Page 55 of Merciless Vow
Ivar exhaled with the full weight of a young man who didn't fear for his own skull. His footsteps retreated down the hall.
I looked back at Addie. She surfaced from beneath a pillow, the laughter still bright in her eyes, her hair a spectacular disaster. In the gray morning light, with my mark on her throat and the sheets bunched around her waist, she was perfect, like a balanced spreadsheet—every variable accounted for, every column aligning exactly as it should.
I got out of bed. Found my trousers on the floor and pulled them on while she sat up against the headboard. She drew her knees to her chest, watching me with that assessing, green-eyed quiet. I picked up my shirt, shook it out, and started on the buttons.
"Do you want help?"
"If you put your hands on me, the pants are coming back off."
Addie grinned.
I missed a button.
"I didn't mean help with your clothes. I meant with whatever business issue is going on. That's what Magnus wants you for?"
I looked at her for a moment. Her dark hair. The mark. The way she'd been studying me just minutes ago with her whole mind engaged, like I was a set of numbers that had finally reconciled—clean, exact, undeniable.
"No," I said.
Her chin went down a fraction.
"I'm not finished with you in this bed. Whatever Magnus needs will take longer if I'm distracted."
The color in her face shifted. She looked away, pressing her lips together. I had the rare satisfaction of watching Addie Blackwood at a loss for words.
I finished the buttons. Found my watch on the nightstand. Snapped it on. I leaned over her and pressed a kiss to her swollen lips. "I'll be as quick as possible."
"Don't let Ivar hear that, or he'll get the wrong idea."
I laughed. When was the last time I'd laughed? I snagged her lips again. Then pressed a reverent kiss to the mark, still healing at the base of her throat, and left the room.
In the family room, Magnus stood near the window, a coffee mug in his hand. Gunnar was sprawled across the long sofa, still in yesterday's clothes. The stench of Lupetto was on him, but not a drop of blood. My gaze snagged on the couch.
The leather was barely distinguishable from yesterday, but I knew the precise geography of it now in a way I hadn't before; the slight give of the center cushion, the creak of the armrest, the way the lamplight fell across it from the left. I had spent the first twenty years of my life treating this room as an extension of my own body. The furniture, the worn rug, the faded marks on the doorframe where my mother had tracked our heights in pencil. All the spills on the upholstery. Now my wife's essence was added to it.
"Lupetto is dealt with, " I said to Gunnar. It wasn't a question. I simply wanted confirmation.
"We delivered him to his sons."
It irked me that the man still breathed. By what I knew of his sons, and what the elder alpha had done to them, I doubted that would last long.
"Romeo and Casanova didn't look particularly upset about the condition he was in when I dropped him off. Nova even thanked me."
The Lupetto sons had been managing their father's deterioration for years; watching him cling to old alliances and older debts while the pack bled credibility. We had done them a service, and they knew it. They were now in our debt. But most alphas didn't like owing anyone who wasn't beneath them.
"The Lupettos aren't the problem," I said. "So what is?"
Magnus set down his mug. He turned from the window and looked at me with the expression he used when he was about to say something he'd been rehearsing.
"The Sterling deal; there's a wrinkle."
CHAPTER FORTY
ADDIE
Ididn't get up.
That was new. I was a woman who got up first thing in the morning. I had been getting up at five-forty-five since my first year at Yale, before the alarm, before the coffee, before the city had fully committed to being awake. I got up because work was waiting and work was the only thing that had ever been reliably mine.
