Silas's hand closed around my bare arm hard enough to bruise.
Not by accident.
His fingers bit into my skin, anchoring me to the freezing balcony while winter wind lashed my hair across my face. Behind the glass, the ballroom still glittered—gold light, crystal, wolves laughing over the music.
He didn't care who saw us.
"What did he say?"
His voice was low. Controlled.
That made it worse.
The Alpha aura bleeding off him was almost a physical force. I couldn't smell his rage, but I could see what it did through the glass—conversations faltered, a waiter stumbled, and a Beta woman went pale before backing away too fast.
Silas never looked away from me.
My body was still cold from the words whispered in my ear.
Aster vael en silvera.
The last moon still remembers.
Someone alive knew the dead language.
Someone alive knew who I was.
So I did what survival had taught me years ago.
I lied.
Not a full lie. Full lies crack too fast.
"He said the women around you don't live long," I said, my voice flat. "He said I'm just bait."
For one beat, the only sound was the wind hitting the building.
Then something shifted in Silas's eyes.
Not confusion.
Not doubt.
Murder.
His head snapped toward the ballroom, scanning the crowd with terrifying speed. He lifted one hand to his ear, thumb brushing the hidden comm unit.
"Lock down every exit," he said. "No one leaves. Pull facial recognition from the balcony corridor. Isolate every male who crossed this section in the last sixty seconds."
A pause.
His jaw tightened.
"I don't care how discreet it looks, Bastian. Find him."
He dropped his hand and looked back at me.
I could almost see him sorting the situation into categories of threat and response. To Silas, a man getting close to me was not flirtation.
It was trespass.
"Did he touch you?"
"No."
"Did he get close enough to scent you?"
That nearly made me laugh.
"No one scents me, Silas. I'm a biological blank slate. Remember?"
Wrong answer.
Technically true. Emotionally useless.
He stepped closer, forcing me back into the stone railing until cold bit into my spine. Heat rolled off him in violent waves, eating through the polished control he had worn all night.
"You froze," he said softly. "You don't freeze for a drunk trying to be clever."
His chest brushed mine.
"What aren't you telling me?"
A smarter woman might have softened.
I stared right back at him.
"I'm telling you exactly enough."
His nostrils flared. The veins in his neck stood out hard against his skin. His thumb pressed into the pulse point on my arm, bruising now.
Then he turned and yanked the balcony door open.
"We're leaving."
The ride back to the penthouse was worse than the balcony.
The bulletproof windows were blacked out, sealing us inside a soundproof vault. Rage had pushed Silas to the edge of another overload, and I was the only thing standing between him and whatever happened when that edge broke.
He had ripped off his tie before the car even cleared the curb. The top buttons of his shirt were open. The pulse at his throat was a hard, violent beat.
Then the sedan took a sharp turn.
His control snapped.
"Come here."
Before I could brace, he reached across the leather seat, caught me by the waist, and dragged me over the console.
My knees hit the seat beside him.
He didn't stop there.
He hauled me fully across his lap, one arm caging my thighs while the other clamped around the back of my neck.
Heat hit me all at once.
He buried his face against the curve of my neck and shoulder, breathing me in with rough, desperate pulls.
Not kissing.
Not tenderness.
Survival.
He dragged in my nothingness like a drowning man stealing oxygen, trying to strip the overload from his nervous system by force.
My hands landed flat against his chest on instinct.
"Silas—"
He didn't answer.
His whole frame shuddered against me. Every turn of the car threw more of my weight into him. His thigh was wedged firmly between mine—not sexual in intent, which somehow made it worse.
It was pure possession.
He wanted me exactly where his body could use me.
This wasn't romance.
This was a starving predator forcing prey into the shape of a cure.
"You're shaking," I said, because facts were safer than reacting.
"I'm angry," he rasped against my collarbone.
"I noticed."
His fingers dug into my hip, bruising the flesh beneath the silver silk.
"He got close enough to make you go cold," he said. "You don't go cold."
"Congratulations on basic pattern recognition."
His mouth brushed the hinge of my jaw.
A warning disguised as something softer.
"You do not leave my sight again," he said. "Ever."
"That wasn't in the contract."
"I'm rewriting the contract."
I could have fought.
I could have twisted away and reminded him I wasn't his pet, his medicine, or his property.
But my brother was sick. An unknown man had just spoken dead language in my ear. And Silas Thorne was using my body to keep himself from breaking apart.
So I conserved energy.
"You're crushing a very expensive dress," I said.
A harsh sound, dangerously close to a laugh, moved through his chest.
"I'll buy you ten more."
He kept his face buried in my neck until the car stopped beneath the penthouse tower.