Chapter 5

I pulled out the calm I had been training into myself all week. "Help how?"

They had hired a full professional coordination team for the engagement party.

The last thing they needed was me, a former girlfriend, getting in the way.

"Receive the guests. You know the pack members. Keep things running smoothly."

He exhaled slowly. "Vivienne also feels you must witness our happiness."

I laughed once. That second part was the real message.

"Fine." I took out my phone to make notes. "I will confirm the details with you at headquarters tomorrow. If there is nothing else, may I go?"

Vivienne had only just left. He would not need me to stay the night.

A mistress, after all, exists only to serve one particular kind of need.

He narrowed his eyes. "You are not upset?"

"Does Alpha Voss want me to be?"

He said nothing. He stubbed out the cigarette, crossed to me, and caught my jaw between his fingers. "Sera. You have changed a great deal lately."

"Changed into something," he tightened his grip two degrees, "that I find quite irritating."

I kept my eyes down. "Tell me what you would prefer. I can adapt."

What had drawn him to me, once, was exactly this: I had been close enough to reach for him every single day, and I never had.

He had called it discipline then. Now he called it irritating.

The one who had changed was never me.

"Never mind." He stared into my eyes for a long moment, then released me. "Go."

I turned to leave. He pulled me back from behind, arms wrapping around me.

His chin came down on my shoulder.

His voice was low. "Do you know why I would not let you go?"

He meant the agreement. The one that kept me tethered.

I did not know either.

I had believed that without feeling, a clean ending was still possible.

"Because you are too easy. You never put me in an impossible position. You never cause scenes, never ask where I have been or who I was with. Not like her, watching my every move."

His arms tightened. "Sometimes I think, if only you had come from a stronger pack line, I would not need to bond with anyone else."

I almost laughed.

In the end, he was blaming my bloodline.

He had forgotten that he was the one who had first reached for a woman with no powerful pack behind her.

"Alpha Voss." I gently pried his hands away. "What color do you want me to wear to the engagement party? I will prepare in advance."

His hands hung in the air between us.

He was perhaps too drained from the evening to keep pulling.

He let me go.

Outside the hotel doors, I found that my palm had been cut by my own nails.