The days that followed felt like a dream.
Not the nightmare I'd been living for the past week, but an actual dream—soft and warm and almost too good to be real. Damien didn't push. He didn't demand. He just… was. Present. Attentive. Devastatingly gentle in ways that constantly surprised me.
We fell into a routine. Breakfast together in the sunlit morning room. Him disappearing into his office for pack business while I worked on a script I'd been neglecting. Lunch brought to me by an invisible staff. Dinner together, always.
And in between, stolen moments. His hand brushing mine as we passed in the hallway. His gaze catching mine across a room, holding it for a beat too long. The way he'd appear whenever I wandered the manor, as if he had a sixth sense for where I was.
It should have felt suffocating. Instead, it felt like being seen for the first time in my life.
But beneath the dream, reality waited. And reality, I was beginning to learn, had teeth.
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