Dakota's hand moved without conscious direction, meeting his reaching fingers. The moment his tiny hand wrapped around one of hers, something in her chest cracked wide open, not painfully but like the breaking of a seal that had been holding back something vast and overwhelming.
"Hi, Cooper," she whispered, her voice emerging rougher than intended, barely recognizable to her own ears.
Why did touching this child feel like finding something she'd lost? Why did looking at him make her throat tighten with emotions she couldn't name or understand?
"He's taken a liking to you," Maya observed, sounding pleased and slightly surprised. "He's usually shy with people he doesn't see often."
The phrase registered oddly in Dakota's mind. She'd been living at the family estate for three years, surely she'd seen her sister's child before, even if she couldn't remember the encounters. But then again, most of the time she had spent it in the Academy or her own apartment.
"He's yours?" Dakota asked, confusion coloring her tone. "I didn't know you had...."
"Oh, no," Maya said quickly, the response coming almost too fast. "Cooper is Ethan's son. From... before. His mother passed away, and I've been helping Ethan raise him. We're planning to make it official after the bonding ceremony."
The words "his mother passed away" hit Dakota with unexpected force, stealing the air from her lungs in a way she couldn't explain. She had no connection to this child, no reason to feel this overwhelming surge of grief at the mention of his deceased parent.
Cooper continued holding her finger, babbling something about his stuffed wolf, completely unaware of the emotional turmoil his presence was causing. Dakota couldn't look away from his little face, from those silver eyes that seemed impossibly familiar despite logic insisting otherwise.
"Dakota?" Maya's voice cut through her thoughts, concern evident in every word. "You've gone completely pale. Are you sure you're....."
The front door opened with enough force to draw attention from half the room. Cold November air swept through the great hall in a rush, and with it came a scent that made Dakota's wolf, silent and dormant for three long years, suddenly surge to life with violent urgency. Pine and winter wind and something wild and familiar that bypassed her conscious mind entirely and spoke directly to instincts she'd forgotten she possessed.
Dakota's head turned toward the door as though pulled by invisible strings, her entire body orienting itself toward that scent before her brain had processed what was happening.
And then her world shattered into a thousand irreparable pieces.
He stood framed in the doorway, shrugging out of a dark coat as snowflakes melted in his hair. Tall, broad-shouldered, with dark hair slightly disheveled from the wind. Even from this distance, she could see the strong line of his jaw, the way he carried himself with unconscious confidence.
Ethan.
Her Ethan. The man she'd been seeing for three years, the man who'd found her when she was lost and confused, who'd been patient with her fractured memories, who brought her coffee every morning and held her when the emptiness of not remembering became too much. The man who made her feel safe in a world that perpetually felt foreign and wrong.
Her Ethan was standing in the doorway of her sister's engagement party.
Dakota's breath froze in her lungs, her heartbeat stuttering and missing several beats in rapid succession as her mind tried desperately to make sense of what her eyes were seeing. This had to be wrong. A mistake. Some kind of cruel hallucination brought on by stress and her damaged mind finally broke completely.
But no, it was him. Same dark hair with that slight wave she'd run her fingers through countless times. Same broad shoulders she'd fallen asleep against more nights than she could count. Same presence that had become her anchor in a sea of confusion and lost memories.
His silver eyes swept across the crowded room with practiced efficiency, acknowledging greetings with polite nods, and then, as though guided by the same invisible force compelling Dakota, his gaze found hers across the distance separating them.
The impact was immediate and devastating. His face went white, color draining so rapidly it was visible even across the room. His body went rigid, every muscle locking into place as though he'd been turned to stone. The expression that crossed his features was one of complete and utter shock, like a man who'd just watched his entire world collapse.
He didn't know.
The realization hit Dakota with stunning, horrible clarity that made her head spin and her knees threaten to buckle.
He didn't know she was Maya's sister.
Three years they'd been together, quiet mornings in her downtown apartment, long walks through the city, stolen evenings where he was the only constant in her fractured existence. Three years of building something real and solid and safe. And he'd never known who her family was, never realized the woman he'd been with was the sister of the woman he was engaged to marry.