No one dared answer.
Marnie opened her mouth—then shut it the instant Damon’s gaze slid to her.
“Alpha Damon,” Gerald blurted, fawning now, the words tumbling over each other.
“We’re Ava’s parents.
We’re family—we’re not troublemakers, we only—”
Damon’s Alpha aura flared.
The pressure crashed down over the street like a physical weight.
Gerald’s knees buckled; he hit the pavement hard, gasping for air that wouldn’t come.
Marnie staggered back, clutching her chest.
Even the onlookers flinched and shuffled a step away, heads bowing on instinct.
Inside Victor, his wolf whimpered and dropped low.
He locked his knees and forced himself upright, hands trembling at his sides.
“Cole.”
Damon didn’t raise his voice.
He didn’t need to.
His Beta stepped forward, smooth and unhurried, straightening one cuff.
“Sir.”
“Clear this up.” Damon’s eyes never left Gerald, crumpled on the ground.
“These two are never to approach this woman again.
Not at her office.
Not on the street.
Not anywhere.
Make it understood.”
“At once, Alpha King.” Cole inclined his head, then snapped his fingers.
Two pack enforcers peeled away from the perimeter of the crowd and moved in on Gerald and Marnie with quiet, mechanical efficiency.
Gerald went white to the lips.
“And you, Victor.” Damon’s eyes turned on his adopted son, cold as the space between stars.
“Is there some reason you’re still standing here?”
Victor stood frozen.
He hadn’t expected his father to come.
And worse—far worse—he’d been caught.
Caught chasing his ex-mate through a filthy, humiliating scene in the open, for anyone to see.
The steady, dependable image he’d spent years constructing—the one meant to prove to the Council that he deserved to inherit real power—cracked straight down the middle in a single afternoon.
He straightened.
Forced his face into something composed.
But before he turned to leave, he leaned in close to Ava, dropping his voice until it was for her alone.
“Divorce him.
A man like that doesn’t deserve you—he’ll ruin you.” A pause.
“I’m telling you this for your own good.”
Ava only looked at him.
Nothing in her face.
Nothing at all.
Victor walked away, stiff-backed.
A few steps on, he glanced over his shoulder at Damon.
Why had his father intervened?
Why would Damon care enough to cross the city for her?
The question buried itself in him like a splinter under the nail—small, and impossible to ignore.
Damon guided Ava into the car before another word could be said.
The door swung shut, and the world outside—the crowd, the stares, the wreckage of the scene—cut off all at once.
The silence inside was too heavy for the space.
He didn’t start the engine.
He turned instead, his hand sliding to the back of her neck, and kissed her.
Ava went rigid.
The kiss wasn’t gentle.
There was something sharp beneath it—frustration, or something nearer to anger, pressed against her mouth.
When he drew back, his silver-blue eyes were locked on hers.
“Were you actually going to divorce me because he told you to?”
“No.” The word came fast.
“It wasn’t that.
Stella cornered me at the office about the mark on my neck.
And I don’t have a ring—I couldn’t explain who I’d married without breaking the contract.
So I said nothing at all.”
Damon watched her for a long moment.
He’d told himself, the day he signed that contract, exactly what this was.
An arrangement.
A transaction.
Nothing more.
He didn’t do jealousy.
He didn’t do the low, ugly heat that had coiled in his chest the second he saw Victor’s hand clamped around her wrist—that same hand that used to hold her, back when she’d belonged to someone else.
He’d torn across half the city in twenty minutes for a woman who was meant to be a signature on paper.
And he still hadn’t let himself ask why.
He didn’t ask now, either.
He filed the feeling away—the way he filed everything he didn’t care to look at too closely.
“Then we’ll get you a ring,” he said.
Saturday morning.
Damon took her to the most exclusive jeweler in the city.
The top floor was reserved for VIP clients, the staff greeting them with practiced, weightless elegance.
A manager led them into a private viewing room, and within minutes attendants arrived bearing trays of black velvet.
Every piece was breathtaking—diamonds climbing all the way up to a massive ten-carat oval-cut pink stone that caught the light and threw it back like fire.
“See anything you like?” Damon asked.
“These are too expensive.”
“You’re my wife now.” His tone left no room to argue.
“You need a ring that says so.”
She understood.
This wasn’t about her at all—it was about the title.
About making certain no wolf ever questioned her standing again.
Her gaze slid past the showpieces and came to rest on the plainest thing on the tray: a slender band, a modest square-cut stone, nothing that would turn a single head across a room.
“This one.”
Something flickered behind Damon’s eyes.
She was always like this.
Practical.
Careful.
Never reaching for more than she strictly needed—as though she’d learned, a long time ago, that wanting things only ever got you hurt.
“We’ll take it,” he told the attendant.
“Engrave our initials inside.”
“Of course, Alpha.”
While they waited, tea was brought out.
Ava sipped hers, her thoughts drifting somewhere past the window.
“It’s still very expensive,” she murmured.
“It isn’t.” He was watching her over the rim of his cup.
“And if you ever need anything else—anything at all—don’t hold back.
Just tell me.”
She looked up.
For a moment something shifted in her chest, warm and unfamiliar and unwelcome.
He handled her problems.
He stood between her and the things that hurt her.
He gave her things she’d never once thought to ask for.
She pushed it back down.
This is still a contract.
Three floors up, Victor walked beside Stella, her arm hooked through his while she prattled about a handbag in a shop window.
“Does this color work?
It’ll go with that white dress I bought.”
“Yeah.
It’s fine.”
“You didn’t even look!” She pouted and tugged at his arm.
He patted her head, distracted.
“If you like it, buy it.”
Stella beamed and slipped into the store.
Victor stepped out to take a call.
For days now he’d been quietly digging into the identity of Ava’s husband—and turned up nothing.
The man who’d materialized out of thin air, the one she’d flung in his face, might as well have never drawn breath.
No name in any pack registry.
No scent trail a single soul would speak of.
As if someone with real power had wiped him clean off the map.
He drifted to the railing, where the whole atrium opened up beneath him.
Two figures emerged from a side corridor.
The woman wore a cream knit dress and a light brown trench coat.
He knew her at once.
Ava.
And there was a man at her side.
The angle swallowed his face—but Victor took in the tall frame, the breadth of the shoulders, the sheer authority rolling off him even from three floors up.
His grip clamped down on the railing.
The answer he’d hunted for days, the one that had slipped through every net he cast—it was walking across the atrium right in front of him.
He would not let it get away.
Without a second thought, he turned and strode for the escalators.