HIS TO CLAIM: Mated To My Cruel Stepbrother

CHAPTER TWO

The first thing I was aware of was pain.

Not the gentle, manageable kind that faded with a glass of water and a few extra minutes of sleep — this was a full, relentless pounding behind my eyes that made the simple act of existing feel like a punishment. I lay completely still with my eyes shut, trying to piece together the previous night from the scattered fragments my brain was offering me, none of which were connecting in any way that made sense.

The gala. The drink. The room tilting sideways beneath my feet.

My eyes flew open.

Someone had drugged me. That was the only explanation that fit — the sudden onset, the way the world had dissolved too quickly and too completely for anything else. My heart slammed against my ribs as I sat up and looked around the room, taking in the high ceilings, the floor-to-ceiling windows flooding the space with pale morning light, the unmistakable, infuriating luxury of a penthouse suite.

I did not recognize it. I had absolutely no memory of arriving here. And whatever had happened between that ballroom floor and this bed, I desperately needed to not have done anything irreversibly stupid.

"Thank goodness you are finally awake."

The voice hit me like a bucket of ice water.

I turned my head slowly, and every coherent thought I had evaporated at once.

He was sitting in the armchair across the room — long legs stretched out, arms resting loosely on the sides, watching me with an expression so carefully blank it could have been carved from stone. Five years had done nothing to diminish him. If anything, they had sharpened every line of him into something more precise, more insufferable, more devastatingly unfair.

Damien Hale.

I was out of the bed before I had consciously decided to move, and the sudden motion sent a wave of dizziness crashing through me that nearly knocked me right back down. I gripped the bedpost, steadied myself, and pointed at him with a hand that was not entirely steady.

"What the hell are you doing here?"

"This is my penthouse," he said simply, as though that answered everything.

My stomach dropped straight through the floor.

His penthouse. I had somehow, through whatever disaster of circumstances the universe had engineered last night, ended up unconscious in Damien Hale's penthouse. I stood there for a full three seconds just staring at him, waiting for some alternative explanation to present itself, and none came.

"How did I end up here?" I demanded. "Of all the places in this entire city, how did I end up here?"

Something shifted at the corner of his mouth — not quite a smile, but the architectural suggestion of one. "I saved you," he said. "You were about to hit the floor in the middle of the gala in front of roughly two hundred people. You are welcome, by the way." He tilted his head slightly, and the look in his eyes shifted into something that made my skin prickle. "I have to say, Nora — five years. You look completely different. You look—"

"Do not," I said flatly.

"Hot," he finished, with the kind of calm that suggested he had known exactly how I would react and had decided to say it anyway.

"Absolutely not. You do not get to do that." I crossed my arms over my chest and tried to ignore the heat crawling up the back of my neck. "What happened last night? And I want a straight answer, not a performance."

"You were drugged. I carried you up here so you could sleep it off safely rather than leaving you alone in a hotel room that anyone could access." He paused, and the amusement that crossed his face this time was entirely deliberate. "Though I will say, once we got up here, you were quite... enthusiastic. Begging to be kissed. Asking me not to put you down." He watched my face with the focused attention of someone waiting for a particularly satisfying reaction. "You were very convincing."

I closed my eyes.

The mortification that washed through me was the specific, scorching kind that left no corner untouched. I stood there with my eyes shut and my jaw tight and breathed through it with every ounce of dignity I had left, which at this point was not a generous supply.

"Did you—" I stopped, my voice coming out thinner than I wanted it to. "Did we—"

"No." His answer was immediate, and the amusement dropped away entirely when he said it. He sat forward in the armchair, his grey eyes level and uncharacteristically serious. "I would never touch someone who could not make a fully conscious, fully informed decision. Whatever you might think of me, I am not that." He held my gaze. "Nothing happened. You have my word."

I looked at him for a long moment, and then I exhaled slowly.

"That is genuinely shocking," I said, "because the last time I checked, you were a completely shameless jerk with no discernible moral compass." I moved toward the chair where my bag had been placed — he must have brought it up with me — and picked it up. "I need to leave. I have somewhere to be."

"Nora." His voice stopped me at the door, and something in the tone of it — quieter than usual, stripped of its habitual edge — made me pause against my better judgment. "There is something we need to discuss."

"I have nothing to discuss with you, Damien."

"You are going to want to hear this one," he said. "Sit down."

I turned around slowly. He was standing now, and the blankness was back in his expression — but underneath it there was something else, something tightly controlled, something that looked almost uncomfortably like it mattered.

"Last night, when I carried you," he said carefully, "something happened that I cannot explain away. And I need you to tell me that you have not noticed it yet, because the alternative is that you have noticed and you are pretending you have not, and that would make this conversation even more ridiculous." He paused. "The moon goddess decided, in her infinite and deeply questionable wisdom, to throw a mate bond at us last night." His voice was very quiet. "We are fated mates, Nora."

The room went perfectly silent.

I stood in the doorway and stared at him and waited for the part where he laughed and told me it was a joke, because that was the only version of this I was capable of processing. My lungs had stopped cooperating entirely. My mouth was open, and nothing was coming out, and the word mates was echoing around the inside of my skull like it was bouncing off every wall looking for somewhere to land.

"You are lying," I said. My voice came out barely above a whisper.

Something shifted in his eyes — and then his voice moved through my mind without his mouth opening. Not a sound. A presence. Warm and certain and carrying the particular resonance that every wolf knew from childhood, the frequency of the mate bond, unmistakable and impossible to fabricate.

Am I?

The air left my body all at once.

My legs stopped working, and I went down before I could catch myself, landing hard on the floor with my back against the door, staring at nothing while my entire understanding of my own life rearranged itself without my permission. The mate bond. His voice in my head. Damien Hale — my bully, my tormentor, the person who had made seventeen years of my life a dedicated exercise in surviving his contempt.

Him.

"Reject me." I looked up at him from the floor, and my voice, remarkably, did not shake. "Reject the bond. Do it now."

He looked down at me for a long moment, and then he shook his head once.

"I have no intention of doing that."

I pulled myself off the floor without accepting the hand he extended toward me, and I straightened my back and looked him directly in the eye and said, with every gram of conviction I possessed, "Then let me be extremely clear with you. I have zero interest in being your mate. I have zero interest in any kind of relationship with you, in any form, for any reason. Whether you reject this bond or not, it is completely irrelevant to me, because I intend to live my life as though it does not exist." I picked up my bag from the floor where it had fallen. "Goodbye, Damien."

I walked out of his penthouse and I did not look back.

My mother cried when she opened the door.

Not dramatically — just a quiet welling in her eyes that she blinked back quickly, like she was trying not to overwhelm me in the first ten seconds, and something about the restraint of it caught me off guard. She looked healthier than I remembered. Steadier. She pulled me into a hug before I could prepare for it, and I stood in her arms for a moment with my hands at my sides before I slowly raised them and hugged her back.

"I am so glad you came," she whispered.

"I said I would," I said.

She pulled back, smiling, and took my hand as she led me inside. The house was warm and clean and smelled like something was cooking in the kitchen, and it was so far removed from every memory I carried of home that it created a strange, disorienting vertigo in my chest.

"Come in, come in — my husband just stepped out to run a quick errand, but he will not be long." She squeezed my hand. "His son is here, though."

I raised my eyebrows. "You have a stepson?"

"Isn't that something?" She laughed softly. "Strange how life works out, isn't it?"

And then I heard the footsteps coming down the stairs.

I turned around.

And the world stopped.