REJECT ME PROPERLY

Chapter 2: The Suite Nobody Booked

Avery Durke had not truly felt his wolf in eight years.

That was the point. That was what the slim silver vial in his inside pocket was for, the one a discreet chemist in Geneva sent him every month for a sum that could have bought a house. Silvershade turned Nimor into a pressure at the back of his skull. Distant weather. It kept Avery calm. Controlled. Uninterrupted.

It did not, apparently, account for her.

Whiskey dripped down his wrist. A shard of crystal had opened a thin red line across his palm. The bartender had gone the color of skimmed milk. And inside Avery, something enormous and black and eight years starving threw itself against the bars.

*MATE.*

"Oh my God." The woman was already grabbing napkins. "You're bleeding. Did you squeeze it? Who squeezes a glass?"

"I'm fine."

"You're bleeding into a forty-thousand-dollar whiskey." She took his hand without asking.

Nobody took Avery Durke's hand without asking. Most people didn't take it *with* asking.

Her fingertips touched his palm, and heat shot up his arm like lightning finding a steeple.

*Her,* Nimor growled, and the growl broke into something worse. Something almost tender. *Her. It's her. Look at her—*

*Stop,* Avery thought.

*I have waited eight years in the dark, you coward. I will not stop. Look at her hands. Her mouth. Her eyes are like—*

*Do not compose poetry.*

*—like rain on a highway at midnight—*

"Hold still." She wound a linen napkin around his hand, quick and competent. "There. You'll live. You'll never play the violin again, but you'll live."

"I don't play the violin."

"Then it's a total win." She tipped her head and studied him. "You work here, right? Security? You have the face of a man who throws people out for a living."

He owned the hotel. He owned the building the hotel stood in, the block the building stood on, and a meaningful percentage of the skyline behind her head. His face had never appeared in a single newspaper, because he paid a great deal to keep it that way.

"Something like that," Avery said.

"Figures." She took a sip of the Macallan the trembling bartender set in front of her, made a face like it had insulted her mother, and drank the rest anyway. "Then you should know somebody's cheating on somebody in Room 1208. Probably several somebodies. I'd recommend fumigation."

Someone had brought an affair into his hotel and a wounded woman onto his roof. Somehow, both felt like his problem.

"Your fiancé," he said.

"Ex." She held up her bare left hand. "As of eleven minutes ago. Also my boss. Same woman, different job. Very efficient. I'd admire her if I didn't want to set her car on fire."

*Let me bite him,* Nimor said. *The fiancé. One bite. Nothing fatal. Mostly nothing fatal.*

"Tell me your name," Avery said.

"No."

He blinked. People didn't say no to him either.

"No names." She turned the empty glass in slow circles on the bar. "Names are for people who plan to see each other again. You're a stranger on a roof. That's the most honest thing I've had all year."

He should leave.

He knew exactly what this was: the pull beneath his skin, the way the whole bar had shrunk to the space between two stools. He had watched it happen to his mother. He had stood in a hospital corridor at twelve years old, breathing lilies and bleach, and sworn it would never happen to him.

He stayed.

"So," she said, eyeing him over the rim of her empty glass. "What's your tragedy?"

"I don't have one."

"Everyone at a rooftop bar alone has a tragedy. It's in the lease." She tipped her head. "Let me guess. Somebody left you."

"No."

"You left somebody."

"No."

"You've never let anybody close enough to leave." She said it lightly, like a joke, and then watched it land and stopped smiling. "Oh. Sorry. That one was a hit."

*She sees you,* Nimor murmured, stunned. *Eight years, and she sees you in eight minutes.*

Avery lifted his bandaged hand for another glass. The bartender nearly sprinted. "You're very rude for someone drinking my—" he caught himself, "—someone's forty-thousand-dollar whiskey."

"Micheal's whiskey. Micheal is paying tonight. Micheal is paying for everything tonight." She raised her empty glass in a toast to nobody. "To Micheal. May his strawberries always be bitten."

Avery had no idea what that meant. He drank to it anyway.

They talked. That was the strangest part. She was funny in a way that cut. She told him about a celebrity chef and a walk-in freezer, and he laughed out loud, and it startled him so badly he nearly checked over his shoulder to see who'd done it. She told him every disaster was just a story told in the wrong order, and that her job was to find the right one. She didn't ask what he did. She didn't ask what his watch cost. She asked for his favorite view in the city, and when he pointed past the lights to the dark strip of forest north of the bay, she looked at him for a long moment, as if she'd heard something he hadn't said.

"Oh." She reached into her bag. "I should show you this. It's how I got in."

A black card. Silver ink. *The Crown Room. Tonight. You are expected.*

As she drew it out, something slid from the envelope and clicked onto the marble.

A gold key card stamped with the Veyra crest.

*4401.*

Avery went very still.

Suite 4401 was a signature suite. Top floor of the east tower. Private terrace, infinity pool, twenty-eight thousand a night. It was not something that fell out of anonymous envelopes.

"Huh." She turned it over in her fingers. "I thought that was a VIP thing. For the bar."

"Who sent it?"

"No idea. Somebody also texted me about my fiancé tonight." A short laugh. "Maybe the universe finally decided it owes me."

"The universe," Avery said carefully, "doesn't book suites."

Suspicion lifted its head inside him, cold and familiar. Women had tried things before. Planted themselves at parties. Bribed his staff. One had once hidden in the back of his car wearing only a bow. The part of him that had built an empire by trusting nothing and no one was very, very awake.

*Don't,* Nimor warned. *Don't you dare ruin this.*

She was watching him. Just watching. Champagne stain on her dress. Mascara smudged under one eye. She looked like the only real thing that had ever sat down next to him.

"I'm going to go look at a very expensive suite." She slid off the stool and tucked the key card between two fingers. "You can come, stranger. Or you can stay here glaring at the skyline. I don't think it minds."

She was halfway to the elevator before he moved.

*Go,* Nimor begged. *Go, go, go, go—*

*If this is a setup,* Avery told him, *I will find out.*

*Wonderful. Find out tomorrow. Go tonight.*

He caught the doors just as they closed. Mirrored walls handed them back to themselves a hundred times over, a hundred Averys making the same mistake.

"This is a terrible idea," he said.

"The worst." She stepped closer. "Want to stop me?"

He didn't.

The kiss was not gentle. It was eight years of silence breaking in a single breath. Under his ribs Nimor howled so loud Avery felt it in his teeth, and under hers, something answered.

The elevator reached the forty-fourth floor. Neither of them noticed until the doors began to slide shut again.

---

Much later, in the dark, the city was a scatter of gold beyond the glass. Her breathing had gone slow and even against his chest, one hand curled on his heart as if she'd claimed it and fallen asleep before signing the paperwork.

Avery lay awake.

The silvershade had crept back a little. Nimor had gone quiet, a heavy, warm weight at the base of his skull, like a dog asleep across a doorway.

Then, so faint he nearly missed it:

*Finally.*

Avery frowned at the ceiling.

*Finally what?*

Nothing.

*Nimor. Finally what?*

His wolf, who had spent the entire night reciting poetry, did not say another word.