Chapter 3

Seren

"You think this is shaping the world? You think this is conquering?" Seren tried to be sassy, but she felt the smallest wobble in her chin. Her nose stung and her eyes burned. She was going to cry. It was the last thing she wanted. She'd humiliate herself if she let a single tear fall. Crying was fine for anyone and everyone, but not for her. Not here, not now.

The worst part of it wasn't the tears. It was Rome's body so close to hers. He towered over her. He'd easily dominate her physically. He was a powerful storm, potent masculinity. He smelled good. Not like other men, who wore fancy suits and spicy colognes. He smelled like oil and work. A little bit like sweat, but beneath that, like his own scent. Alluring. Intoxicating.

That her nostrils pricked and her body leaned slightly to the side, sinfully craving his nearness even though she'd never admit it, made her want to cry even worse than the dread of what she was there to do. He was a male and he was wolf, and that was all her body cared about, but her body was a traitor. Her body could go to hell and so could Rome, with his conquering and his contracts.

"The world can burn for all I care." He didn't back down an inch. His voice was cold and dead.

It still lured her in. She was like a fish, helplessly wriggling in a net, drawn ever closer to her doom.

She'd dressed in layers. Black leggings, velvet dress, boy shorts and a sports bra underneath, a light sweater overtop. She'd tied her shoes extra tight, like those laces could buy her time.

It wasn't going to save her. She was in the lair of the beast now.

A beast who would breathe fire over everything, set the world to destruction. Except… he hadn't. He'd built this business. He appeared to thrive despite whatever happened to make him a lone wolf in a human world. He hadn't yet unleashed his fire.

"Except?" she prodded, hardly daring to breathe. If she inhaled, she'd only take more of him in.

"Except… my daughter. She needs a place. She's the sole reason I care about anything."

She shook off the black spell he cast so effortlessly over her traitorous body. It was a wolf thing. It had to be. The human in her would never crave or yearn like this. The animal in her appreciated Rome's blatant, dangerous sexuality. He was no alpha, but he was entirely alpha male. At the same time, the wolf in her would never dream of submission. It was the human part of her that put her name on that contract.

"Now that we've established you're not a classically trained psychopath, can we please just get this over with?" She crossed her arms and stepped to the side, freeing herself from his sphere.

Laughable. She wasn't free. He dominated the entire space.

He said nothing and she was forced to continue. "Or did you want to stand here trading insults all night? I'm not giving you extra time. An agreement is an agreement, lawyers or not." She'd signed and he'd signed, and they'd agreed that if the contract never saw the light of day, it would be best for both of them. She'd never live down the shame of her parents finding out that she'd done something like this. It would have been easier to handle if it was a soul contract.

Wasn't it, though?

It might have only specified that she'd spent one hour on Monday nights between seven to eight, but anyone could fill in the blanks. One million dollars in exchange for her time. Eight hours on Sundays, one hour on Mondays. What the hell else would she be doing to pay back that kind of money?

"Where do you want it?" Her face heated and she damned Rome's black soul for goading her into having to ask.

"Where do I want you ? In my office. Away from the windows."

"It's good to know you want to be the sole voyeur."

"I don't like to share." Possession. His tone dripped with it, like he already owned all of her and not just her body.

She fumbled for something to say, but a terrible truth lodged in her throat, cutting off her air. How could anyone be so physically beautiful and so ugly in every other way? "You share this space."

"It's not the same thing."

"I don't belong to you."

"For the next six months, you do."

Approximately two hundred and sixteen hours. She'd done the math with an average of four weeks in a month. She didn't want to look it up to find out how many extra Sundays there might be in that time. Two hundred odd hours was already bad enough. It wasn't a lifetime. She could get through this. There was a word for what she was doing, but she pushed that to the back of her mind. There was also another word, one she preferred—she was surviving . She was doing what she needed to do, and she was making the choice herself.

She had to because she had no other choice. The penalty for a broken contract was that she handed sole ownership of her company to Rome.

