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Chapter Twenty-One

BLAKE

H e’s leaning against the frame like it owes him something. Shadowed on one side, hallway light on the other. Malachi. Immaculate in his suit from the balcony suite. All tailored dominance and dark temptation. One hand tucked in his pocket. The other curled loose at his side, as though even now—especially now—he has to leash the claws itching to sink into something soft. Something waiting. Something like me.

The noise from backstage doesn’t follow him in. It falters against whatever gravity he carries, sucked back into the world below. Because Malachi isn’t a man so much as an event. A phenomenon with a pulse. The air tightens around the low hum of his presence, scent unwinding into the room like silk ribbons dropped in static. Cypress sharpened by frost. Star anise and iron. Lightning char held in leather seams. I taste it on the back of my tongue the moment he crosses the threshold.

I’m already trembling before he closes the door. The latch clicks and it anchors every part of me to the floor—but it also makes me feel like the thing I’ve fought not to be around him: prey.

I told him no. Backstage, just before the show began. He asked me to sit beside him—offered a seat in that private box designed for power players to sip top-shelf liquor and carve out empires with a glance. And I refused. Professional boundaries, I told myself. Control. Decorum. The only power I thought I had left.

I turned him down, unable to look at him without feeling the embarrassment of my unintended confession—like if I kept my distance, I could pretend I hadn’t laid something so personal between us, raw and uninvited.

Now he’s here. And I don’t know if I want to run or beg him to close the distance.

“You were brilliant tonight,” he says, his voice so low I feel it more than I hear it. “Flawless execution. You made tonight the success it was.”

No dark flirtation, no barbed confession pulled into a seduction I can’t refuse. The smoothness is there, velvet-laced iron, but beneath it is something twisted with ache. A fracture, spreading slow. I blink. It would be nothing if someone else said it. A compliment from a boss. But from him?

I feel it like a bruise beneath my ribs.

My office is small, but with him inside, it feels minuscule. He takes up all the oxygen in the room, my head starting to spin. The thoughts I’ve been resisting, ignoring desperately, are sliding forward. I can’t deny it, not when we’re alone like this. I want Malachi. I crave him like a woman crazed. I can’t deny it any longer.

“I came in with six days to go,” I murmur, forcing my voice steady. “The cast, the crew? They were already doing the heavy lifting. I just… tightened things. Got us over the finish line.”

He steps closer. He’s not looking at me like I’m his employee. Not like a colleague whose performance he’s assessing. No. He’s looking at me like I’m already his—like I always have been—and realizing it’s pointless to deny it anymore.

He should terrify me.

But he doesn’t.

He never has.

“I should be elsewhere,” Malachi says, his tone roughening slightly as he starts toward me. “Connecting with potential investors, potential clients to book private events. Sit, drink, nod at senators. Shake hands with men who couldn’t stomach the darkness they pretend to control. I should be out there, smiling for the sake of the future of this place.”

Another step. Then another.

“And I was.”

I don’t move, can’t breathe—not when he keeps coming, slow and deliberate until the space between us is gone. Until the desk presses into the backs of my thighs and he’s close enough to bend the air around me.

“I was,” he says again, lower now, gaze locked on mine, “until I realized I didn’t give a fuck. Because all I could think about was you.”

His words unfurl like smoke, wrapping me tight, sinking claws into my spine.

“I should be thinking like your boss,” he continues, softer now. Like his voice might shatter if he pushes too hard. “But I haven’t been for a long time.” He huffs a quiet laugh through his nose. “I don’t think I ever have.”

I don’t answer. Because I can’t. My body is full of contradictions—fight and fall, flee and fling myself into danger. My heart doesn’t know how to distinguish fear from want anymore.

Especially not with him. Not when he’s saying what I’ve only barely let myself think.

My lips part. No sound comes out. I lick them instead, suddenly aware of everything: the heat nestled low in my core, the stretch of silence between us, the too-neat seam running along the desk I’m now unconsciously leaning against, as if its sharp edge can hold me together better than my collapsing restraint.

Maybe it’s ridiculous, standing there as if I’m a nineteen-year-old, face flushed from too much whiskey and too little good judgment—but this isn’t a crush. It feels dangerous in a way that isn’t clean or one-dimensional. It’s heat and hunger. Fury and fear. A need I’ve never allowed myself to be selfish enough to feel.

My mouth parts—whether to speak or breathe, I don’t know. Something trembles inside me, a wire pulled too tight.

Malachi doesn’t touch me. Doesn’t speak. But the space between us feels razor-thin. Like if I exhale too sharply, we’ll both fall into it.

I stare at him, throat burning, heat blooming low in my belly despite every reason to stay calm. I’ve made an entire life out of keeping myself contained. Professional. Steady. Never putting myself first. But nothing about him lets me stay that way.

And maybe, just for tonight, I don’t want to.

I press my palms flat against the edge of the desk behind me, grounding myself. “This isn’t smart,” I say quietly, like maybe he’ll agree and end this before we go any further.

“Probably not,” he agrees, and my stomach sinks before launching into my throat when he continues. “But I don’t give a fuck anymore.”

