I remembered coming home from school and heading straight to the garden to do my homework. I liked the quiet there—the hum of bees, the soft rustle of petals, the way the air smelled like sunlight and lavender. It helped me think better. And I needed that, because calculus was eating my brain alive.
After two hours of staring at the same math problem, I’d let out a loud yawn and tilted my head back in frustration—and that’s when I saw him. Dimitri. Standing at his window, watching me. The second our eyes met, he disappeared.
But a few minutes later, he came downstairs and asked if I needed help. I said no. He sat beside me anyway. And the next thing I knew, we were solving equations together. Well, he was solving them. I was too busy pretending to care about numbers when all I could think about was how close we were, how our fingers almost touched every time we reached for the same pencil, how intoxicating his scent was. He smelled like warm sandalwood, with hints of coffee and whisky mixing together. And beneath the musk of his cologne trying to mask it—his own masculine scent that only I seemed to smell, that made my wolf prowl restlessly beneath my skin anytime she caught it, like she’d just found something she wanted to claim. When the lesson was over, he went back to being his usual self—cold, distant, unreadable.
And that pretty much summed up our relationship over the years. Moments of warmth that flickered, and then vanished before I could believe they were real.
And now this happened.
I pressed my palms against my burning cheeks. This was ridiculous. I was twenty years old, lying in bed fantasizing about my stepbrother like some lovesick teenager.
Except he wasn’t really my stepbrother. Not by blood.And the way he’d looked at me tonight—that hadn’t been brotherly. That had been hunger. Pure and primal.
I threw off the covers, suddenly needing to move, to do something other than torture myself with what-ifs.
Work. I’d work. Lose myself in contracts and projections until my brain was too exhausted to think about Dimitri Ravencrest and his dark eyes and his capable hands and—
Stop it.
I grabbed my one-size-fits-all bag and rummaged through it for the Castellanos merger file when I remembered that I’d left it in his study yesterday when he’d called me in to discuss next week’s meeting. I could retrieve it now, review the terms, and make notes. Anything to distract myself from him.
It was past midnight. Everyone would be asleep—Maia in her wing, Dimitri presumably in his. The house would be silent and empty.
Safe.
I pulled on a cardigan over my tank top and sleep shorts, not bothering with anything else since I wouldn’t run into anyone. My bare feet made little sound on the cool marble as I made my way downstairs.
The halls were dark and quiet, only emergency lighting guiding my path. When I reached the study, I turned the door handle slowly, carefully, intending to slip in and out like a ghost.
I froze.
The room wasn’t empty.
And the very air seemed to shift—growing thin and heavy all at once due to the sight before me.
Dimitri sat behind his massive oak desk, wearing a simple black t-shirt that clung to his body perfectly, revealing those forearms that had haunted my thoughts when he drove me to the office the other day. In his hand was a glass of amber liquid—scotch, probably.
He looked up the instant the door sighed shut, and the air snapped tight. Exhaustion carved sharp lines around his mouth, hollowed the skin beneath those strong, dark brown eyes, but it only made the restof him look dangerous—stubble catching the lamplight, chest rising once, slow and deliberate, like he’d just tasted something forbidden. His gaze dragged from my bare legs to the loose cardigan, lingered on the strip of skin it exposed, then locked on mine with a heat that felt like fingers sliding up my spine. The glass hovered at his lips; a single drop of scotch clung to the rim, trembled, then slipped free—falling in a slow, deliberate arc to the polished wood between us.
“I-I’m sorry,” I blurted, already backing toward the door. “I didn’t know you were—I’ll just come back tomorrow—”
“Wait.”
The single word stopped me mid-retreat. I hesitated, one hand on the doorknob, every instinct screaming at me to run.
“Don’t go.” He lifted the glass to his lips, draining it in one swallow. When he set it down, his eyes found mine again. “Don’t go, Isabella.”
The smart thing—the safe thing—would be to leave right now. To put distance between us before something irreversible happened.
But something in his voice, in the defeated slump of his shoulders, kept me rooted in place.
I let the door click shut behind me.
“Are you okay?” I asked quietly, taking a tentative step into the room.
“Okay.” He repeated the word like it was foreign to him. His gaze dropped from my eyes to my lips, then lower—to my bare legs beneath the short sleep shorts. His eyes lingered there a moment too long before dragging back up to meet mine. “I don’t know what that word means anymore.”
Heat crawled up my neck. I was suddenly, painfully aware of how little I was wearing. How alone we were. How the air between us felt charged, electric.