Damian's POV
I knew what she was the moment she walked into the hotel lobby.
Not who she was. I didn't know her name or her face or the particular shade of green her eyes turned when she was trying to hold herself together and almost managing it. I didn't know any of that yet. What I knew was what my wolf knew, and my wolf knew it in the space of a single breath, a deep involuntary pull in my chest that I had never felt before and immediately did not trust.
Ashmoon.
The bloodline had been extinct for several years. Every wolf who knew anything about the old clans knew that. The last Ashmoon female had died in a fire that most wolves believed was an accident and that I had always suspected was not. There were no survivors. There were no descendants. The bloodline was gone and the power it carried was gone with it and certain very powerful wolves had slept considerably better because of that fact.
And then she walked into the lobby of the Devereaux Hotel on Christmas Eve with mascara halfway down her face and fire in her eyes and the scent of dormant Ashmoon blood moving through her like a current beneath still water, and several years of certainty collapsed in a single breath.
I said nothing. Obviously I said nothing.
She didn't know what she was. That much was clear within the first five minutes of talking to her. She carried the bloodline the way someone carries a gene they have never been tested for, completely unaware, moving through a world that would tear itself apart over her if it ever found out, with no idea that she was anything other than an event planner from the cheaper side of the city having the worst Christmas of her life.
I took her upstairs because my instincts demanded it and I had learned over twenty nine years that fighting my instincts on matters of protection was a battle I consistently lost. I told myself it was just that. Protection. Proximity until I could assess the situation clearly.
I slept on the couch and stared at the ceiling and listened to her breathe through the bedroom wall and tried to remember the last time my wolf had been this loud about anything.
I couldn't.
Luca found out the morning after.
Not because I told him. Because Luca had been my security chief for years and a wolf for his entire life and he walked into my office at nine AM, took one look at my face, and said, "Who is she."
Not a question. A statement. He could smell it on me the way wolves smell everything on each other, the disruption, the proximity, the fact that something significant had happened and I had not yet decided what to do about it.
"Sit down," I said.
He sat. I told him what I knew anyways, which was not much, because I trusted him . A woman. Young. Unaware. The scent was unmistakable but the gene was completely dormant, she had no symptoms, no awareness, no connection to anything in her lineage as far as I could tell.
Luca was quiet for a long time after I finished. This was unusual. Luca was not a quiet man by nature.
"If she's Ashmoon," he said finally.
"She is."
"Then the Blackwind pack cannot find out." He leaned forward. "Marcus has been looking for leverage against you for many years, Damian. If he finds out there's a living Ashmoon female and she's connected to you…"
"I know."
"And Moretti. If his people get wind of a wolf blood ritual component walking around New Orleans with no protection…"
"Luca." I looked at him. "I know."
He sat back. Studied me. "What are you going to do?"
I had been asking myself the same question since approximately one AM when I was lying on a hotel couch listening to a stranger sleep and feeling my wolf settle into a calm it had no reasonable business feeling.
"The photos leaked this morning," I said. "Someone from Moretti's network. They were following me from the gala, which means they already know she exists. They just don't know what she is yet."
"Yet," Luca repeated.
"The PR team is recommending a contract marriage to control the narrative." I kept my voice even. "I'm going to offer it to her."
Luca looked at me for a long moment. "And if she says no?"
"She won't."
"You don't know that."
"She has no resources, no legal protection, and her name is already attached to mine in every major outlet in the state." I picked up my pen. "She'll say yes."
"That's not why you're doing it," Luca said quietly.
I didn't answer.
"Damian." His voice was careful. "You can protect her without marrying her. Safe house, security detail, legal team. You don't need the contract for protection."
"The contract gives her proximity to me without raising questions about why she needs protection. It's the cleanest solution."
"It's also the solution that puts her in your house every day." He watched me. "And you in hers."
I set my pen down. "Are you making a point Luca or are you just going to keep circling it?"