Malachi’s breathing changes. Deepens. Not noisy, but noticeable. His whole body slows down as if time’s thickened between us. Something primal blossoms in the way his gaze drops to my mouth. The tempo in my chest doubles. My breasts feel tight against the thin fabric of my dress, nipples pressing up like they’re reading Morse code through the air.

“Tell me,” he breathes.

“What?”

He steps in. Close enough that the heat of him grazes my skin. His hands don’t touch me, but it’s worse. The restraint is its own kind of caress.

“Tell me what you want.” His voice is wrecked silk. “Tell me I can have you.”

My heart slams out of rhythm. But he doesn’t kiss me. Of course not.

He waits for me.

I look up at him—this man who’s always been more wolf than sheepdog, more storm than shelter—and God help me, I know. I know what I want.

I reach up, hand trembling, and tug him forward by the lapels of his jacket.

And then I kiss him.

The air between us snaps.

It’s desperate. Dangerous. Our mouths collide in a tangle of teeth and tongue and pent-up ache. I’m shaking with adrenaline and hunger and the fierce clench of something I’ve tried to starve in myself for too long. When he groans into my mouth—sharp and ragged and real—I bite his bottom lip like an apology and grip his coat as if he might disappear.

His hands dive into my hair, yanking me back so he can devour my neck with more reverence than worship. Heat rushes through me like a fever. I want him to touch every ruined, bruised part of me and make it something else. I want him to sink those fangs of his into my flesh. I want him to consume me.

One hand palms my ass, the other sliding under the fabric of my thigh—pulling me up. His strength isn’t human, God, I know that, but it doesn’t stop me from gasping when he lifts me like I weigh nothing at all, planting me on the edge of the desk. The shock of cold seeps through my skin from the polished wood, but my thighs flutter open, hungry, bare inches from pulling him in.

He mutters something hard and low in a language I don’t recognize. His lips find mine again, but it’s different this time. Possessive. Slow. Like he wants to savor this one. Like it’s a memory in the making.

Then his hand slides beneath my skirt. Those dexterous fingers gliding over the lace of my thong.

“Blake.” He breathes it like prophecy.

I don’t get to answer. Not before his fingers brush under the material between my legs.

And they come away slick.

He hisses—like he’s in pain.

“You’re soaked for me,” he growls. “Fuck.”

I want it. Want him.

But just as I arch into the pressure, just as I start to give myself over to the sensations—he stops.

A full inhale draws him back from the edge like someone pouring cold water on the moment.

Then he whispers, “No.”

It’s not rejection; it vibrates more like rage. Like he’s fighting himself.

“I’m not doing this here,” he says, breath ragged.

“But—”

“Not in a damn office.” His fangs brush my jaw, fever-drenched. “Not like this is just some secret, quick fuck.”

I blink, confused in the fog. “Is this because I was technically a virgin? I’ve never expected rose petals and candles.”

“I know.” His breath is trying to calm. It’s failing. The fight’s all over his body. “But I’m not touching you again unless it’s the way you deserve.”

The words are so tender I ache from the inside out.

“You deserve those rose petals and candles,” he breathes. “You deserve everything soft. Everything slow. Not just a hungry man behind a locked door.”

I laugh—because what do you say to something like that?

Malachi takes my face between his hands and for the first time since the curtain dropped on tonight’s show, I feel steady. Until he lowers his forehead to mine, whispering.

“I want you.”

He brushes his lips just beneath my ear.

“I need you.”

Lower. The prick of his fangs down my throat.

“It’s in my fangs when I speak. In the cracks of my control. I haven’t thought of anything else since the night you first kissed me.”

His voice turns quieter, fiercer, wrapped in something terrifyingly honest.

“Not just your body. All of you. Your laugh. Your hands. Your goddamn will. I think about you when I’m handling business. When I’m hunting in the dark. I think about what it would take to kiss you awake every morning and fall asleep with your scent on my sheets. I think about every man who looks at you too long, the wolf who thought to claim you, and how easy it would be to kill them.”

He returns his forehead to mine, inhaling slowly.

“So tell me now,” he says, barely audible. “Tell me if it’s only this. That it was just heat and adrenaline and rescue and lust. That you don’t want me the way I want you—and I’ll walk away.”

Silence.

My body burns, head to toe, but not with lust. With clarity.

I reach up, touch his jaw. It’s tight as steel—but trembling.

“I’m done denying anything,” I whisper.

“That a yes?”

“Yes.”

Malachi doesn’t kiss me again.

He lifts me—again—into his arms, bridal style, his breath a snarl by my ear. My arms fold around his neck, and I don’t ask where we’re going.

Then he moves, and the world becomes motion.

The hallway blurs. He’s too fast. Inhuman. The walls slip past in blink-thin jerks of light and shadow, until the back service door bursts outward and the cold night air slams into my face. A hush rings around us as we cross the lower parking garage—not the quiet of stillness, but the kind of silence the forest goes when a predator is stalking through. Absolute.

The SUV is already waiting—engine rumbling to a purr at the press of a button on his key.

He places me in the passenger seat like I might break.

Then he gets in beside me and drives, one hand locked on the wheel, the other still trembling between the gearshift and his thigh.