Elara woke in the middle of the night, gasping for breath. The luxurious bedroom in the penthouse felt like a coffin to her. Full moonlight slipped through the gap in the heavy silk curtains, illuminating her arm wrapped in clean white bandages.
The pain from her silver wound had eased thanks to Doctor Victor's anesthetic, but the pain in her chest had only grown worse.
The mate bond wouldn't let her rest. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw Raga. She could feel the man's anger, his anxiety, and his overwhelmingly possessive urge. Elara touched her wildly pounding chest. She hated this feeling. She hated how her body reacted to a man who should have been her natural enemy.
Unable to sleep, Elara rose from her bed. She pulled a black silk robe over her sleepwear and quietly slipped out of the room.
The penthouse was eerily quiet. Bastian was probably still in his study. Elara sneaked toward the security control room—a small chamber filled with monitors hacking into nearly every CCTV camera in the district. As the syndicate's former star assassin, Elara knew the access code to the room.
Her fingers danced over the keyboard, searching for reports of tonight's incidents. If what she felt was true, the Alpha had to be causing chaos in the city to find her.
An encrypted video file from Obsidian Nightclub caught her attention. The recording was timestamped three hours earlier.
Elara opened the video. Her eyes widened.
On the screen, she saw Raga, dressed in an expensive suit, strangling Marco with one hand. She saw Kael's unnatural speed as he incapacitated the security guards. And at the end of the video, she saw the silent confrontation between Raga and Gideon. No gunfight had taken place—only a chilling tension before Raga turned and walked away, leaving a business card on the table addressed to Bastian.
"He really came down into the human city," Elara whispered, her voice trembling.
Conflicting emotions assailed her. One part of her—her wolf—struggled to run into the man's arms, while her human side was horrified by how far the Alpha was willing to cross the line to hunt her down.
"Handsome man, isn't he?"
The deep, cold voice from the doorway froze Elara's blood. She turned slowly and found Bastian standing there. The mafia boss held a glass of bourbon, his eyes fixed sharply on the monitor displaying Raga's face.
Bastian stepped inside and locked the door behind him with a terrifying click.
"Gideon reported to me ten minutes ago," Bastian said casually, though he approached Elara like a predator cornering its prey. "Two men with golden eyes came to our club. Broke my manager's neck, beat up my guards, and had the nerve to ask where you were."
Bastian stopped directly behind Elara's chair. He placed one hand on the backrest while holding the glass in the other, trapping Elara in place. The smell of alcohol and expensive cigar smoke billowed around her, choking her lungs.
"You said you didn't know who you met in the forest, Elara," Bastian whispered right into the girl's ear, his voice dangerously low. "But this man... a man capable of radiating a killing aura so fierce that even Gideon hesitated to pull the trigger... this man is searching for you as if you were the air he needed to breathe."
Elara swallowed, struggling to maintain her blank expression. "It must be a coincidence. They might be bounty hunters—"
"Don't insult me, Elara!" Bastian suddenly roared, slamming his bourbon glass onto the table until it shattered. The shards scraped the back of Elara's hand, but the girl didn't flinch.
Bastian leaned toward her, gripping Elara's jaw and forcing her to look into the mafia boss's face, now twisted with obsessive fury.
"The man on that screen is Alpha Raga of the Blackwood Pack," Bastian hissed, his eyes flashing with madness. "My intelligence isn't that bad. I know who he is, and I know your people's ridiculous laws about fated mates. He's your Mate, isn't he?"
Elara's breath stopped. The golden cage that had protected her all this time had now become an execution chamber.
"You belong to me, Elara," Bastian growled, rubbing the glass scratch on her hand until her blood stained his thumb. "And I don't like sharing what's mine. If this wild dog wants to play on my territory to take you from me, I'll welcome him. I'll cut off his head and send it back to the forest in a gift box."