Evander's POV
"So you're his daughter."
The words leave me flat and quiet. They hit her like a slap.
She freezes over the body, towel knotted tight, wet hair trailing water down her spine. A bead slides off her shoulder, runs the length of her arm, and drops to the rug. She doesn't look at me. Her silver-gray eyes are open, pale and clouded, staring past everything. Beautiful. Useless. Blind.
My wolf surges. Mate.
I bite down hard. No.
He rams the bars I've kept shut for years, teeth flashing through my mind. You've locked me out, Evander. Not tonight. I finally found her.
She belongs to him, and he betrayed me. My hand tightens on the gun, leather grip creaking. That makes her collateral, not destiny.
I grind my teeth. Dead weight. Blind. Weak. A mistake born of him. Human. Fragile. Breakable.
She's mine, he snarls. Ours. Touch her and I break your bones from the inside.
Water ticks off her hair like a clock counting down. She flinches, hands fumbling for balance, then starts to crawl backward, blind and instinctive, one heel squeaking on marble. "Who are you?" she whispers, breath tripping. "Who… who is there?"
Rook shifts two steps behind me. I lift a finger. Hold.
She tilts her head like she's searching with her ears. Not with those unfocused eyes. Her fingers skim the floor in a nervous sweep—fabric, rug fringe, the slick of blood she doesn't understand yet. She jerks, swallowing a sound. Fear scalds the air.
My wolf goes still, listening to her heartbeat like it's a drum he was born to follow. She's scared. Fix it.
I don't fix things. I end them. I keep my tone even. In the room beyond us, men keep kneeling, praying to any god that speaks bullet. This house smells like copper and lilies and rain on stone—her. That last scent keeps cutting in, clean and wild, no matter how much blood tries to drown it.
"Who are you?" she asks again, voice smaller. Her right hand crawls over her father's shirt, searching for life and finding buttons. She leans down, cheek brushing his chest, silver eyes wide and empty. Water clings everywhere—at her collarbone, at the hollow of her throat, along the line where the towel's slipping an inch at her shoulder. It turns everything intimate and wrong.
Pick her up, my wolf orders. Cover her. Move her away from death.
I don't take orders from ghosts in my head.
I am you, he bites back. The part that remembers what we are. You can't cage me when she's here.
She tries to stand and staggers, knee catching the rug. "Pa?" The word cracks. She pats his face with shaking hands. Her palm lands wet and red. She freezes, breath snagging; then she rubs her fingers together like she can reason the texture into something else. She can't.
A sound slips out of her—thin, breaking. Those pale eyes search the dark like the dark might help. They don't.
I step forward once. The pull tightens through my chest like a hook dragging meat.
Rook's gun follows my movement. So do three others. One twitch from me and she dies. Simple math.
My wolf bares his teeth at my own men. They point steel at her. Break them.
"Stand down", I tell both sides at once, out loud for the men, inside for him.
No one breathes.
She hears me move. Her chin lifts, instinct over sight. "Please," she says, voice raw. "Don't… don't hurt me." She plants her free hand behind her, tries to push backward, bumps her heel into the coffee table, flinches, scrapes her calf. She's all white—white hair like winter light, white towel, white face—except for the blood streaking her fingers and the gray storms caught in her blind eyes.
Everything in me should be ice. It always is. I have killed for less than the way she says please.
She's ours, my wolf says, softer now, the sound a low, dangerous rumble. Say it.
No.
You won't cage me again, he warns. Not with her breathing right there. Not when I can smell her—moonlight and rain and skin. You starved me. You broke me. You told me none of this mattered. It matters.
She's leverage, I say. At most. I let the cruelty fit my mouth because it's safe. Her father chose wrong. She pays.
The growl shakes my bones. Hurt her, and I tear you apart, Evander. From inside.
Oddette—Oddette, that's her—edges her hands along the rug, trying to orient. Her hair sticks to her cheek. She swallows. "Please. Tell me who you are."
My men wait. The staff on the floor shake and don't dare make a sound. Blood pools around Maurice's shoulder and touches her knee. She doesn't notice until it warms her skin. She flinches and pulls her leg away, breath quickening into tiny hiccups. The knot in her towel shifts with each gasp, working loose, then holding by a whisper.
I step again. The scent hits harder—stone after rain, green cut open, the shock of cold water on a hot throat. It slides under the blood and makes a promise I never asked for.
My wolf shoves the bars so hard my hands prickle. Closer.
Stay down.
Say you'll protect her.
I won't say what isn't true.
Then I will, he says, and it's not a threat. It's a vow humming through my bones, old as teeth and moonlight.
"Oddette," I say before I can stop it.
Her head snaps toward my voice, eyes huge and empty. "You—how do you know my—" She cuts herself off, fear choking the rest.
Behind me, Rook shifts weight. Safety catches live like insects in the quiet. The staff hold in a collective breath that could be their last.
I drag my gaze over her face—those clouded silver eyes framed by white lashes, the tremble in her mouth, the stubborn line in her jaw under all that panic. She's fragility and fight in the same small frame, wet and shaking over a dead man I put down.
Everything I am pulls apart in opposite directions.
Claim her, my wolf says.
Kill the witness, my training answers.
Cover her, he breathes.
Use her.
She shivers, fingers curling around air like she can catch courage with her hands. "Who are you?" she asks one more time, hoarse. "Who is there?"
I close the space between us to two strides and stop. Any closer and I won't be able to pretend this is only business.
"Evander," I say. No title. No warning.
She tries to crawl back and her palm slides on blood. She slips. I catch nothing. My men twitch. My wolf lunges inside me, howling to move.
"Guns down," I say without looking away from her.
Silence. Then a soft chorus of metal easing. Not all of it. Rook keeps his barrel low, but trained. He knows me too well.
"Don't hurt me," she whispers, so quiet it's almost thought. "Please."
My wolf presses his muzzle to the bars, eyes on mine. This is the only order that matters: protect.
I stare back at the cage I made and feel the metal warm under his breath. If I protect her, I ask him, what do I become?
What you were built to be, he answers. Not a machine. Not a myth. A king with teeth.
The word tastes like a future I buried.
Footsteps behind me. Jax, impatient, shifts his aim to her heart.
My wolf's snarl rakes my ribs. My hand tightens on the gun until the leather grip complains. For a half-breath, I see two paths: one where the room stays red and simple; another where nothing is simple again.
"Orders?" Rook asks, calm as smoke.
Oddette's blind eyes fix on my voice like it's the only real thing left. She shakes. The towel slides a fraction lower. Water keeps ticking, counting down.
I open my mouth to choose—
—and a pistol clicks, loud as a thunderclap, as someone takes up the slack on a trigger aimed at her skull.