Her Dark Wolves

The Girl In The Lobby

Chapter Five

The Girl in the Lobby

Jessica's POV

She had not planned to be at Addams & Co. that evening. She had a life a full, structured, carefully maintained life that did not require her to stand in corporate lobbies at six in the evening watching elevator doors like she was waiting for something.

And yet. Here she was.

It had been Jason who mentioned it, three days ago, in that offhand way he had of delivering information he knew would land like a stone in still water. We hired a new assistant. She starts Monday. Nothing more. No name. No details. Just that quiet statement dropped into conversation and left there while he moved on to the next thing like it meant nothing.

Jason Addams never said things that meant nothing.

So Jessica had come. Not obviously she had business on the thirty-eighth floor, a perfectly legitimate reason to be in the building. She had taken the long way through the lobby on her way out. Casually. Just to see.

She told herself it was just curiosity.

Her wolf knew better.

∗ ∗ ∗

She had known Jason and Tyson Addams for eight years. Had run beside them, bled beside them, built beside them. She had been seventeen when her family's pack had merged with the Moonlight Pack under the twins' father old Alpha Dominic, who had seen something in Jessica that most people missed and had placed her close to his sons deliberately.

Guard them, he had said, the week before he died. They will need someone who is not afraid of what they are.

She had done that. For eight years she had been at their side in the pack, in the business, in every room that mattered. She had made herself indispensable. She had made herself irreplaceable. She had waited with the patience of someone who understood that the best things required time.

She loved them. Both of them. Differently but completely — Jason's cold precision and Tyson's rare warmth, the way they moved through the world like two halves of something ancient and unstoppable. She had built her entire future around the quiet certainty that one day they would see it. Would see her.

She had waited eight years for that day.

And then something had shifted. Three nights ago. She had felt it from across the city like a tremor in the ground — something deep in the pack bond vibrating on a frequency she had never felt before. Something that made every wolf in the Moonlight Pack lift their head without knowing why.

She had known immediately what it was. She was too well-read, too experienced, too old in wolf terms not to recognise it.

The mate bond.

And it had not been hers.

The elevator doors opened at six o'clock exactly.

The girl who walked out was not what Jessica had expected. She had built a picture in her head over three days had imagined someone obvious. Someone who looked the part. A wolf perhaps, or someone from one of the connected families, someone with history and bloodline and a place in this world already carved out.

Instead she got a girl in a navy blazer with dark curly hair and a tote bag on her shoulder, walking through the marble lobby with her chin up and her heels clicking against the floor like she was already comfortable in a building she'd worked in for precisely one day.

Human. Unmistakably, completely human.

Jessica felt her wolf go very, very still.

The girl hadn't noticed her yet. She was fishing her phone out of her bag, distracted, probably calling that friend of hers there was a small smile pulling at the corner of her mouth, easy and unguarded, the expression of someone who had no idea they were being watched. No idea what they had walked into. No idea what they were.

Then she looked up. And her eyes found Jessica across the lobby with the kind of directness that surprised her. Not fearful. Not deferential. Just steady and aware and quietly assessing in a way that felt almost wolfish.

Jessica held her gaze. Let the silence stretch exactly as long as she wanted it to. Then she smiled the smile she used in boardrooms and pack meetings when she needed to communicate something without saying a single word.

I see you. I know what you are to them. And I am not afraid of you.

She turned and walked away without a word. Unhurried. Composed.

Her wolf, however, was not composed at all.

The mate bond on the twins had been strong enough to feel three days ago from across the city. Up close standing in the same room as the girl it had attached itself to — it was almost suffocating. A scent that the wolf part of Jessica recognised immediately as claimed and reacted to with a territorial fury that took everything she had to keep off her face.

She was human. A human. The fated mate of two of the most powerful alphas in North America was a human girl with a tote bag who didn't even know wolves existed. The moon, Jessica thought with a cold, furious clarity, had an extraordinary sense of humour.

She doesn't deserve them. The wolf was not interested in nuance. She doesn't know them. She doesn't know what they are. She doesn't know what this world costs. She will break under the weight of it and take them down with her.

Jessica pressed the thought down. She was not her wolf. She was strategic and patient and eight years of careful work did not get thrown aside for a feeling. She walked to her car, sat in the driver's seat, and looked at the steering wheel for a long moment.

Then she made a decision.

∗ ∗ ∗

She was not going to do anything reckless. She was not going to storm into Jason's office and make demands she knew better than anyone that Jason Addams responded to demands the way stone responded to rain. She was not going to make a scene. She was not going to give the girl a reason to run to the twins and paint Jessica as a threat.

She was going to be smart. She was going to be patient.

She was going to find out everything there was to know about Lily Hayes where she came from, what she wanted, what she was afraid of, what she was hiding and she was going to use every single piece of it.

The mate bond was powerful. She knew that. She was not naive enough to think she could simply sever it. But bonds required proximity to strengthen. They required trust. They required time. And Lily Hayes was human fragile and unknowing and about to step deeper into a world that had broken far stronger people than her.

All Jessica had to do was make sure she stepped wrong.

She pulled out her phone. Opened a contact she hadn't used in two years someone who dealt in information, who knew every secret this city kept, who owed her a favour that had been sitting uncollected long enough.

She typed one line.

I need everything you have on a woman named Lily Hayes. Human. Twenty-three. Chicago. Tonight.

She sent it. Started the car. Pulled out into Chicago's evening traffic with her hands perfectly steady on the wheel.

She had waited eight years for Jason and Tyson Addams.

She was not about to lose them to a girl who didn't even know what they were.

The bond could be fought.

The girl could be broken.

And Jessica Voss had never once lost something she decided to keep.

Three blocks away, in a cab heading back to Crestfield, Lily Hayes pressed her forehead against the cool window glass and replayed that lobby smile in her head cold and deliberate and loaded with something she couldn't name yet.

She didn't know who the woman was. But every instinct she owned every quiet, animal part of her that had nothing to do with logic was standing very still and paying very close attention.

Remember that face, something whispered inside her.

Lily intended to.

The war had been declared.

Lily just didn't know it yet.

✦

— End of Chapter Five —