4

He pulled her back from the glass so fast her shoulder hit the wall, his body angling between her and the window on pure instinct, and for a strange, suspended second she noticed how solid he was, how the heat of him at her back felt less like danger and more like the one stable thing in a room that had stopped making sense an hour ago.

"Talk to me," she said. "Who's out there?"

"I don't know yet." His voice had dropped into something clipped and commanding, a register she hadn't heard from him in the interview. He pulled his phone out, thumbed a message off fast, and within seconds she heard footsteps in the hallway outside her door, more than one set.

Rowan came in first, the sharp-jawed man she recognized vaguely from the facility earlier, then the dark-haired woman from that afternoon, both of them reading the room, and Sienna's apartment, fast.

"Perimeter," Killian said, and Rowan was gone again without a word, out the door and down the hall.

"Killian." The woman's eyes cut to Sienna, narrowed, calculating in a way that made Sienna feel like a math problem someone hadn't finished solving. "You told her already."

"She had a photograph, Nadia. Ashgrove crest, birth mark, the whole thing. There wasn't a version of tonight where I didn't tell her."

Nadia. His sister, Sienna guessed, something in the shape of their eyes matching even through the tension.

"That doesn't make it smart," Nadia said. "You've had this pack six years, Killian, and in six years you've never once brought your instincts before your judgment. Don't start with the one woman who could get us all killed."

"Don't talk about her like she isn't standing here," Sienna said, sharper than she meant to, though her hands were shaking.

Nadia's gaze swung to her, assessing, and something in it eased, fractionally, like Sienna had passed a test she hadn't known she was taking. "Fair," Nadia said. "Sorry. It's been a long six years."

Rowan came back inside a few minutes later, shaking his head. "Nothing. Car in the lot's registered to a resident three buildings over. Might've been nothing."

"Might've been," Killian repeated, like he didn't believe it any more than Sienna did.

"You're both jumpy," Nadia said. "Understandably. But we can't lock down the whole facility every time a car door slams, Killian, not with Voss's people already watching us for any excuse."

"If it's nothing," Killian said, "then it's nothing. If it's not, I'd rather have overreacted than have Sienna dead in her own apartment on her first night."

The word dead sat in the room like something with weight to it. Sienna wrapped her arms around herself, cold in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature.

"Somebody needs to explain the actual math to me," she said. "You keep saying people will come for me. Who? Why now, tonight, when nobody knew I existed yesterday?"

Rowan and Nadia both looked to Killian, some silent negotiation passing between the three of them, before Killian answered.

"Draven Voss," he said. "Talia's father. He's the one who led the raid on Ashgrove fourteen years ago, though nobody's ever proven it, and nobody ever will, because he made sure there were no witnesses left to talk." His hands closed briefly into fists. "If he learns an Ashgrove daughter survived, he has two choices. Finish what he started, or use you as leverage against every pack that still owes Ashgrove an old debt. Either one gets you killed."

"And if I just leave? Tonight, quit the job, go back to my old apartment, pretend none of this happened?"

"Your scent's already in this building," Nadia said, gently enough that Sienna understood she meant it as a kindness, not a threat. "Half my brother's inner circle caught it the second you walked through the door this afternoon. Leaving doesn't erase that. It just means you're unprotected when someone comes looking."

Sienna sat down slowly on the arm of the couch, the same spot Killian had sat in twenty minutes earlier, feeling like the floor of her life had been quietly swapped out from under her sometime between the job interview and now.

"I have a brother," she said. "Milo. Sixteen. He has a heart condition, he needs surgery in eight weeks, I am the only person on this planet responsible for him. Tell me exactly what you people are dragging both of us into, because I need to know if I'm about to make his life more dangerous just by loving him."

Killian crouched in front of her again, the same posture as before, hands open, voice dropped to something low and steady that she suspected he used on frightened rookies before their first big game.

"I will protect you," he said. "Both of you. That's not a line, Sienna, it's what I am, it's in the blood. An Alpha protects what's his, and like it or not, whatever the paperwork says about my engagement, my wolf already decided you're mine the second I touched your hand this afternoon."

"Your wolf doesn't get a vote in my life."

"No," he agreed, quiet. "But it's honest, and right now honesty might be the only thing keeping you alive. I'd rather you hate me for the truth than trust me for a lie that gets you killed."

Nadia cleared her throat. "The gala," she said. "Three days from now. Talia's father is already flying in for it. If Sienna's scent lingers around Killian even a little by then, and Draven's people are as sharp as I think they are-"

"I know." Killian's jaw tightened. "I need three days to figure out how to keep two truths from colliding in front of the entire pack council."

"And if you can't?" Sienna asked.

He looked at her, gold flickering at the edge of his gaze again, something fierce and unwilling and true underneath it.

"Then everyone in that room finds out exactly what you are," he said, "at exactly the same moment Draven Voss does. And I will have three days to figure out how to keep you alive after that instead of three years."

Somewhere out past the window, faint enough that Sienna thought at first she'd imagined it, a long, low howl rose up over the parking structure and cut off just as suddenly, and every single person in the room went rigid at once.

"That wasn't nothing," Rowan said quietly.

Killian was already moving toward the door. "Lock this behind me," he told Sienna, low and urgent. "Don't open it for anyone except Nadia or Rowan. I need you alive when I get back."

"Killian-"

"Three days," he said, from the doorway, eyes gold, voice rough with something that sounded, impossibly, like fear for her instead of himself. "Stay alive for three days, Sienna Ashgrove. I'll handle the rest."

He was gone before she could tell him that wasn't her name, not really, not yet, and the door shut behind him with a sound that felt, in the dark of her first night in this building, uncomfortably final.