The words hung in the air as cold and hard as the marble floor beneath her feet. There's no safety anywhere in existence, except here. Selena's body involuntarily tensed; she was going to stand against whatever may have just whispered such words. The whole of Selena's brain screamed in retaliation against every primal instinct, against every fiber of a woman who had fought her way out of the foster care system and had crafted an existence of her design. She was no damsel. She did not need to be saved. Her defiance surged as stiffening reflexively, chin resolutely poking him in the eye. "Get real," she shot back. "This is not a war where you can shut me up in some tower! I have my press credentials; hell, I have founded and edited the Chicago Runner! Pass a new law to keep the gangs off the f**king streets! Calm the murderous hunger that pulls guns on US citizens! They're the ones after you... Why don't you put a stop to them, save yourself and my threads, and beg our land to be less sporcling before it breaks free? Anything there rather than leaving me still in their sights!" Her voice had increased in pitch but never shook.
His logic was a cold, infuriating cage, though she couldn't find any flaw in its bars. He wasn't being a possessive alpha male trying to control her; he was a man who understood the nature of the predators hunting them, because he was one of them. He was taking responsibility for the danger he had put her in, and the weight of that responsibility was painted in the grim lines around his mouth. To argue would be childish, an act of pride that could very well get her killed. She loathed it. She loathed feeling vulnerable, having her choice ripped away from her. But being used as bait by him seemed far worse. "Fine," she snarled, the word tasting of defeat. "But I'm not your guest. I'm your partner in this. We work together. And the first order of business is getting those journals." A fleeting stroke of admiration passed over his face before he nodded. "Agreed. I'll have Elias retrieve a bag of your essentials from your apartment. Give him your keys. He's the only one I trust."
The thought of a stranger opening her things, into her private space, violated her once more, yet she knew the necessity of it. In a very cold, formal call to Elias, Damien then, led Selena to the private elevator, under which they were descending the deep innards of the building toward the sub-basement. The air turned colder and deserted opulence till the stark, sterile white of unending corridors replaced it. They halted in front of a round, massive steel door like something out of a detective movie. Damien swiped his palm on a biometric scanner, and then with a satisfying hiss of hydraulics, the reinforced door began to swing apart. The room it opened onto harbored no combination of gold and notes, but instead a lot of bookshelves and volumes upon volumes of leather-bound books. Scores of them. Collected paranoia in a whole lifetime. This was the library of a lunatic mind or probably the last word from a man who knew a truth most poignant. "My father's legacy," Damien said with a flat voice, void of emotion, the glint of old pain in his eyes visible to Selena.
Damien approached a bookshelf, pulled out an ancient-looking tome, and gently ran his hand down the back of the leather. "He spent his life being terrified of what runs in his blood. It made him cold. It made him cruel." Snapping out of pity for the boy Damien must have been under the burden of the constant fear, simmering in his father's essential existence, Selena, for the next few seconds, felt a realization buried deep that Damien Voss, the billionaire beast, was merely a son who spoke softly with respect about his father. That vulnerability left as soon as it came. He picked up a few of the oldest journals, his face once again made into a blank mask. "Let's start at the beginning." They ascended the building to the ornate cage of the penthouse and spread the books on a large glass-top table. An odd electricity filled the room-a mix of academia and channeling. Selena opened the cover of the book dated nearly fifty years back. The paper-felt thick and creamy, the handwriting inside precise, slightly slanted. Selena read the first entry, her voice hushed and reverent:
"October 31. The veil thins. The blood moon calls to the Alpha's curse, the one my grandfather brought back from the old country. They say the beast sleeps for generations, but I feel it stirring in my veins. It dreams of power, of the hunt. And it whispers of the mate. God help the soul it chooses as its anchor, for that union will be both our salvation and our apocalypse. She is the price of a soul, the one who will either cleanse the bloodline or drown it in darkness into eternity." A man apart, Damien. Her eyes met with his as she looked up from the page. Everything within the room was silent. Those hand-scrawled words were amorphously binding with the memory of the nightmare he had told her about. This was it-all reality. The curse, the clans, the prophecy. And her. The anchor. The key. The price. Despite the fact that investigations were still in their embryo stage, only one thing was certain: Selena's life would never again rest in her own hands.