THE BILLIONAIRE ALPHA'S SCARRED MATE

Chapter 4 — Red Carpet, Sharp Edges

"Avery." Ryder's voice had changed completely — every trace of the almost-shy man who'd been standing at Kora's counter thirty seconds ago gone, replaced by something flat and controlled and, underneath it, coiled tight as a spring. "Didn't expect to find you slumming it three bus stops from the Meridian district."

"I could say the same to you." Avery Durke's smile widened, and up close it was the kind of smile that had clearly been practiced in mirrors — warm enough to fool a room, sharp enough at the edges to cut if you looked too long. His eyes slid past Ryder to Kora, cataloguing her the way you'd catalogue furniture, and lingered — just a fraction too long — on the scarred side of her face. "Though I suppose I understand the appeal of slumming it, given the company."

"Careful," Ryder said, very quietly.

"I'm always careful." Durke's gaze finally left Kora and settled back on Ryder, and something about the shift felt deliberate, like a predator deciding a smaller thing wasn't worth the trouble today. "Actually, I'm glad I caught you — saves me a phone call. Bena's asking about the winter gala. She'd like to know if you're escorting anyone, or if she should keep the seat next to you open. Again."

*Please tell him no,* Kora's wolf said, low and vicious, surprising her with the sheer force of it. *Please tell this man no in front of me right now so I can watch his smile die.*

"Tell Bena," Ryder said, and something in his voice made the temperature in the small shop drop several degrees, "that I already have plans for the winter gala."

Durke's smile didn't move, but his eyes did — sharp, assessing, flicking to Kora and back with a speed that made her skin crawl. "Do you," he said. Not a question. A filing-away. "How interesting."

He left without buying anything, the bell over the door ringing cheerful and completely wrong on his way out, and Kora realized she'd been holding her breath the entire time only when it left her all at once, shaking.

"Are you okay?" Ryder was in front of her before she'd registered him moving, close enough that she could smell cedar and something warmer underneath it, close enough that every instinct that had screamed *run* at the gala was now screaming something entirely different and much more inconvenient. "Kora. Your heart's going twice as fast as it should be."

"I'm fine." She wasn't. Her hands wouldn't stop trembling and she didn't fully understand why — Durke hadn't threatened her, hadn't even really looked at her twice, and still every cell in her body was screaming a warning she couldn't name. "Who is he?"

"Family friend." Ryder's jaw was tight enough that the words came out clipped. "Supposedly. Alpha of the Durke Pack. He and my father were close, before—" He stopped himself, visibly recalibrating what he was willing to say to a woman he'd known for three days. "It's complicated."

"He looked at me like I was something to write down in a file."

"He does that to everyone." But Ryder's eyes had gone distant and hard in a way that told Kora he was thinking the exact same uneasy thing she was, even if he wasn't saying it yet. "I don't like that he saw you with me."

"Why?"

"Because I don't know yet what he does with things he sees." He exhaled, visibly shoving the thought aside, and softened his voice back toward the careful gentleness from before. "That's not your problem to carry. I'm sorry he scared you."

"I wasn't scared of him." That much, at least, was almost true. "I don't know what I was."

*Your wolf knows,* something whispered from deep inside her, quiet and troubled, the words gone before she could catch hold of them properly. *Your wolf's known since he walked in. Ask her why later. Ask her tonight, when it's quiet, and she might actually answer.*

Ryder studied her for a long moment, gold-flecked eyes searching her face with an intensity that should have made her want to hide it and instead — infuriatingly — made her want to lift her chin higher. "Come to the gala with me," he said abruptly. "Not as a mate. Not as anything you don't want to be called. As my guest. Bena will be there. Durke will be there. And I'd rather you be standing next to me where I can see you than out here somewhere I can't."

"Ryder, I work catering events. I don't attend them. I don't have a dress that costs more than my monthly rent, I don't know which fork—"

"I have a stylist. I have a car. I have, frankly, an unreasonable amount of resources currently sitting unused because I've spent them exclusively on hotels and race cars for the last decade." A ghost of the earlier humor came back into his voice, careful, testing whether it would land. "Let me be reasonable *at* you for once instead of unreasonable. Just this once."

"That's not a real sentence."

"It's the only kind I've got left today."

Kora looked down at the embossed card still crushed in her fist, corners bent from how hard she'd been gripping it, and thought about three years of hoods and averted eyes and service doors, three years of being the kind of invisible that felt safe right up until it felt like drowning. She thought about Durke's eyes cataloguing her like a threat assessment. She thought about her wolf, terrified and silent, recognizing something in that voice that Kora herself couldn't place.

She thought, most of all, about the fact that some part of her — some tired, starved, three-years-lonely part — did not want to go back to being invisible tonight.

"One condition," she said.

"Name it."

"No cameras pointed at my face without warning. If a photographer gets too close, you tell them to back off, and you don't act embarrassed about doing it in front of your board."

Something in his expression cracked open, warm and fierce all at once, gone before she could fully name it. "Kora. I would burn down a photographer's entire career for less than that."

"That's a very billionaire thing to say."

"I contain multitudes," he said, and it landed so close to her own wolf's exact words from two nights ago that she actually laughed — short, surprised, entirely against her will — and for one unguarded second, standing in a shoebox coffee shop that smelled like burnt espresso, it felt like something in her chest that had been clenched shut for three years loosened by half an inch.

The gala was four days away. Kora spent the drive home telling herself, over and over, that saying yes to one dress and one night didn't mean saying yes to anything else.

Her wolf, unhelpful as ever, spent the same drive humming something suspiciously close to a wedding march.

---

Four nights later, Kora stood at the top of the Dalone Grand Meridian's red-carpet steps in a gown the color of dark wine, her scars in full view under lights bright enough to see every seam of them, Ryder's hand warm and steady at the small of her back — and felt the entire room go quiet the second the doors opened, two hundred wolves turning to look at exactly the thing she'd spent three years hiding.

Somewhere in the crowd, Avery Durke lifted a glass in her direction, smiling with all his teeth, and murmured something to the beautiful, pack-perfect woman beside him that made Bena Dreed's face go carefully, deliberately blank.

Kora didn't hear what he said.

She only saw Ryder's hand tighten at her back, and felt, for the first time in three years, that whatever was coming next, she wasn't going to face it alone — right before the ballroom lights flickered, the music cut out mid-note, and every phone in the room lit up at once with the same breaking headline.