Healed by My Second Chance

Chapter 4 — Kane

Dinner with the Hendersons lasted three hours and felt like ten.

The restaurant was the kind of place that didn’t put prices on the menu—all low lighting and lowered voices. My father used to bring his business partners to places like it when he wanted them to remember exactly what kind of man they were negotiating with.

I had chosen it deliberately, mostly out of habit. It was easier to play a part in a room designed for exactly that.

Lilith sat across from me in navy, the same shade she had told me to wear. She laughed at the right moments, touched my arm at the right moments, and played the role of my future wife with the polished ease she brought to everything.

No one at the table could have guessed that we had exchanged maybe forty words alone since our engagement was announced.

“Your father built something remarkable here,” Old Man Henderson said halfway through his second scotch. “Shame he isn’t around to see how far you’ve taken it.”

Coming from him, the comment sounded more like a warning than a compliment.

“He’d have plenty of notes,” I said.

It drew the laugh it was supposed to.

I hadn’t meant it as a joke.

My father had always had notes. Most of them concerned what I owed the pack, what I owed the family name, and how the merger with the Hendersons would keep three territories out of Kastellan hands for another generation.

He had never once offered an opinion about what I wanted because, in his mind, what I wanted and what I owed were supposed to be the same thing.

He had died still believing that a well-run empire and a well-lived life were interchangeable, provided a man was disciplined enough.

They weren’t.

I had known that for years and buried the knowledge anyway.

I made it back to the office a little after ten and told myself I needed to review contracts. Instead, I found myself standing at the window with the city laid out below me, thinking about a dish sink on my own ground floor.

And about a girl who probably didn’t know that my name appeared on half the paperwork in the city because my father had put it there.

My father had built this empire on the same soil hers had torched.

It wasn’t fair to think of her that way. I knew it wasn’t fair.

I thought about it anyway.

Roman found me there a little after midnight, which meant he had been watching for my car in the garage.

He didn’t bother knocking.

“You’ve been up here for two hours doing nothing,” he said. “That’s not like you.”

“I’m thinking.”

“About the merger.”

“Sure.”

“You’re a terrible liar for a man who runs half this city’s business dealings.”

He had been my beta long enough to know exactly what two hours of silence from me usually meant. He remained in the doorway with his arms crossed, waiting me out.

When I still didn’t answer, he crossed the room and joined me at the window. He was quiet for a moment in the particular way he became quiet when he already knew he wouldn’t like what came next.

“Kane. What happened in that kitchen?”

I could have lied again.

I was tired of lying, even to myself.

“I felt something.”

Roman didn’t move.

“Felt something, or felt something?”

“You know which one.”

The silence that followed lasted long enough for me to hear the building settling around us, the low hum of the ventilation system, and someone’s phone buzzing three offices away.

Neither of us tried to fill it.

“You’re engaged,” Roman said at last.

It wasn’t a question.

“I know what I am.”

“The Hendersons put half their fleet up as collateral on this merger. Your father spent the last four years of his life building the alliance that’s supposed to keep Kastellan off our territory, and the entire thing depends on that wedding happening on schedule.”

He spoke plainly, the way he did when he needed me to hear him rather than simply wait for him to finish.

“I’m not telling you what to feel. I’m telling you what happens if you act on it.”

“I haven’t acted on anything.”

“Not yet.”

Roman looked at me the way he used to before a fight, back when we were young enough to still get into them—checking that I had my head on straight before it mattered.

“She’s a rogue, Kane. Unclaimed, unprotected, and the daughter of the man who sold out three packs to save his own skin. You know what the council would do with that if it got out. You know what they’d do to her.”

I did know.

That was the part I couldn’t stop turning over—not the wedding, the merger, or even Lilith’s cool hand on my arm during dinner.

I kept thinking about what my world would do to Melody Moon if it ever discovered that she mattered to me at all.

The council didn’t forgive easily, and it forgave rogues even less. Whatever I had felt while standing beside that dish sink wouldn’t matter to them. They would care only about what it cost the alliance and what it cost her.

“I’m not going back down there,” I said, mostly to convince myself.

Saying it aloud was supposed to make it feel more true.

It didn’t.

“Good.”

Roman clapped a hand on my shoulder the way he had a hundred times before, easy and certain, as though the matter were closed.

“Get some sleep. You’ve got the Kastellan briefing at eight.”

He turned to leave, then stopped at the door and looked back at me for a moment too long. He seemed to be deciding whether to say something else, but apparently thought better of it.

He said nothing. He only nodded once and let the door click shut behind him.

Roman left.

I remained at the window for a long time afterward, watching the lights go out floor by floor across the city and thinking that I’m not going back down there was exactly the kind of thing a man said before doing precisely that.