Serena
The first time I saw Damian Voss, I thought he was going to kill me. The second time, I realized I might have been right.
Rain hammered against the windshield as my taxi crawled through the iron gates of the Voss estate, and the mansion rose out of the fog like something that had been waiting for me my whole life, enormous and black against the sky, hundreds of golden windows glowing like watchful eyes. I tightened my fingers around the envelope in my lap. Thirty thousand dollars. That was what Damian Voss had offered me for one month of work, and it should have been easy, except nothing about the man who owned this place was ever going to be easy.
My phone buzzed against my knee.
Maya: Serena, please tell me you haven’t gone inside yet.
I stared at the screen, my thumb hovering, my heart already sinking.
Me: I’m here.
Maya: Leave.
I almost laughed, because if leaving were an option, I wouldn’t be sitting in a stranger’s driveway with my whole future folded into an envelope. My brother needed surgery, the hospital had already given us a deadline we couldn’t meet, and my savings were nowhere near enough to save him. Thirty thousand dollars could change everything. So could a miracle, and I wasn’t expecting either.
The taxi rolled to a stop. I paid the driver with hands that weren’t quite steady and stepped out into the rain, and the moment my shoes touched the stone driveway, I felt it, a strange pressure settling over my chest that wasn’t fear exactly. It was something deeper, something ancient, something that made my skin prickle before my mind could catch up. I looked toward the mansion and swore, for one impossible second, that a pair of golden eyes were watching me from an upstairs window. I blinked, and there was nothing there.
“Get a grip, Serena,” I muttered, pulling my coat tighter, and walked toward the entrance before I could talk myself out of it.
The massive doors opened before I even lifted my hand to knock, and a man in a black suit stood waiting on the other side, his face as unreadable as the house behind him.
“Miss Vale.”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Voss is waiting.”
Of course he was.
I followed him inside, and the mansion swallowed me whole, colder than the storm I’d just left. Everything gleamed with a kind of perfection that made my chest ache, marble floors, dark wood, crystal chandeliers, paintings that probably cost more than my entire family home, and yet something about it felt wrong beneath all that beauty. There were no family photographs anywhere. No servants murmuring to each other. No music drifting from another room. Just silence, thick and deliberate, like the house itself was holding its breath.
Then I heard it, a low growl rolling somewhere beneath the silence, and I stopped walking.
The man ahead of me didn’t.
“Did you hear that?”
He turned slowly, his expression giving nothing away. “Hear what?”
Before I could answer, another growl rolled through the house, closer this time, unmistakably animal and unmistakably large, and my heart slammed against my ribs.
“What is that?”
His face stayed blank. “Nothing you need to worry about.”
That was exactly the kind of answer that made me worry.
He pushed open a pair of double doors. “He’s inside.”
I stepped into the study and forgot how to breathe.
Damian Voss stood beside the enormous windows with his back to me, dressed in a black suit and a white shirt with no tie, one hand resting in his pocket while the other curled around a glass of dark liquor. He didn’t look anything like the photographs online, the ones that showed a billionaire CEO with a carefully controlled smile. The man standing in front of me looked like something far more dangerous, something that had only agreed to wear a suit because it amused him to pretend.
He turned, and his eyes met mine, and everything inside me went still. His eyes weren’t brown. They weren’t even hazel. They were gold, molten and impossible, and for one heartbeat I could have sworn his pupils narrowed like an animal’s before he blinked and became human again.
“You came,” he said, his voice deep enough to make my stomach tighten in a way I refused to name.
“You invited me.”
His mouth curved, just slightly, and I hated how much I hated that smile, and I hated even more how my body reacted to it anyway. He crossed the room toward me, one slow step at a time, and I forced myself not to retreat even as every instinct screamed at me to. He stopped close enough that I could smell his cologne, dark and clean and dangerous, close enough that I had to tilt my chin up to hold his gaze.
“You’re late.”
“I’m seven minutes late.”
“Seven minutes is late.”
I folded my arms, refusing to let him see how much he unsettled me. “Then don’t hire me.”
Something flickered in his eyes, that strange gold flashing brighter for just a moment. “I already did.”
He reached for the contract waiting on the table between us, and I stared at it like it might bite.
“Thirty days,” I said. “No more. And I leave whenever I want.”
He studied me for a long, unreadable moment. “Do you?”
My confidence cracked, just slightly, just enough for him to notice. “What?”
His gaze dropped to my mouth before returning to my eyes, slow and deliberate, and heat crawled up my neck despite myself. “You said you leave whenever you want.”
“Yes.”
He set the contract back down. “We’ll see.”
I should have walked out right then. Instead, I picked up the pen, my pulse hammering in my throat. “Where do I sign?”
Something shifted in his expression, subtle but unmistakable, like he’d been waiting his whole life to hear those exact words.
“Before you sign, Serena, there’s something you should know.”
I looked up, and something in his tone made my chest go tight. “What?”
He stepped even closer, until I could feel the warmth radiating off him. “The rules in this house are different.”
“Different how?”
His jaw tightened. “You don’t enter certain rooms.”
“Fine.”
“You don’t leave the estate after midnight.”
“Fine.”
“You don’t invite anyone here.”
“Fine.”
“And if you hear a wolf,” he said, and stopped.
My frown deepened, my heart already picking up speed. “A wolf?”
His eyes darkened until the gold nearly disappeared. “Don’t follow it.”
A cold shiver traced down my spine, slow and deliberate, like a finger dragging over my skin. “Why not?”
“Because you won’t like what you find.”
Before I could ask anything else, a crash exploded from somewhere upstairs, and I jumped hard enough to knock into the table. Damian didn’t move at all, his whole body suddenly, terrifyingly alert, turned toward the sound like a predator scenting danger.
Then I heard it.
A howl tore through the house, long and deep and utterly wrong, and every hair on my arms rose at once. Damian’s face changed in front of me, and for the first time since I’d walked through his doors, the most powerful man I’d ever met looked afraid, not for himself, but for me, and that terrified me more than the howl had.
He grabbed my wrist, his grip tight enough to bruise. “Get behind me.”
“What?”
“Now.”
The lights flickered once, twice, and then died completely, plunging the room into darkness so thick I could feel it pressing against my skin. I heard Damian’s breath beside me, ragged and controlled at once, and then something slammed against the upstairs window hard enough to rattle the glass. I screamed before I could stop myself, and a pair of golden eyes ignited in the darkness across the room, larger than any I’d ever seen, watching me with an intensity that felt almost hungry.
Damian moved in front of me without hesitation, his voice dropping into something low and guttural, something that didn’t sound entirely human.
“She is mine.”
The creature answered with a howl that shook the walls, and in the darkness, with his fingers still locked around my wrist, Damian leaned down and whispered the words that would change my life forever.
“Serena.”
I could barely hear him over my own heartbeat. “What?”
His grip tightened, and his voice cracked on something that sounded almost like fear.
“Your scent woke my wolf.”