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I held her gaze.

"I will rip their throats out."

I walked out and pulled the door closed behind me with a careful click that was more final than any slam would have been.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

NELL

Ineeded to run.

Not metaphorically. Not as a lifestyle choice, or a wellness practice, or any of the other things people said about running to make it sound like something a sane person would choose. I needed to run because my body was currently operating at a frequency that was going to make me do something professionally inadvisable if I didn't put it somewhere, and the options I had eliminated were as follows:

Dance class: no. My body was so sensitized that the idea of a stranger's hand on my waist to correct my position made me want to remove that hand from its owner. This had nothing to do with Magnus telling me not to let anyone touch me and everything to do with the fact that my nerve endings were currently tuned to a specific frequency and anything that wasn't that frequency was going to feel like interference. Also, I would scream at the instructor. I knew myself. The moment someone told me which beat to shake it to, I was going to say something that got me banned from the studio.

Weights: no sir. Too much time stationary. Too much time thinking.

Running: okay, fine. Running was stupid, and I hated it. But it was the only thing that was going to work right now.

I changed in the residence, told the wolf detail I was going to the park, and did not wait for their formation to assemble before I started moving.

Central Park in the early evening was full of after-work runners, dog walkers, and tourists who had miscalculated how long it would take to get from the Met to the south exit. I put my earbuds in and found a playlist that matched the energy of a woman working off a denied orgasm — Beyonce's Partition, Megan Thee Stallion's Savage, Lizzo's Juice — and started running.

I hated running.

I hated the impact of it. The monotony of it. The way it required me to simply keep going with no choreography and no skill and no variation except faster or slower. Dance gave me something to do with my body besides move it forward. Running gave me nothing except forward and the relentless arrival of the next moment.

Right now, that was exactly what I needed.

I did the loop once. My detail settled into their positions; two ahead, two behind, the invisible perimeter I had stopped noticing days ago. The park was quiet for a weeknight. A few other runners. A man with a stroller. A woman doing something with a yoga mat that looked more like a hostage negotiation than a practice.

I did the loop again.

My body was angry. That was the most accurate description of its current state. Magnus had spent ten minutes this afternoon conducting a masterclass in the torture of being brought to the edge of something and denied it, repeatedly. He'd made a point with his hands because he was not going to make it with his mouth. Though his tongue had done a pretty good job.

And the point was — what? Cause I had another man in my office? Territorial bastard. I was going to have a lot more men in my office. In my bed, too. Just as soon as I kicked him out of it.

The problem — the maddening, keep-me-up-at-three-in-the-morning problem — was that his ploy had worked. Not the possessive declaration at the door. The thing that had worked was the ten minutes before that. The complete, undivided attention of a man who was not thinking about anything else except how to get me off, how to keep me on edge, how to make me want more.

I had been the only thing in the room for Magnus Blackwood for ten minutes, and my body had not forgotten it and was not going to forget it and was currently making its feelings about the interruption extremely clear on mile two of a park loop.

I did the loop a third time.

By the third loop, the detail had relaxed. They were still there. They were just less there.

The park was emptying. The after-work rush thinned to the dedicated runners and the people walking dogs who needed more than a lobby turnaround. No one was paying attention to me. No tall Kenyan to deploy as a Magnus-summoning device. No threats. No drama.

Just me and my angry body and a playlist that was not helping. Janelle Monáe sang Make Me Feel in my ears. I veered off the path.

Not far — just off the main loop, into the section of park that had trees dense enough to interrupt sight lines. I wasn't running from the detail. I wasn't running toward anything. I just needed thirty seconds of not being visible to anyone, not being tracked, not being a perimeter point on someone's GPS.

I needed to be a person in a park who had made a terrible decision about a wolf in a suit and was working through the consequences alone. Unfortunately, I was not paying attention to the ground. The root caught my left foot mid-stride.

It was the thick-knuckled kind that had been lifting the path for probably forty years. It sprang up and played footsie with me. The world tilted with a sudden, total wrongness. My body had committed to a step that wasn't going to land correctly. I pitched forward, the momentum of a woman who had been running angrily carrying me further than a simple stumble would have. And then the ground dropped.

My body met the sharp slope of a drainage embankment, the kind of infrastructure the park hid under its manicured surface. It was steep enough and sudden enough that I had no time to do anything except tuck and go.

Go, I went.