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"Wait? Are you bleeding?"

"Take off my shirt."

Her eyes had gone warm; the argument still present in them but a lower priority now. She reached for the hem with a smile that told me exactly what she thought was about to happen. She pulled it over her head and let it drop to the floor.

I bent to pick it up, taking great pains not to lick her bare cunt on the way back up. When I slipped first one arm and then the other into the shirt, her smile flickered.

"You're taking the day off," I said, working the buttons with the calm efficiency of a man who was already past the part of open discussion. A trickle of blood from my fingertips dotted the collar of the shirt.

"I'm not⁠—"

"Your meals will be delivered. I'll have your assistant cancel your meetings." I reached for my jacket from the chair where I'd left it. "Come to your senses about the apartment. About all of it. I'll be back this evening."

"Magnus. You cannot⁠—"

I walked to the door, muffling her protests in the process.

"Nobody in or out," I ordered the enforcer on the other side.

The man nodded.

I turned and walked toward the elevator. The door to Nell's apartment rattled as the elevator dinged its arrival. Behind the door, Nell's voice rose with the full force of a woman who ran companies and dismantled empires and was not accustomed to being ignored. I stepped into the elevator and hit the button for the ground floor.

As the doors closed, an unwelcome memory rose. I heard another voice. A teenage girl standing in the snow outside a small house in a suburb. She wasn't screaming at me. She was sobbing. Nell was screaming, which was fury with teeth in it. The girl had sobbed the way people did when something had been taken and there was nothing to be done about it. The broken, inconsolable sound of a girl who had just been told her father was not coming home.

I had been the one to tell her.

I had stood in the snow with my hands clasped behind my back, mimicking the way my father had dealt with her father. I had watched her face fall, her knees hit the ground, and then I'd walked away.

It wasn't the same with Nell. I'd be back for Nell. I would give Nell everything. She would come to understand that soon enough.

Behind me, I was leaving a woman who was furious and contained and alive and fighting. Which was the only version of Nell that existed, and the version I intended to come home to tonight. Not a girl in the snow. Not a broken thing.

Nell was fine.

She was better than fine.

I was the one about to blow up my life.

I was going to go tell my father what the knot had declared and what it meant for the Lobo arrangement and what it was going to cost the Blackwood pack. I was going to do the necessary and difficult thing the way I had always done the necessary and difficult thing — cleanly, without flinching, with my hands folded and my chest out. Because it was the right thing to do.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

NELL

My hand closed around the knob. It didn't turn. It wasn't locked. There was no lock on the outside. There was someone on the otherside of the door, holding the knob.

One of my detail. My nostrils flared. I recognized it was the bigger one. I hadn't bothered to learn either of their names. Just Thing One and Thing Two. This one was Thing Two. He had a fondness for licorice.

"Let me out, or I'm calling the cops."

"Sorry, Ms. Odhiambo. Alpha's orders."

"I said I'll call the police."

"I wouldn't advise you to put law enforcement in harm's way, ma'am."

The fuck? Did he just make a threat? I got the sense that he'd do it. These weren't regular men. The Blackwoods had enough money that they likely owned at least one precinct.