Chapter Five
1322 Words
The private elevator to the Sovereign’s penthouse didn’t play music. It just hummed. A low, bone-rattling vibration that felt exactly like the purr of a massive predator.
Floor 70. 71. 72.
Jane stared straight ahead at the brushed steel doors. If she looked two inches to the left, she would see his reflection. She didn't look left. She focused on the illuminated red numbers climbing higher, counting them in her head to keep the panic locked in its neat, clinical box.
Her hands were folded perfectly over her stomach. Her posture was flawless, spine straight, chin parallel to the floor. Inside, she was frantically building walls. She needed to compartmentalize the last hour. The dining room. The severed heads. The way he had touched her neck in front of the entire pack.
She had left everything behind. Her clothes. Her inherited jewels. Her meticulously planned, miserable future. She was standing in a metal box with a monster, wearing only a stifling, high-collared black silk dress and a pair of pinching designer heels.
Floor 85.
The elevator chimed, a bright, polite sound that felt entirely out of place. The doors slid open.
The penthouse was a monument to cold money. It was massive, all floor-to-ceiling glass overlooking the glittering, ignorant city below. White marble floors. Black leather furniture. Minimalist. Sterile.
Except it wasn't sterile at all.
Jane stepped off the elevator and the scent hit her like a physical blow. Pine. Crushed earth. Copper. It was the exact smell of the subterranean cell, just dressed up in Italian leather and expensive bergamot. The scent was so heavy, so dominant, it coated the back of her throat. Ryan had claimed this penthouse for the last three days, but it didn't smell like him at all. The Sovereign had swallowed the space whole.
Click.
The heavy steel doors snicked shut behind her. The biometric locks engaged with a heavy thud.
She was in the cage. Just a nicer one.
Michael walked past her. He didn't look back to see if she followed. He knew she had nowhere to go.
He stopped in the center of the massive living area. He reached up and slowly loosened his dark silk tie, pulling it free and dropping it onto a glass table. Then, he unbuttoned the bespoke Tom Ford jacket. He shrugged it off, tossing it carelessly over a ten-thousand-dollar chair.
The "surgeon" mask was slipping. Just a fraction, but it was enough to make the air in the room dangerously thin.
Underneath the jacket, his crisp white dress shirt was pulled tight across the terrifying breadth of his shoulders. He began rolling up his sleeves, exposing thick forearms roped with veins and faint, silvery scars. He moved with a terrifying, liquid grace. A beast wearing human skin, just waiting for the seams to tear.
Jane felt a sudden, inappropriate urge to check her email. Or ask for a glass of tap water. Something mundane. Something to prove the world hadn't actually ended.
"Where is the guest room?" she asked.
Her voice was perfectly flat. A masterclass in dissociation.
Michael stopped rolling his left sleeve. He didn't turn around. He just stood there, his broad back to her, perfectly still.
"There is no guest room."
"Then where am I sleeping?"
He finally turned. The amber in his eyes was glowing, bleeding into the whites. The civilized tactician who had just bloodlessly conquered the pack at a dinner table was gone. The beast was crawling up the back of his throat, looking at her through those terrifying, golden irises.
"You aren't," he whispered.
Jane’s spine snapped rigidly straight. She dug her manicured nails into her palms, welcoming the sharp bite of pain. "I require a minimum of six hours of sleep to maintain basic cognitive function. If I am to be your political hostage, I need a bed."
It was a ridiculous thing to say. It was her anchor firing under extreme pressure. Practicality in the face of a monster.
Michael let out a low, rough sound. It wasn't a laugh. It was the scrape of gravel against bone.
He started walking toward her.
Jane held her ground for exactly two seconds before her survival instincts violently overrode her discipline. She took a step back. Then another.
He didn't speed up. He just stalked her, his footsteps entirely silent on the marble. A predator sizing up the drop.
"Political hostage," he repeated, tasting the words. "Is that what you think this is, Jane?"
She took another step back. Her heel caught the edge of a Persian rug. She didn't look down. "You needed a treaty condition to legitimize your hostile takeover. I am the pureblood heir. It’s basic mathematics."
"Mathematics." He tilted his head. "Is that what you were doing in my cell three days ago? Calculating?"
The memory flashed violently behind her eyes. The pitch-black dark. The wet sound of his teeth cracking her collarbone. The excruciating, tearing heat of his feral knot locking deep inside her, stretching her until she couldn't breathe.
Her core gave a vicious, involuntary throb. A slick rush of heat pooled between her thighs, heavy and aching.
She hated it. She hated her body for remembering. She focused intently on the geometric pattern of the rug beneath his expensive shoes.
"That was a transaction," Jane said. Her voice dropped an octave, thinning out. "I needed to ruin my pedigree. You were available."
Another step back.
Her shoulder blades hit cold, hard glass.
She was out of room. The city lights spun vertiginously behind her, eighty-five floors down. She analyzed the structural integrity of the reinforced pane. It was rated for hurricane winds. It wouldn't break. She was trapped.
Michael didn't stop until he was inches away. He was so massive he eclipsed the room, blocking out the light, the air, the entire world. The heat radiating off his chest seeped through her high-collared, stifling dress, burning her skin.
He didn't touch her. He didn't need to. His proximity was a weapon.
"Available," Michael murmured. He braced one large hand on the glass right next to her head. The other hovered near her throat. "You walked into a cage with a monster they told you drank blood, and you asked me to break you."
"And you did. Contract fulfilled. We have nothing else to discuss."
"Lie to Ryan. Lie to the Council," Michael whispered, leaning in so close his lips brushed the shell of her ear. The heat of his breath made her shiver violently. "But do not insult me by lying to my face. Not when I can smell exactly how wet you are for me right now."
Jane stopped breathing. Her chest froze. Her clinical detachment shattered into a million jagged pieces.
She tried to turn her head, to look away, but his hand moved. His long, calloused fingers wrapped gently around the back of her neck. Not to choke. To hold.
His thumb brushed over the high silk collar of her dress. It pressed down, finding the exact spot beneath the fabric where his teeth had punctured her flesh three days ago.
The bite mark was still raw. It burned under his touch, sending a shockwave of dark, suffocating arousal straight down her spine. The feral venom in her bloodstream woke up, singing a violent, primal song.
"You thought you could walk into my dark, take what you wanted, and just wash it off in the rain," Michael said. His voice dropped into a lethal, vibrating purr that rattled her teeth.
He pressed his thumb harder against the wound.
Jane gasped. It was a tiny, fractured sound she couldn't swallow in time. A sound that belonged in a cage.
His golden eyes locked onto her ice-blue ones. The predator had caught the prey, and now he was going to eat it alive.
"Did you really think," Michael whispered, his gaze dropping to her trembling lips, "I wouldn't follow my own scent?"
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