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I was going to marry Rosalind Lobo.

I was going to marry Rosalind Lobo, and I was going to be a good Alpha and a faithful husband. I was never going to touch Nell Odhiambo again.

"This weekend."

I looked up to find Sorsha walking towards me. Her dark hair blended into the blackness of the night.

"The wedding," she said pleasantly. "I think we've waited long enough. The council is destabilized; the Volki are in disarray. The Blackwood-Lobo alliance needs to be visible and public. So, this weekend. A small ceremony. We can have the larger celebration in the spring."

"Agreed." My agreement was toneless, emotionless.

I looked at the dock ahead, willing it to come faster. It was all I could do to not jump into the water and swim for my life. Once on land, Sorsha walked beside me for a moment in the comfortable silence of a woman who had gotten what she wanted and was not going to make a production of it.

"The Omondi woman, you knew she was a panther?"

"No."

"No wonder you were drawn to her. A panther princess. It's almost romantic. If one were inclined toward that kind of thing."

"Nell is brilliant. I have a weakness for intelligent women."

Sorsha made a sound that was not quite a laugh. "Too bad, then. Rosalind is not brilliant. She is beautiful and she is biddable. She will give you strong pups, and she will not give you a moment's political trouble. That is all that matters for what you need her to be."

She held my gaze. I held hers. There was nothing behind my eyes right now.

The river was dark around us. The city lights broke on the water. The night pressed in from all sides.

"This weekend," I said.

"This weekend," she agreed.

I walked down the gangway. A car waited at the dock; dark, engine running, one of my enforcers at the wheel. He saw me coming and got out to open the door. I walked past him.

I kept walking.

Past the car. Past the dock's perimeter. Past the pool of light from the dock's single overhead lamp. Into the dark beyond it, where the scrubby grass at the water's edge met a chain-link fence. Beyond the fence was a stretch of industrial nothingness that connected to a service road that connected eventually to the kind of terrain a wolf could run in.

I stopped at the fence. I took off my shirt. I stood in the dark at the edge of the city and I thought about Nell saying we are business partners in the voice she used for quarterly reports. Like a brilliant, defiant woman who could bankrupt a pack's financial empire in an afternoon. Like the woman who could scream yes at the ceiling while giving herself to me completely. Like the woman who could deny I meant anything to her the next day and walk away to save my life.

The shift came fast. Bones moved before I gave consent to the wolf. Fur came in hot. The cold night air hit the wolf's skin. The world expanded into the full, overwhelming register of a predator whose senses had been running at human capacity for too long.

The wolf hit the ground and ran.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

NELL

The suite at the Waldorf Astoria was extraordinary. Three rooms, floor-to-ceiling windows, furniture that had been chosen by someone with both taste and a very large budget, a bathroom with a soaking tub that I had been looking at for forty-five minutes and had not used because every time I moved toward it someone knocked on the door to ask if I needed anything.

A woman named Ama, who had introduced herself as the clan's hospitality coordinator and whose actual function appeared to be ensuring that the lost Omondi princess did not do anything for herself, had appeared three times in the last hour. Once with food. Once with clothing: a kikoy in deep indigo and rust, the cotton so fine it felt like water. Along with a beaded collar piece that caught the light when it moved. Once, simply to check that I was comfortable, which I was, in the way of a person who was climbing the walls.

I had grown up doing everything for myself. Being treated like a princess was driving me absolutely insane.

I sat at the suite's desk — mahogany, a lamp with actual brass fittings — and opened my laptop, which Darius had retrieved from my apartment, and finished the Omondi proposal.

It was good work. The disruption of the last twelve hours had not improved it, but it had clarified something in me about what mattered and what didn't, and the proposal reflected that.

I printed it from the suite's printer — of course there was a suite printer — and knocked on the door of the adjacent room where Darius had been conducting what sounded like a series of calls in Swahili and two other languages I didn't know. My grandmother had sometimes spoken to my mother in their native tongue, but my mother never bothered to respond and had only addressed me, when she was mindful enough to recognize I was in the room, in English.