The Devil’s Room
Chapter One: The Devil's Room
The gun was the only honest thing about me that night.
Everything else was borrowed. The name on my lips, the confidence in my stride, the story I had rehearsed until it stopped feeling like a lie. But the weight of steel against my ribs, tucked flat beneath my jacket where no one could see it, that was real. That was mine. And walking into the Voss Tower lobby with nothing but a fake name and a loaded gun was either the bravest thing I had ever done, or the last.
I was betting on brave.
The lobby was the kind of place that was designed to make you feel small. Marble floors pale as bone. Ceilings so high you could lose your voice just calling across the room. The kind of money that does not announce itself because it does not need to. I kept my eyes moving without letting them linger, cataloguing exits, reading the two guards at the elevator bank without appearing to look at them at all. Old habit. The kind you pick up when the people around you have a tendency to turn dangerous without warning.
Six years ago I had left this city with nothing but a duffel bag and the wreckage of something I had believed in completely. I had told myself I would never come back. And I had meant it, right up until Marcus Hale slid a photograph across a table in a back room in Detroit and said the four words that made every promise I had made to myself dissolve on the spot.
"I know who did it."
So here I was.
The elevator arrived without a sound. The two guards flanked me inside and the doors closed and for forty-two floors nobody said anything at all. I counted the numbers above the door as they climbed. Kept my breathing even. Kept my hands loose at my sides. Kept telling myself that this was just another job, another room, another man who thought he was untouchable.
The problem was that I knew this particular man.
Not the version that Chicago whispered about. Not the version that made rival packs flinch and rival bosses triple their security and pray they were never interesting enough to land on his radar. I knew the version that existed before all of that. Before the empire and the title and the weight of every terrible decision he had made in the name of power.
I knew Damien Voss at eighteen, before he became someone worth fearing.
The elevator stopped.
The doors opened and the room beyond was exactly what I had expected and nothing at all like what I had prepared for. Low light. Dark wood that had been old when his father was young. Floor-to-ceiling windows along the far wall with Chicago spread out below them like something that had been conquered and kept. There were two men standing near those windows speaking quietly, and when the elevator opened, one of them turned.
The breath I pulled in was the last controlled thing I did for the next several seconds.
He was not the same. That was the first thing that landed, even before my training kicked back in and reminded me to keep my face neutral. He had been tall at eighteen but this was different, this was a man who had grown into his size the way storms grow into themselves, something dense and permanent that took up more space than its edges suggested. His jaw was harder. His eyes were the same though. That particular shade of dark that I had spent six years working very hard not to think about.
They found me the moment the doors opened.
That was the thing nobody warned you about when they explained mate bonds. Even a broken one. Even one that had been rejected cleanly, publicly, in front of every witness his father had carefully arranged. Even one you had spent six years burying under anger and distance and sheer refusal. The bond did not care about any of that. The bond had the memory of something that had never been allowed to happen and it held that memory the way a scar holds its shape, and the moment he looked at me I felt it stir in my chest like something that had been asleep a very long time.
I killed it in under a second.
Six years of practice. I was exceptionally good at it by now.
I shifted my attention to the older man stepping forward from his right. Grey at the temples. The careful, measured stride of someone who had survived a long time in proximity to dangerous people by learning exactly how much space to take up. Marcus had described him as Garrett, Damien's head of external contracts, the man I was officially here to meet.
"Miss Cross." He extended his hand and I took it. His grip was firm and assessing. "Thank you for making the trip. I understand Marcus spoke highly of your work."
"He tends to." I kept my voice easy. "I was told you need someone to manage the northern supply routes. I have the background."
"So we were told." Garrett smiled, professional and impenetrable. "We have a few questions before we discuss the specifics."
He said something else after that. I did not hear it.
Because Damien had not moved since the elevator opened. He was still standing where he had been when I first saw him, arms loose at his sides, watching me with the particular quality of stillness that I remembered meaning he was thinking something he did not intend to say. His expression had not shifted. He had not greeted me. He had not introduced himself. He was simply watching, with those dark eyes that had not changed at all in six years, and something at the base of my spine told me in a language older than words that he knew.
Not suspected. Not wondered.
Knew.
I smiled at Garrett and asked a polite question about the route structure and kept every single nerve in my body pointed away from the man standing ten feet to my left. This was the job. This was why I was here. Damien Voss was a complication I had already accounted for, a variable I had already calculated, a wound I had already survived once and could survive again.
I was still telling myself that when he finally spoke.
"Vera."
One word. My real name, the name I had not used in six years, said in a voice that had no right to sound exactly the same. Quiet. Certain. Like he was simply identifying something that had always been his.
Garrett stopped mid-sentence.
I went very still.
Then I turned and looked at Damien Voss for the first time since the night he stood in front of our entire pack and told the world that I was not his.
"You have the wrong person," I said.
He looked at me for a long moment. Something moved through his expression that was there and gone so quickly I might have imagined it.
"No," he said simply. "I don't."
