Chapter 3

Celeste Benton POV:

"Look what you did!" Darrien roared, storming across the Persian rug.

Veins bulged along his throat. He stopped inches from my face, his breath reeking of bourbon.

"The press is streaming live from the lobby!" he snarled, spitting as he screamed. "They caught Chloe exiting my suite! If you had stayed at my side like you were told, none of this would have happened! You brought this ruin down on my head by running off!"

I looked at him, feeling nothing but total, bone-deep disgust. "I caused this? You were spread across a vanity table five minutes after I left the ballroom!"

"It was a corporate setup!" he yelled, throwing his arms wide. "Someone drugged my glass! As my mate, your only job was to cover for me, not shatter my mirrors and summon the vultures to my door!"

"That is enough, Darrien," Beaulah's voice sliced through the air like a whip.

Darrien flinched, snapping his jaws shut and retreating like a kicked cur.

Beaulah slid open a black leather portfolio on the obsidian table. She unclasped a heavy gold pen, scrawled a signature across a slip of paper, and slid it toward me.

A cashier's check from the Page treasury. Five hundred thousand dollars.

"Here is your reality," Beaulah said, steepling her diamond-clad fingers. "You will sign a standard non-disclosure agreement. Tomorrow at eight sharp, you will sit beside Darrien at a press conference. You will announce that you were the woman in that room, and that the model photographed was merely an assistant handling a wardrobe malfunction. You will confirm your bond is unbroken."

Around the room, four Page elders nodded with cold detachment. To them, a wolfless girl from the slums had no right to dignity. Five hundred thousand dollars was more than my adoptive father made in five years running freight vans.

"Take the money, Celeste," an elder near the window scoffed. "It's ten times what your blood is worth."

I looked down at the check. Five hundred thousand dollars to swallow my soul, lie to the city, and spend my life chained to a coward and the adoptive sister carrying his bastard.

A strange, freezing clarity settled over my pulse.

I stepped forward. I reached out and took the check.

Beaulah's lips curved into a smug, triumphant smirk. "Good. At least you have some sense—"

I gripped the paper with both thumbs and ripped it down the middle.

The sharp tear sounded like a whip crack. I folded the halves, ripped them again, and shredded the check into white confetti.

I stepped forward and hurled the scraps straight into Beaulah's face.

The paper fluttered over her emerald silk and into her hot tea.

A collective gasp sucked the air from the room.

"The Benton family might be poor," I said, my voice ringing out like a battle cry, "but our spine is not for sale to a house of lying cowards."

"You insolent little bitch!" Darrien lunged, his hand shooting forward to seize my throat. "You don't walk away from me! I am the heir of this pack! You will submit!"

Years of tactical police training took over before his Alpha strength could pin me. I twisted my shoulder, slipped beneath his reach, and grabbed his wrist, driving my weight down to wrench his joint.

With my free hand, I dug my thumb beneath the heavy four-carat engagement ring on my left hand.

The metal ripped skin as it came free, but I tore it off in one violent jerk.

"Take your damn ring!" I snarled.

I drove the heavy platinum setting straight across Darrien's cheekbone.

The diamond tore through his flesh like a razor blade. Darrien howled in agony, stumbling backward, clutching his face as blood poured between his fingers.

The ring bounced off his chest and clattered into the trash bin in the corner.

"Our engagement is dead," I announced to the room.

"Restrain her!" Beaulah shrieked, kicking her chair backward into the paneling. "Lock her in the subterranean cells! She does not leave this compound until she signs!"

The four tactical guards lunged at once.

I didn't blink. I seized a heavy lead-crystal ashtray off the table and hurled it with full force.

It struck the lead enforcer squarely in the bridge of his nose with a wet crunch. He roared, clutching his shattered face, blinding the man behind him for a single fraction of a second.

That was all I needed.

I dropped low, ducked under an outstretched claw, and burst through the heavy double doors into the corridor.

"Block the elevators!" Darrien's muffled scream echoed behind me.

I hit the heavy emergency fire door with my shoulder, tumbling into the raw concrete stairwell. My bare feet hit the freezing steps, tiny chips of metal and gravel driving into my soles, but the adrenaline burned the pain out of my veins. I threw myself down the steps three at a time, using the handrails to sling my body around the turns.

Two floors. Four. Six.

Above me, the fire doors banged open, accompanied by the guttural, echoing snarls of shifting wolves.

I slammed through the ground-level crash bar and burst into the subterranean chill of the P2 parking garage.

The air reeked of damp concrete, gasoline, and motor oil.

"Spread out! Pillar twelve!" a guard roared from the stairwell.

I ducked behind a thick concrete column, my chest heaving, blood smearing the floor beneath my torn feet. Fifty yards away, the exit ramp was barred by a heavy hydraulic gate and an armed booth.

Behind me was a dead-end wall of high-voltage transformers.

I was trapped.

I crouched, wrapping both hands around a jagged chunk of broken curb. If I was going down, they were going to bleed for every inch.

The lead wolf rounded the pillar, his nose twitching as he caught the copper scent of my blood.

"There! Take her down!"

They raised their shock batons and surged forward.

Suddenly, blinding high-intensity halogen beams tore through the gloom.

A massive, matte-black armored SUV roared around the corner, its engine screaming like a jet turbine. The vehicle drifted sideways with a deafening screech of burning rubber, slamming to a halt inches from the guards, cutting off their line of fire with an impenetrable wall of ballistic steel.

The rear door unlatched and swung open.

Inside, the cabin was a cavern of pitch blackness.

I didn't stop to think. Anything was better than Beaulah's dungeons.

I dropped the concrete stone, threw myself forward, and dived headfirst into the darkness of the SUV.

The door slammed shut behind me with a pressurized, vault-like thud, cutting off the gunfire and shouting outside.

I collapsed onto the plush floor mats, gasping for air, trembling violently.

Then, from the captain's chair above me, the scent drifted down.

Bitter mountain frost. Ancient black cedar.

The Alpha from the dark suite.