"You don't have much of a choice, Benny. I know you. I know what you think I don't," Amasten says, smirking.
The candlelight makes him look exactly like what he is — something that was built for rooms like this. Patient. Certain. The kind of certain that doesn't need to raise its voice.
I don't believe he wants to kill me. If he did, those two men would have moved already. This is a performance. He's trying to find the edge of me and I will not give him the satisfaction of finding it.
Under the table, my wolf is doing that thing — the locked, total stillness it has maintained in his presence since the street yesterday. Like every other instinct has gone quiet so that one can listen. I have been ignoring it for twenty-four hours. I will keep ignoring it.
"Answer me, Benitova!"
The snap in his voice cuts across the empty restaurant. My palms go slick and I let them — that's the only concession he's getting. The rest of me stays completely still. I will not drop my chin.
"This confirms you're one of those losers," I say, flatly. Almost bored. "Whatever you claim to know about me doesn't matter. Even if you expose the evidence, it still doesn't matter. You're wasting your time."
"You think you're immune or something?"
"I am, sir," I reply. "Go on. Look under our table."
His eyes drop — barely a flicker — before returning to mine. Smart enough to know what that means. Too composed to react. The gun presses cold and steady against my palm beneath the tablecloth and I am grateful for every hour I spent learning not to flinch.
"What you're trying to do won't work," he says.
"And that is?"
"Trying to seduce me."
"I'm holding a gun, dear." Even voice. Steady hands. "It's pointed directly at your cock."
The silence that follows is immaculate.
"What?"
"It seems your brain is made of water." I tilt my head slightly. "But I am still curious. Tell me exactly what you think you know."
He leans back. Settles. A man rearranging himself to enjoy a long story.
"The red-haired wolf who killed several of my pack's dealers." His voice drops into something reaching. Not performance anymore. Something underneath it shifts — his attention sharpening, narrowing, the way a dominant's does when they stop making assessments and start making decisions. "The sweet princess of the Marcel family with no criminal records. The mysterious public face with no actual talent worth the name."
He knows what I am. He knows what his people were. He knows what this conversation actually is underneath all the candlelight and wine and restaurant theatre — two wolves, one table, and a gun.
I keep my face exactly where it is. I give him nothing.
"Wow." I let the word breathe. "I want to hear more."
"This is not a joke."
The restaurant is empty except for us. Every table dressed, every candle lit, the whole room arranged for a conversation he intended to have on his terms. That, at least, did not go to plan.
"I am truly sorry, Mr. Zakiel." Just enough warmth to make it almost believable. "I didn't know they were your people."
He watches me for a long moment. And then something happens that I don't expect — something shifts in his face that has nothing to do with the conversation. A slight tension around his eyes. A stillness that is different from his usual stillness, less controlled, more involuntary.
Like something in him has just noticed something.
Like something in him has just woken up.
My wolf surges hard against the wall I've built around it and I slam it back down so fast my jaw tightens.
Not now.
"You are not sorry," he says. His voice has changed slightly. Still level, still certain, but something underneath it is different. "And I like that. More of the reason why I'm requesting that you be my girlfriend."
"Try kneeling and apologizing to me and my friends on national television for the misinformative disaster you caused," I say, leaning in slowly. "Then I might consider accepting your offer."
"Consider it done," he says.
The smile fades from my face. "You don't mean that."
"Tune in to the morning news. My next interview airs then." He doesn't blink. "What else do you want?"
I study him. The calm. The certainty. The thing that happened in his face a moment ago that he has already smoothed over and is pretending didn't happen. I don't know if he knows what it was. I don't know if he's felt it before.
I have. For twenty-four hours. I know exactly what it is and I have been refusing to call it by its name and I will keep refusing.
"Tell your men to leave," I say.
He raises one hand — small, unhurried — and waves them off. The near-silent exit of bodies trained to move without being noticed. The restaurant settles.
Just us now.
Two wolves. One table. No witnesses.
"You are confusing me," I say. "What do you actually want from me? What are you gaining from any of this?"
"All of you." He says it simply. No theatre in it. "Isn't that enough?"
"Cut the bullshit. You just tried to—"
"You knew I wouldn't."
"I don't know you!"
It comes out sharper than I meant. And it's true in a way that goes beyond the obvious — I don't know him, and yet my wolf has been behaving like it does since the street yesterday, like recognition is a thing that operates below the level of names and histories and choices. I smooth my expression. Lock it.
He doesn't react to the sharpness. He looks at the table between us, then back up. That involuntary stillness crosses his face again — quicker this time, like he caught it and stopped it — and then it's gone.
"How was the meal?" His voice shifts into something almost conversational. "Did you like the wine?"
He has to be out of his mind.
"Benny?"
"It's Miss Marcel to you, sir."
"Of course." A pause with an edge of warmth in it that I don't trust. "My love."
"Don't."
"Come on. I'll drop you home."
"I have a driver. Don't waste your time."
I draw the gun from beneath the table in one clean motion, barrel resting on the white tablecloth aimed at him. The empty room holds the silence like a held breath.
"And it's not a request," I say.
He rises slowly. Then he leans forward — across the table, jacket brushing the candle flame — until the point of the barrel makes contact with the center of his chest.
My grip tightens. My breathing stays even.
Up close his scent is overwhelming. Warm. That specific frequency my wolf has been locked on since the crash, the thing I recognized in the alcove last night and refused to name, the thing that is not cologne and not money and not power, the thing that is older and more specific than all of those and aimed entirely at me.
He feels it too.
I can see it — that stillness again, deeper this time, his eyes on mine with something in them that wasn't there when I walked in. Not calculation. Not strategy. Something he doesn't have a prepared response for.
Good. Neither do I.
"What are you doing?" I ask.
"Go on, Benny." His voice drops to barely above a whisper. Eyes steady on mine, no fear in them, not even the shadow of it. Just that new attention, total and unguarded, the kind that dominant wolves only show when something has gotten past every wall they built. "Shoot me."
The restaurant breathes around us.
And standing there with a gun pressed to his chest and his eyes on mine and his scent doing what it's been doing since yesterday and my wolf completely rigid with something I have been calling by every wrong name for twenty-four hours —
I understand, with a clarity that feels like cold water, that he already knows I won't.
What I don't know yet is whether that's because he's read me correctly.
Or because somewhere underneath the candlelight and the gun and the twenty-four hours of careful denial, he already knows exactly what I am to him.
And I'm terrified it might be both.