If she thought this was bad, being under his thumb this way, she couldn't imagine what it would be like with him as owner of her business. It would be a reminder for the rest of her life that not only had she failed, she'd shamed herself, ground herself into nothing. Weakness was not an option. Not this time.

"The office. You're not going to make me go into the garage and spread-eagle myself over some godforsaken machine or stick tools up into forbidden places?"

"That would harm you."

"As if this doesn't," she snapped. Don't pretend you care. Don't pretend you're not the devil himself.

"There are different kinds of harm. Acceptable levels."

Acceptable levels? What did that even freaking mean?

She knew the way to his office. She had to reclaim some control of the situation. She led the way. She wouldn't cower. She'd come to him. She'd put her name on that paper he'd written out. If she let him dictate her every move, she'd be powerless, and there was no way her wolf was going to bow down to that. She'd split herself in half if she didn't face this with bravery.

Still. Her hand trembled when she flicked the light on in his office. It was probably the same temperature as the front, but goosebumps broke out on her skin underneath her clothes. A sick, cold sweat coated her body. The urge to shift was wild. She couldn't remember a single time when she'd ever had so much trouble stopping the wolf from coming out, and she'd been raised from the time she was born in human society.

The hair on the back of her neck stood up, hackles at attention, at the sound of Rome's footfalls behind her.

She had to step further into the room or have him at her back again. The wolf wouldn't be cornered, so she spun around and uttered another challenge.

"Why me for your daughter? Why not some other wolf? Why not your family?"

She'd been tattooing this man for a year and a half. She knew parts of his body with a level of intimacy that made her blood run hot. She'd always tried to remove herself, think of the body as a canvas or in that clinical way that a doctor would. It wasn't quite possible to do that with Rome. Not when he had a body that begged to be worshipped. She'd maintained a professional veneer, and she was proud of that. Still, she'd memorized every bit of him that she'd ever seen and inked. She knew his skin, she knew his body, but she knew very little about him.

A wolf living in the city? No wolf lived amongst humans if they could help it. She'd be very surprised if Rome had a pack. All signs pointed to him being a lone wolf.

Her parents were packless. They'd been that way since before she was born. Her father hadn't been cast out. He'd married her mother when they were both still part of small packs.

Any wolf had enemies, and her mother's pack was obliterated by enemy wolves. It hurt to know that her grandparents had been murdered by her own kind. Wolves weren't like any other shifter. They could be dangerous, especially when they were left to thrive in their own world. Her father's pack, unable to maintain a solid unit on their own any longer, eventually drifted off to support themselves. It meant living in cities and towns, often alone, but maintaining distant ties with their kin.

It had been apparent to her as soon as she'd realized Rome was a wolf, that he was pure blooded. From one wolf to another, his blood sang a song that hers answered. That song had far too much of a hold over her than she wanted to admit. Rome wasn't just dark and cuttingly beautiful. He was in his prime, powerful, daunting, disgustingly beautiful.

"I'm going to leave the room and you're going to put these on."

Her lungs shrank to nothing when he thrust a white cotton ball at her. The fabric was soft against her hands. Another contradiction for something so appalling. She was scared to unravel it, but she had to. Gradually, a pair of panties took shape.

A sharp laugh burst out of her. "What the hell are these?"

She couldn't imagine Rome shopping in the granny panty section, but where else would he have found them?

His lips pulled back from sharp white teeth. "You wanted to be covered. You will be."

"I'm not putting those on. What kind of fetish do you have?"

"You will put them on. Unless you want to walk out this door right now and hand over the keys to your building. I can have the paperwork ready for you to sign by tomorrow morning."

"You're a bastard."

"No doubt, but I don't owe myself a million dollars."

"That doesn't even make sense."

"Neither does coming to me for cash, signing an agreement, and showing up only to back down over a pair of white cotton underwear."

She shook the offending object, the idea of it so repulsive that she could barely swallow. "Fine. Enjoy the peepshow."

"Why would I need to spy on you when I'll have everything I want right in front of me?"

