Nina Argstone had learned to read a room the way other people read a book — cover first.
Tonight the cover was velvet and cold champagne and a hundred and fifty voices pitched half an octave too high, the way people always sounded when there was money in the air. She counted eleven steps from the car to the first change in floor texture — carpet over marble, soft under her heels — and stopped exactly where her cousin's grip on her elbow told her to stop.
"Try not to touch anything," Simone murmured, sweet as poison. "It's all Durke money in this room. You break it, we're paying for it for the next decade."
"I'll do my best," Nina said, "to keep my devastating blindness from knocking over any priceless vases."
Simone's fingers tightened once — a warning — and then let go entirely, which was somehow worse. Nina stood very still and listened to her cousin's heels click away across the marble, swallowed almost instantly by the room's noise.
*Alone at the world's most expensive party. Fantastic. Truly the dream.*
She didn't panic. Panicking was for people who needed their eyes to survive. Nina had a floor plan built entirely out of sound — the low hum of a string quartet to her left, waitstaff moving in a loop that meant a bar somewhere behind her, the particular hush-and-murmur of a crowd parting for someone important dead ahead.
*Someone important* turned out to be an understatement.
She felt him before she heard him. That was the part she'd spend the next eighteen months trying and failing to explain to anyone — how a body could announce itself to a blind woman across thirty feet of marble like a hand closing slowly around her ribs. Her pulse did something humiliating. Her skin went tight and aware, every hair lifting like the room had dropped ten degrees on one side only.
"You're staring," she muttered under her breath, "at absolutely nothing, because you're blind. Get it together."
*Too late,* said a voice that was not her own thought, low and startled and unmistakably delighted. *Oh, we are not getting it together. We are the opposite of together. We are extremely un-together.*
Nina froze. She had never — not once in twenty-four years — heard her own wolf sound like that. Giddy. Undone. Like a teenager who'd just watched their crush walk into a room.
*What,* Nina thought back, with as much dignity as she could summon while internally combusting, *is happening to you.*
*Mate,* her wolf said, and the word landed in Nina's chest like a struck bell, spreading out warm and enormous and terrifying. *That's him. That's — oh, he smells like a garage and a thunderstorm, I could just —*
"Focus," Nina hissed, and a passing waiter gave her a concerned look she couldn't see and wouldn't have cared about if she could.
The presence kept moving toward her. Not toward her, she corrected herself — through the room, in a line that simply happened to pass close enough that she could feel the air change when he stopped. Close. Too close. Expensive cologne over something underneath it that made her wolf make an embarrassing sound.
"You're standing in the middle of the floor," a man's voice said. Low. Amused, in the specific way of someone who found very little in life genuinely amusing and was surprised by his own reaction. "Everyone's going around you like you're a fountain."
"I *am* a fountain," Nina said. "A fountain of poor decisions. It's my signature look."
A pause. And then — she felt it more than heard it — a huff of laughter, quick and startled out of him, like it had escaped before he could stop it.
*He laughed,* her wolf said, smug beyond all reason. *We made the scary one laugh. I love him. I've loved him for four seconds and I already can't live without him.*
*You are an emotional disaster,* Nina told her wolf.
*You're one to talk, your heart is doing a drum solo.*
It was. She could feel it, a fast and stupid rhythm entirely out of her control, and she hated it, and she couldn't make it stop.
"Avery," said a second man's voice, arriving at a jog, faintly breathless. "There you are. Council's asking for you by the stage, they want the toast before—" He stopped. Nina felt the shift in him too, a flicker of surprise aimed her way. "Oh."
*Oh,* her wolf echoed, delighted. *That's the friend. The friend clocked it. This is happening. This is really happening.*
"Mitch," the first man — Avery, apparently, and something in Nina's chest did a slow, helpless roll at even just knowing his name — said, in a voice that had gone very carefully flat. "Give us a second."
"Yeah," Mitch said, sounding like a man watching a very good movie. "Yeah, sure, no rush, take all the—"
"Mitch."
Footsteps retreated, reluctant.
Silence settled between Nina and the stranger who apparently had a name that made her wolf sit up like a dog hearing a leash jingle. She could feel him looking at her — really looking, the kind of attention that had weight — and for one long, suspended second, she let herself imagine what it might be like to be looked at like that and not have it be about the cane folded in her clutch, or the careful way she held her chin, or any of the small tells that gave her away before she'd said a word.
"You felt that," Avery said. Not a question.
"I felt *something,*" Nina said, because admitting the truth out loud, to a stranger, in a room full of people, felt like standing at the edge of something with no floor beneath it. "I don't know what your something was."
"It was a mate bond." He said it like a man setting down something heavy he'd been carrying for exactly six seconds and already regretted picking up. "You didn't know."
"I didn't know werewolves were *real* forty seconds ago," Nina said. "So no. Forgive me for not having a reference point."
*He's going to say something,* her wolf said, and for the first time all night, the giddiness in her voice had gone thin and scared. *Nina. Something's wrong. He's — his wolf just went quiet. That's not — mates don't go quiet, that's not what this is supposed to—*
"You're—" Avery started, and stopped. Nina heard him take a breath, the kind people took right before they said something they'd already decided, something they were bracing themselves to survive saying. "Your eyes."
Nina went very still.
"What about them," she said, though she already knew. She'd heard that particular pause a thousand times, in a thousand rooms, right before someone's voice changed the way it was about to change now.
"They don't track," Avery said, quieter now, and somehow that was worse than if he'd said it loud. "You're blind."
The music kept playing. The room kept talking, oblivious, thirty feet of chatter and champagne between Nina and the edge she could suddenly, sickeningly feel underneath her. Her wolf had gone completely silent, curled into some small frightened shape in the back of her mind, waiting.
"Yes," Nina said, chin up, voice steady in the way she'd spent twelve years perfecting. "I am. And?"
Avery Durke didn't answer right away. And in the space where his answer should have been, Nina heard something far worse than words — she heard him step back. One deliberate step, the sound of his shoe against marble, putting distance between them like she was something he'd need room to say no to.
"Everyone," he said, and his voice had changed entirely — pitched now to carry, cool and final and public in a way it hadn't been a single sentence ago — "if I could have your attention."
*No,* Nina's wolf whispered. *No, no, don't—*
The room went quiet around them, two hundred strangers turning toward the sound of their Alpha's voice, and Nina Argstone stood in the middle of the most expensive room she had ever set foot in, blind, exposed, and utterly unable to see the moment coming.