TOO LATE TO REJECT ME, ALPHA

Chapter 2: Nobody Tonight

Aiden Armone had faced down rival Alphas, hostile boardrooms, and a Council of Elders who could end his bloodline with a single vote.

None of them had ever made his hands shake.

In the dark of the stalled elevator, with a stranger's pulse hammering against his palm and the taste of rain still on his tongue, the Alpha of the Armone Pack forgot every rule he had ever set for himself.

*Mine,* Ronan snarled inside him.

*Quiet,* Aiden answered.

*Mine. Mine. Mine.*

He had never heard his wolf like this. Ronan was old, patient, and ruthless. A strategist. A wall of iron that Aiden leaned on when the world got loud. Ronan did not pace. He did not plead. He did not, under any circumstances, lose his mind over a woman in a wet dress whose name Aiden did not even know.

Yet here he was, pressed against the inside of Aiden's skull, howling.

"Ash," the woman whispered.

The false name landed like a small, sharp stone.

"Say it again," he heard himself say.

"Ash."

"No." He leaned closer. "Not that."

"It's the only name I have for you."

"Then I want to know what yours sounds like in the dark."

Her breath shivered against his mouth. "Nobody," she said, and he could hear the smile in it, unsteady and stubborn and brave. "I told you. Nobody."

The elevator groaned. The lights stuttered back to life, harsh and yellow, and the car began to climb again as though nothing had happened.

Aiden did not move. Neither did she.

Her eyes were huge and dark, and he searched them for what he had felt in the dark, that strange, humming *pull*. He found only a woman. Human, he would have sworn. No wolf-scent. No claws beneath the skin. And yet Ronan would not stop.

The doors opened on the top floor.

"We can still leave," Aiden said. It was the most honest thing he had said all night. "You can go back down, take a cab, and never think about me again."

"Is that what you want?"

He laughed, short and helpless. "No."

"Then don't ask me like it's a question." She stepped past him into the hall, turned, and held out her hand. "I'm tired of being sensible, Ash. Just for tonight."

He took it.

The suite was dark and enormous, the city spread beneath glass like a second sky. He had booked it for the purpose of being alone, which was, in hindsight, spectacularly stupid.

Ash. Nobody. Two lies standing very close in the dark.

She kissed him first.

It was brief and fierce, a woman leaping off a ledge, and when she drew back to look at him he saw fear in her face and something braver beneath it. He cupped her jaw with careful, unsteady fingers. Ronan went silent in his head, silent and watchful and hungry.

"Tell me if it's too much," Aiden murmured.

"Everything's too much," she said. "That's the point."

So he kissed her the way he had wanted to since the moment she stared down the bartender.

Slowly. Deliberately. As if she were something that might vanish.

She tasted like rain and whiskey and the beginning of something dangerous. Her hands slid beneath his coat and pushed it from his shoulders. His found the zipper at her back and paused, waiting, and she nodded against his mouth, breathless.

"Yes."

The rest came in pieces.

The sound she made when his mouth found the line of her throat. The scatter of her laughter when he lifted her, and the way it broke off into a gasp as her back met the wall. Her hair, damp and dark and everywhere. The moth pendant at her collarbone, catching the city light, warm against his chest.

He memorized her by touch, the way a man memorizes a road he expects to lose.

He had been with women before. Beautiful ones, polished ones, women who wanted the Alpha or the CEO and were very good at pretending they wanted him. None of them had ever looked at him like this, as though he were only a man, and an interesting one, and *hers* for the night.

None of them had ever made his wolf go quiet with something that felt suspiciously like peace.

It scared him more than any Council ever had.

Later, in the tangle of sheets and the last silver spill of moonlight through the glass, Kira lay curled against his side, her cheek on his chest, listening to his heartbeat like it was a language she was learning.

"You're quiet," she said.

"I'm thinking."

"That sounds dangerous."

"You have no idea." He traced a lazy line down her spine. She shivered. "You're not what I expected."

"What did you expect?"

"Someone easier to forget."

Her breath caught. She lifted her head, and in the half-dark her eyes were soft and unguarded. "That's the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me."

"It's not nice." His voice roughened. "It's a problem."

She kissed him again, slowly, as if to swallow the word.

And then his mouth was at her throat, and Ronan surged so hard that Aiden's teeth *ached*.

The bite.

It rose in him like a tide, ancient and absolute. The urge to claim, to sink his teeth into the curve of her neck and seal something that could never be unsealed. His canines lengthened. His grip tightened. Every instinct he owned screamed *now, now, she is yours, take her.*

She felt it. He knew she did, because she went very still, and her pulse fluttered against his lips.

"Ash," she whispered. She was not afraid. She was only listening, as though something inside her had lifted its head to hear the same thing he was hearing.

That was what undid him. A human woman should have flinched from teeth like his. She held perfectly still, and her whole body leaned toward the danger.

He didn't think about it. He couldn't. He tore himself back from her throat, breathing hard, teeth grinding, every muscle locked in the effort not to finish what his wolf was screaming.

"Ash?" She touched his face. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing." His voice sounded like gravel. "Just... not like this."

"Like what?"

"Not with a stranger. Not a mark." He pressed his forehead to hers. "Not when you don't even know what it means."

Her eyes softened. "I'd let you."

"I know. That's why I won't."

She held his gaze a long moment, and he thought she might argue. Instead she smiled, a slow, private, devastating curve of her mouth, and pulled him back down into the dark.

They did not sleep much.

By the time the first gray began to bleed into the windows, Aiden lay awake and utterly still, with a woman's warm weight against his side and his wolf, for the first time in his life, silent.

*No,* he thought. *This isn't real.*

*Fate isn't real.*

*I refuse to be my father.*

He closed his eyes for what felt like a heartbeat.

When he opened them, the bed was empty.

The sheets on her side were cool. The suite was quiet. Her dress was gone, her shoes, the faint trace of wild plum and moonlight that had wrapped around him all night. He sat up, heart lurching, and Ronan snarled a single furious word.

*Gone.*

Aiden stared at the empty pillow.

There, in the hollow where her head had been, lay a small silver pendant on a broken chain.

He picked it up. It was warm, as though it had only just left her skin.

A moth, wings spread wide, hung beneath a thin crescent moon. It was delicate and old, and the metal was worked with an intricacy no modern jeweler could match.

He turned it over.

On the back, carved in letters so small they might have been scratches, was a single word he could barely read.

*Banar.*

The room tilted.

He knew that crest. He had seen it once, long before he was old enough to understand it, in a sealed folder his father had never known he'd found. A folder with a burned corner, a name crossed out in red, and a single line at the bottom in his father's handwriting.

*It never happened.*

Aiden's phone lit up on the nightstand.

**Jace:** Where are you? Voss has people asking.

**Jace:** Someone saw you leave the Hollow Moon with a woman.

**Jace:** Whoever she is, you'd better find her before the Council does.

He stared at the pendant in his palm.

And Ronan, low and certain and terrified, whispered the thing Aiden had spent his entire life trying not to hear.

*She was ours.*