REJECT ME PROPERLY

Chapter 3: I Reject You

Alina woke up in a bed the size of her apartment and immediately regretted every decision that had led her there.

No. That was a lie. She regretted the champagne stain. The rest had been, frankly, spectacular.

*Spectacular,* Daxy agreed, sprawled warm and smug beneath her ribs. *Ten out of ten. Would mate again.*

"Stop saying mate." Alina sat up, clutching the sheet to her chest. Sunlight poured through floor-to-ceiling glass. Beyond it, an infinity pool spilled toward the sky. There was a grand piano in the corner of the bedroom. Who put a piano in a bedroom?

*Mate, mate, mate. You felt it.*

She had felt something. She'd been drunk on heartbreak, forty-thousand-dollar whiskey, and a man who laughed like he'd forgotten how. That wasn't fate. That was a very bad day with a very good ending.

His watch lay on the nightstand. She picked it up, read the brand, and set it down very, very carefully.

"Oh no," she whispered. "He's not security."

From the living room came his voice. Low. Clipped. Nothing like the voice she'd heard in the dark.

"...booked under whose name?"

Alina froze.

"Alina Argstone." A pause. "Through a concierge account. Cash deposit. And nobody at my front desk thought that was strange?"

*My* front desk.

"Find out who she is. Where she works. Who she talks to. Every call she's made this month." The pause that followed was colder than the first. "Because women don't just happen to hold the key to my suite, Dino. Somebody planned this."

Alina wrapped the sheet around herself like a toga, marched to the doorway, and stopped.

He stood at the window in yesterday's trousers and an open white shirt, phone to his ear. Daylight did unfair things to him. Then he turned, and their eyes met, and the air in the room changed.

In the dark it had been heat. In daylight it was a scent, cedar and rain and cold stone, and it hit her so hard her knees almost folded.

*MATE,* Daxy screamed. Not a whisper this time. A siren.

Across the room his pupils blew wide, and for one second his eyes burned molten gold.

He ended the call without saying goodbye.

"You're a wolf," she breathed.

"So are you." His voice could have frozen the pool. "How convenient."

"Convenient?"

He crossed to the desk, flipped open a leather folder, and uncapped a pen. A checkbook. An actual checkbook, like a villain in an old movie.

"How much?"

Alina stared at him. "Excuse me?"

"The suite was booked in your name. You arrived with a key. You knew which bar I'd be in and exactly which story would work on me." He tore a check free and held it toward her between two fingers. "Whoever you're working for, whatever you planned, it ends here. Name the number."

"I don't even know your name."

"Avery Durke."

The floor tilted.

Everyone in Halden Bay knew that name. Nobody knew the face. The ghost billionaire. The Alpha who'd thrown his own father out of the boardroom. The man whose company owned half the skyline and whose press office never, ever returned a call. In her industry, people told stories about Avery Durke the way sailors told stories about sea monsters.

She had slept with the sea monster.

"You think I trapped you," she said slowly.

"I think you're very good at your job." His gaze flicked to the check. "You told me so yourself."

It landed exactly where Micheal's words had landed, the same bruised place. *Late. Behind. Not enough.* And now, apparently, *for sale.*

Something in Alina went very calm.

"Take the check, Miss Argstone." He was already looking past her toward the door, as if she'd left. "I don't take mates. I never have. So let's make this clean." He drew a breath. "I, Avery Durke, reject—"

"Too slow." Her voice rang out steady and clear. "I, Alina Argstone, reject *you*."

Silence.

The words hung between them like smoke.

For one second, pain slid through her chest, sharp and slow, like a blade drawn out inch by inch. She watched it hit him too. His hand closed hard on the edge of the desk, knuckles going white.

Then it stopped. Unfinished.

Every wolf knew how rejection worked. One spoke it. The other accepted it. The bond broke clean, and whatever fate had tied snapped like cheap thread.

All he had to say was *I accept.*

All she had to say was *I accept.*

*Don't you dare,* Daxy snarled. *Don't. You. Dare.*

He opened his mouth.

She lifted her chin.

He closed it.

His eyes narrowed. "You rejected me before I finished."

"You were taking too long. It's a very long name."

"You don't get to reject *me*."

"I just did." She walked past him, scooped her ruined dress off the floor, and spotted his charcoal coat draped over a chair. Cashmere. Heavy. It smelled like him in a way she instantly resented. She pulled it on over the dress. "I'm taking this. Consider it a settlement."

"That coat is worth more than—"

"Your manners? Everything is." She paused at the door. "Keep your check, Mr. Durke. I don't take money from men who can't finish a sentence."

The door clicked shut behind her.

---

Avery stood alone in the suite.

The check was still pinched between his fingers. He looked down at it.

It was blank. He had never written a number.

He stared at it for a long moment, not understanding how that had happened.

Then he felt her.

That was the problem. He should have felt nothing. She had rejected him; he had rejected her, mostly. Everything should have gone quiet. Instead he could feel her in the elevator, a small, bright ache. Twenty floors down and dropping. Ten. The lobby. Farther.

It hurt.

*You i***t,* Nimor said. Not a roar. Something much worse. Quiet and wrecked. *You absolute, magnificent i***t. She was ours.*

*She was a setup.*

*Then why didn't you accept her rejection?*

Avery didn't answer.

---

The Veyra lobby was far too full. Alina kept her head down, his coat turned up to her chin, and walked fast.

She was three steps from the revolving door when the first flash went off.

Then another. Then ten. A knot of photographers had staked out the entrance, clearly waiting for someone, and in that someone's absence they'd found a woman in yesterday's dress and a man's bespoke coat stepping out of the Veyra's private tower elevator.

"Miss! Miss, over here!"

"Whose coat is that?"

"Were you with Durke?"

How did they know to say *Durke*?

Alina buried her face in the collar and shoved through the door into the blinding morning.

She threw herself into the first taxi at the curb. "Go. Anywhere. Just go."

The driver, a gray-haired man with a rosary swinging from his mirror, pulled into traffic without a word. Behind them, flashes kept popping like fireworks nobody had ordered.

Alina pressed her forehead against the window and waited to feel relief.

It didn't come. What came instead was a pull, low and insistent, right under her sternum, as if a thread had been knotted there and the other end was still upstairs in Suite 4401. Every block the taxi drove, the thread pulled tighter.

*It's supposed to stop,* she thought. *Why isn't it stopping?*

Daxy didn't answer. Daxy was curled into a small, tight ball somewhere deep inside her, and for the first time in three years, her wolf was crying.

"You okay, miss?" the driver asked, eyes flicking to the mirror.

"Fantastic." Alina smiled with every tooth she had. "Best night of my life."

The radio murmured on. *...unconfirmed reports of a woman leaving Durke's private tower at the Veyra this morning. Durke Holdings has declined to comment. As always.*

The driver glanced at her coat. Then at her face. Then, very wisely, back at the road.

---

Upstairs, Avery's phone rang.

Dino Marse did not say hello. Dino never said hello.

"Why," his best friend asked, in the terribly calm voice of a man standing at the edge of a cliff, "is your coat on the front page of every news site in Halden Bay?"

Avery went to the window. Far below, a small figure in charcoal cashmere folded herself into a taxi.

"And Avery?" Dino's voice dropped. "Madame Rinora just called. She wants to know who the woman is." A beat. "So does the entire world."