"You won't lead me to believe you have any honor. Not after this."

He shrugged and walked out of the room. Whistling , like there was anything to be happy about. He slammed the door. The office was windowless. As clean and clinical as when she'd been in here the first time, giving the space an unused feel.

She stared down at the underwear. The tags attached counted for something. They remained only ninety-eight percent evil.

Her wolf wanted to charge out and shred the things then do a number on the office and the man who it belonged to, but she forced back the destructive anger. She bent and untied her shoes and took them off. Slipped off her leggings and peeled down the black boy short panties. If she put the white ones on over everything, that would only make things worse.

She had to get control of herself. If she couldn't master her own feelings, she wasn't going to be able to steer the situation in any direction. Acting childishly wasn't going to get her through this. Rome would only devise something worse for every single time she acted out of spite.

She'd tugged her dress down and left her leggings, panties, and shoes carefully in a ball behind the desk when Rome opened the door. He did it slowly, giving her time to ready herself.

She didn't like the clipboard in Rome's hands. He walked right past her and perched on the edge of his desk, graceful, lean and built at the same time, at ease but deceptively coiled and ready for action, like a snake in tall grass.

She might have the stupid panties on under her dress and they might burn like they were made of fire, but she rolled her eyes and forced her back straight. "The doctor-patient fantasy is incredibly overdone. You know that, right?"

"I'm going to ask you some questions and you had better answer them honestly. Your future will be much more unpleasant and uncomfortable if you lie."

A new knot of tension coiled in her belly. "What kind of questions?"

"Have you ever done anal?"

Her mouth dropped. She was so terrified she forgot to be humiliated. "What the freaking what ?" It took her more than a moment to find her balance again. "I'm not going to answer that."

"I suppose I'll just have to guess as to the size of the butt plug I'm going to purchase for you."

"Fuck you!"

"Sadly, I won't be participating past an instructor level. I thought I'd made that clear. I'm not going to touch you with any part of my physical body."

"What kind of terrible things do you fantasize about?"

A few words, a single sentence, knocked down her tower of bricks she'd walled around herself. She was vulnerable now. Exposed. That contract wasn't specific. She'd never insisted on a list of things Rome couldn't do. She'd blindly signed, like a total amateur and an idiot. When was she ever going to learn that she couldn't trust anyone? That chivalry was indeed dead, and honor was a foreign concept to people like Rome and to institutions like insurance companies, which started this whole stupid mess.

They might have finished it, but they didn't start it. One man lied and lied and took those lies to court and had a judge decide in his favor. He's the one responsible for all of this. If she was more of a wolf, a true wolf, if she'd been raised in a different world by different parents, if it was kill or be killed, if she was more like Rome,

she would hunt that bastard down and force him to give back every penny of her money. She'd make him admit the truth.

Even thinking about harming another person, even one who had lied and ruined her and caused her downfall, caused her to have to trade her body in this terrible exchange, sickened her.

She wasn't that kind of wolf.

She'd rather endure six months of humiliation and depravity.

And clearly, it was going to be utterly depraved. She'd been so na?ve to think there could be a limit.

"That's a question for me to ask you. It's only fair that you enjoy our time together. It would be much more pleasant that way."

"It's so cliché that you'd enjoy this." She finally looked into his black eyes again. There was nothing in the indoor lighting to distinguish the parts of them. No ring, no bursts, no grains, no patterns. Just endless black like a starless night.

"Explain."

"You enjoy pain."

"You're equally as tattooed as I am."

"I'm an artist. It's different. I don't enjoy anyone's pain. I try to do my best to limit the discomfort if I can."

"Do you like it when your clients go against your advice? When you know it could be easy for them and they refuse? When they need to punish themselves to prove something?"

His eyes might be black, but they were a lake of fire, probing her skin, trying to get inside her. She wrapped her arms around her torso like she could ward him off. They were at an end, she could feel it. An end of his patience, his questions, his willingness to wait. A new kind of torture was about to begin.