“Chapter 5: What She Wasn’t Supposed to Find,”
1102 Words
“Chapter 5: What She Wasn’t Supposed to Find,”
────── ❅ VIANA ❅ ──────
Stay in the apartment. Don't answer the door. Don't go near the rink.
Cross gave me a list of rules and zero explanation, then vanished for six hours, and I spent every single one of them pacing that ridiculous apartment like a caged animal.
By noon I'd read the same page of a book four times without absorbing a word. By two I'd made coffee I didn't drink and eaten half a sandwich I didn't taste. By four I was standing in the hallway outside that locked door again, the one with the keypad, staring at it like it might finally decide to explain itself.
It didn't. Obviously.
But something had changed since last night. The door wasn't fully latched. Just a sliver of dark space between the frame and the wood, like whoever left in a hurry that morning hadn't checked it was locked all the way.
I told myself not to look. I told myself a lot of things right before I did the exact opposite of what I told myself.
I pushed the door open.
The room was nothing like the rest of the apartment. No marble, no floor to ceiling windows. Reinforced walls, thick and gray, a heavy chain bolted into the floor near the far corner, and claw marks. Actual claw marks, deep gouges raked across the walls at a height that made my stomach twist.
This wasn't a bedroom. It was a cage. Built specifically for something that needed containing.
My hands started shaking before my brain fully caught up to what I was looking at. A framed photo sat on a small shelf near the door, the only soft thing in the whole cold room. A family. A woman with Cross's exact jaw, a man with his exact eyes, two younger girls tucked into the picture, all of them smiling in front of a house I didn't recognize, somewhere green and old and nothing like the city outside these windows.
Written across the bottom in faded ink: Morvath Pack, 2014.
Pack. Not family. Pack.
My knees went weak enough that I had to grab the doorframe to stay upright.
"I told you not to come in here."
I spun around so fast the photo nearly slipped out of my hands. Cross stood in the hallway, still in yesterday's jacket, dark circles under his eyes like he hadn't slept either, and something in his expression that looked like the exact moment a person realizes there's no going back from what's about to happen.
"What are you," I whispered.
He didn't answer right away. Just looked at that photo in my hands, and something in his face cracked wide open, grief and exhaustion and ten years of carrying something alone all at once.
"Put it down," he said, quietly. "Please."
I set it back on the shelf with hands that wouldn't stop trembling. "Cross."
"I'm a wolf." He said it flat, fast, like ripping off a bandage was easier than easing into it. "Born one, not turned. My family, my whole pack, was the last true bloodline of alphas left on this continent. Ten years ago hunters found our compound and burned everyone in it to the ground. I was the only one who got out."
The room tilted. I gripped the doorframe harder.
"You're serious."
"Dead serious." His jaw worked, tight and controlled. "I've spent ten years hiding what I am so it never happens again. So no one else I care about gets caught in the middle of it."
"That's why the room. The chain. The claw marks."
"I can't always control the shift, especially around the full moon. This room keeps everyone safe when I can't." His eyes met mine, steady now, like he'd decided there was no point holding anything back anymore. "Including you. Especially you."
My brain was trying to process too many things at once. Wolves were real. Cross was one. His whole family had been murdered for being what he was. And somehow, impossibly, none of that was the part making my chest feel tight.
It was the way he looked at me when he said especially you.
"The text this morning," I said slowly, putting pieces together I didn't want to fit. "That's why you left. Someone knows something."
His silence answered before he did.
"The people who killed my family," he said finally, "they specialize in something now. Hunting the people wolves love. Using them as leverage."
The floor seemed to drop out from under me.
"They know about me."
"They suspect." His hands curled into fists at his sides. "The engagement announcement leaked faster than I planned. They're connecting dots they shouldn't be able to connect."
"So I'm in danger because I signed a contract to be your fake girlfriend."
"You're in danger," he said, voice rough, "because the second my wolf caught your scent in that rink, you stopped being fake to me at all."
The words hung in the air between us, heavy and unmistakable, and I felt something c***k open in my chest that had nothing to do with fear.
"What does that mean," I whispered.
He crossed the hallway in three steps, close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him, close enough that my whole body went electric with awareness I didn't want and couldn't stop.
"It means," he said, low, "that wolves like me only get one mate in an entire lifetime. And the second I smelled you, my wolf decided you were his before either of us had a say in it."
My breath caught somewhere in my throat. "Mate."
"I know it sounds insane."
"It sounds insane," I agreed, and my voice came out barely steady, "and I still don't want you to step back."
Something flared gold in his eyes, bright and unmistakable this time, no trick of the light to blame it on. His hand came up slow, giving me every chance to pull away, and brushed a strand of hair back from my face like I was something fragile and precious all at once.
"Viana," he said, rough, right before his phone started screaming an alarm loud enough to make us both flinch apart.
Not a text this time. A building wide alert, red lights flashing down the hallway, a mechanical voice cutting through the apartment.
Security breach. Sub level three. Security breach.
Cross's face went white.
"That's the private elevator," he said. "The one only I have access to."
Someone was already inside the building.
────── ❅ ──────
- Writer