"My point," he said, "is that your wolf already decided something in that hotel lobby and now your brain is building reasons around it. Which is fine. It happens. But you should know that's what you're doing."
I looked at him across the desk. He looked back with the particular patience of someone who had known me long enough to say the thing nobody else would.
"Handle the security detail," I said. "I want someone on her at all times starting today."
He stood, recognizing the dismissal. At the door he paused. "She's going to find out eventually. What she is. What that means."
"I know."
"You should be the one to tell her."
"I know that too."
He left. I turned back to my window and looked out at the city and thought about green eyes and Ashmoon blood and the particular way my wolf had gone quiet and certain in a hotel lobby on Christmas Eve in a manner that had absolutely nothing to do with proximity or protection or any of the clean reasonable explanations I had been constructing since.
She had been in my house for seven days.
Seven days of breakfast across the table and footprints in the snow that I made before six AM because the full moon was approaching and my control required maintenance that I preferred to perform before the house was awake. Seven days of watching her navigate a world that was completely foreign to her with the particular stubborn grace of someone who refused to let anything see her struggle even when she clearly was.
Seven days of the Ashmoon warmth moving through my house like a current I could feel from three rooms away.
The gene was stirring. I could sense it the way you sense weather changing, subtle shifts in pressure, something building beneath the surface. She couldn't feel it yet, or if she could she was explaining it away, which was exactly what a person with no context would do. She was smart and she was observant and she was going to start asking questions that I needed to be ready to answer before someone else got there first.
The piano helped. It always helped. Twenty nine years - which was about One hundred and forty years in the human world- of learning to channel the wolf's excess energy into something that didn't break walls had given me outlets, the gym, the piano, the long pre-dawn walks that Luca recorded in his security logs as perimeter checks and that were actually me standing in the tree line letting my wolf breathe for twenty minutes before I had to put the suit back on.
She had heard me playing last night. I knew the moment she appeared in the doorway even though I hadn't turned around, her scent reached me before her footsteps did, something warm and green and faintly floral that had nothing to do with the flower shop and everything to do with what ran in her blood.
I had told her to sit down.
She sat in the armchair by the window and I played for almost an hour and my wolf was quieter in that hour than it had been in weeks, which was information I was not entirely sure what to do with.
I did not look at her while I played. I was fairly certain that if I looked at her while she was sitting in the lamplight listening with her knees pulled up and her guard down for the first time since she had moved in I would do something counterproductive and probably irreversible.
After she went to bed I sat at the piano for another hour in the dark and thought about timelines.
The full moon was in nine days. Her symptoms would accelerate around that time whether she was ready or not. The board dinner was in four days, a public appearance that would confirm the marriage narrative to my business partners and simultaneously make her more visible to every interested party in both worlds.
Moretti's people were already watching the house. I had Luca's confirmation on that this morning, a car that had been parked at the end of the street for three days running, different vehicles but the same two men rotating shifts. They were watching, not moving yet, which meant they hadn't identified her bloodline. Yet.
Marcus Blackwind had called twice in the last week. I hadn't returned either call. Marcus calling twice was either territorial posturing or information, and I didn't want to give him the opportunity for either until I had Ava further from the surface of all of this.
Ava.
I had started thinking of her by her first name somewhere around day three, which was a detail I noted and did not examine too closely.
I went to bed at one AM and lay in the dark and listened to the house settle around me, and beneath the settling I could feel it faintly, that Ashmoon warmth three floors up and on the other side of the building, steady and quiet and completely unaware of what it was doing to the wolf on the other side of these walls.
Nine days to the full moon.
I needed to tell her before then.
I just needed to find the right words for a conversation that started with everything you think you know about yourself is incomplete and ended somewhere that didn't send her running out of my house and directly into the hands of people who would use her bloodline to burn both our worlds down.
No pressure.
I closed my eyes and listened to the house breathe and thought about green eyes that had started looking back at themselves in mirrors with an expression they didn't yet have a name for.
She was beginning to feel it.
Which meant we were running out of time.