Healed by My Second Chance

Chapter 2 — Kane

I didn’t register a word Damon said between the kitchen and the elevator bank.

“—and if the merger board moves the date again, we’ll have to redraft the entire—”

“Fine.”

I had no idea what I had just approved. At that moment, I didn’t care.

Damon continued, now talking about the Hendersons’ lawyers and a clause no one had caught in time. On any other morning, he would have had my full attention. He was good at his job, and I was wasting his time, but my mind remained in the kitchen behind us, fixed on the woman at the sink.

Melody Moon.

The surname had registered the instant she said it. A second later, I remembered why.

Moon. The traitor’s daughter.

Her father had sold three territories to the Kastellan alliance and disappeared before the council could catch him. After that, no pack had been willing to take his daughter in.

She had spent four months washing dishes in my building, and I hadn’t known she was there.

There was no reason that fact should have mattered to me. Instead, I could barely think about anything else.

Damon’s voice came back into focus.

“—legal needs your signature by Friday.”

I nodded. He studied me for a moment, apparently decided against asking, and turned toward his office.

My father used to say that a wolf who let his nose lead him would end up in someone else’s trap. He delivered it as pack wisdom, the kind drilled into every alpha’s son before he was old enough to shift.

Usually, he said it whenever I asked about my mother, whom he refused to discuss otherwise.

I didn’t need my nose to know what I had felt in that kitchen. The instant I walked through the door, every instinct I possessed had fixed on Melody. The pull was immediate and impossible to ignore.

By the time I reached the elevators, I had dismissed it as nothing three times.

I hadn’t believed myself once.

“You look like you saw a ghost.”

Roman fell into step beside me with a tablet tucked under one arm. He wore the particular grin that meant he already knew I was hiding something.

He was my beta and had been my closest friend since we were sixteen. That history gave him permission to ask questions no one else would risk.

“I didn’t see a ghost.”

“Sure.”

The elevator arrived. We stepped inside, and Roman pressed the button for the top floor. The doors slid shut.

“Whatever you saw, it followed you in here. You haven’t blinked since we got on.”

“I have a merger to think about.”

“You look like you’ve been hit by a truck. The merger didn’t do that.”

Roman didn’t scare easily, and once he knew I was avoiding something, he never let it go.

“What happened downstairs?”

I could have told him. Roman was the one person who might understand what that pull meant—and what it cost to feel it and walk away.

But if I said it aloud, I would have to decide what it was.

I wasn’t ready to do that.

“Nothing happened,” I said. “I checked on an invoice issue.”

“Since when do you personally check invoice issues?”

The elevator opened onto the top floor. I stepped out without answering.

The honest answer made no sense: since four minutes earlier, when an instinct I had kept under control for years suddenly stopped obeying me.

My office was exactly as I had left it. The glass walls overlooked a city that seemed to belong to me. In fairness, most of it did.

A stack of contracts waited on my desk. I sat down but made no attempt to open them.

A message from Lilith was at the top of my screen.

Dinner tonight. Don’t forget. The Hendersons will be there.

Then, added like an afterthought:

Wear the navy.

I set the phone face down on my desk.

The engagement had made sense eighteen months earlier. It tied her father’s shipping routes to my father’s old debts, then dressed the merger up as a marriage because that was easier than admitting what it really was.

Lilith didn’t want me any more than I wanted her. We both wanted our fathers to stop circling each other as if a fight were inevitable.

At the time, it had seemed like a fair trade.

Until that morning, the arrangement had felt practical. Now it felt like a decision I had made without understanding what it might cost me.

I pictured Melody’s hands in the dishwater and remembered the way she had held my gaze.

I would have remembered you.

I had meant it literally. Once the words were out, they sounded far more personal.

Her expression had changed when I said them. I couldn’t tell whether I had seen hope or only surprise that someone like me had noticed her. Either way, I had ended the conversation before it could go any further.

I already knew the consequences of following that pull. My father’s objection formed in my mind before I could stop it.

You would throw away a merger and the Eclipse name for a woman who washes dishes?

She was also the daughter of a traitor. She had lost pack protection because of her father’s actions, and no other pack had accepted her. Under every council law that mattered, Melody Moon was a rogue.

By every rule I had been raised to follow, I should have walked past her without stopping.

I hadn’t.

I had stayed at her station far longer than necessary, and I was already searching for an excuse to go back the next day.

“Don’t,” I said aloud.

I reached for the merger file and forced it open.

A page later, I realized I hadn’t absorbed a single sentence. I closed it again.

Four months.

She had answered without hesitation, even with half the kitchen watching us. Melody wasn’t easily intimidated.

That evening, I would sit across from Lilith and the Hendersons and discuss shipping routes. I would play my part because I had made an agreement and intended to honor it.

One encounter in a kitchen did not undo eighteen months of negotiation. An instinct I refused to name did not give me permission to abandon everything my family had built.

By the time I left the office, I could repeat the argument without hesitation.

I still couldn’t make myself believe it.