Wendy's POV

"This is the ninety-ninth one," Nell Pearce said, setting a paper cup of coffee in front of me. "If this one disappoints you too, I'm picking your next husband myself."

"You said that about number ninety-eight."

"Number ninety-eight tried to explain your own job to you."

"He was passionate about spreadsheets."

"He was passionate about hearing himself talk." She dropped into the chair across from me. "You're planning an escape route again."

"I always plan an escape route." It was the truest thing I'd said all day.

The restaurant was small and warm—exposed brick, low gold light, humans and wolves sharing tables without anyone announcing which was which. That was why I'd stayed in this district for three years. Here nobody cared that I was the daughter of the Whitlock Pack Alpha, or that I carried no scent at all. Here I was only Wendy Vance—a sales assistant with a rented apartment, a secondhand car, and a best friend who refused to let me give up on the idea of a family.

Three years ago I'd believed love was supposed to feel like safety. Then Drexel Pace chose Mabel, and the story reached every nearby pack before I'd even crossed the territory line—that I was too cold, that I'd driven him away, that I should have been grateful he'd wanted me at all.

I'd believed my father would protect me. I'd believed someone would come looking when I disappeared. No one did. So I ran until the human district swallowed me whole, and I built a life small enough that no one could take it from me again.

"This is the last one." I told her.

The door swung inward, and the room rearranged itself around the man who walked through it.

Tall, broad through the shoulders, a black coat that fit like it had been cut in silence. Dark hair, a sharp-carved face, eyes an unsettling shade of ice blue. He didn't move like an ordinary wolf—there was too much control in it, too much power held deliberately still. Conversations lowered. Heads turned. I had spent years learning to recognize danger before it reached me, and every instinct told me this man was dangerous.

Then his scent reached me. Black cedar. Cold smoke. Rain-soaked stone. Wraith slammed against my ribs so hard my fingers whitened around the cup.

Mate.

The word struck through me again and again, and I could barely hear Nell whisper my name.

He crossed the room and stopped beside our table. For one impossible second I thought he might recognize me—and then he didn't, because no one ever could. A scentless wolf.

He offered a polite nod. "Miss Vance?"

"Yes."

"Cassian Vey." He said it as though I ought to know the name. I'd made a habit of avoiding pack news and business headlines and everything tied to the life I'd fled, so I only moved my chair to make room.

Nell was already on her feet, chair scraping. "I just remembered I have somewhere to be." She leaned in and breathed, don't panic, he's gorgeous, then smiled at him. "I'm Nell. Be nice to her."

His brow lifted a fraction. "I intended to."

He sat, stripped off his gloves, set them beside his plate. A faint scar crossed the back of his right hand; he caught me looking and didn't hide it. "Have we met before?" he asked. "You seem familiar."

"I have one of those faces." The answer came too fast, and his eyes stayed on mine a beat too long before he let it go.

"Tell him," Wraith paced. "He is ours."

"He can't smell us," I told her, and she growled.

When the waiter came, Cassian ordered steak and black coffee; I ordered pasta because it was the safest thing on the menu and because my hands were still unsteady under the table.

He didn't ask about my family, or why a woman with my posture was filing sales reports in a human district, or offer pity when I said I had no relatives nearby. He asked harder things. "What do you want from a marriage?"

I looked up—men on first dates asked about vacations, not this. "A quiet home," I said slowly. "Honest bills. Separate closets. I don't like people touching my things without asking."

He nodded as if it were the most reasonable list in the world, so I said the rest before I could stop myself. "And someone who doesn't make me beg to stay."

Something moved beneath his calm—a tightening at the eyes, a shadow passing. "Has someone made you beg?"

"Someone tried."

The date lasted an hour and forty minutes. He didn't flirt, didn't touch me, didn't make a single promise he couldn't keep. Outside, in the cold, he asked for my number and texted me at once so I'd have his—Cassian Vey, nothing else.

No heart, no compliment, no demand to know when he'd see me again. It should have made him easy to forget. It didn't. For two days Wraith wouldn't settle, whispering the same word through spreadsheets and coffee lines and twice in the dark: Mate.

I told myself it didn't matter. Fate had never once protected me. So I did what I always did when my heart wanted something dangerous—I ignored it.

On the second evening my phone rang while I was folding laundry. I let it nearly ring out before I answered.

"Are you free next Wednesday?"

"Why?"

A short silence. Then, with the same calm certainty he'd used to give me his name: "I want to get married."

My hand went still over the shirts. "Excuse me?"

"I've thought about it. We're compatible. I respect you. I want a stable life, and I believe you want the same."

"We've met once."

"I know it's fast."

"This isn't fast, Cassian. This is insane."

"Possibly." Almost amusement, there and gone.

I pressed my fingers to my forehead. "Why me?" The question left me before I could catch it.

He didn't answer right away. In the silence I could hear his breath, slow and steady, and I had the strangest sense that he'd been waiting for this question much longer than two days. When he finally spoke, all the lightness had drained from his voice.

"Because you said you wanted a quiet home," he said, "and I believe I can make one for you."

My throat closed.

"I'm not asking you to fall in love with me," he said.

"Then what are you asking for?"

He didn't answer that either. "You don't have to answer tonight," he said, and ended the call.

I sat on the edge of the bed among the clean laundry and the smell of detergent, and for one whole minute I let myself want what he'd offered. Then I put the feeling under a rock, where it couldn't get me killed.

He didn't know my history. And history was the only thing I owned.