The car stopped, and then the passenger door swung open. Felicity jammed her feet into the ground to stop.

Oh, no. It couldn’t be.

Helena came out wearing the most astonished expression Felicity had ever seen on someone. It was the sort of expression she would expect to see on one’s face if they saw a UFO land in front of them. Instead, it was only Helena watching Felicity in the midst of her escape.

“You’re running away.” Helena couldn’t have sounded more surprised.

Felicity could hardly believe the words herself and she was the one trying to do it.

“Move!” Felicity barked. She shoved Helena away from the car and glanced inside. The alpha Zeke looked her once over and his lips curled up into a predatory grin.

“Need a lift?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Then get in.”

She shoved herself in, slammed the car door shut on her dress but he didn’t peel away from the curb.

Hands shaking, she wiped hair out of her face and stared at the growing crowd from the door she’d exited. He was coming for her. She could feel it as surely as if their bodies moved as one. His steps were thundering, barreling, and storming through the hall for her, filled with anger and shock.

She’d still maintained that she was the most surprised. Yet, doing this felt more right than standing in that hall with all those people waiting. When someone else’s name had been on those invitations first, and a mad woman wanted to challenge her. It all felt so wrong. It shouldn’t be like that.

“What are you waiting for?” she all but screamed the words. Couldn’t he see this was the very definition of an emergency?

She fiercely started biting her fingernails, tearing skin and nail in her wake. The reporters came snapping pictures of the car and she ducked her face away.

“For the perfect moment, darlin’.”

“Please, just go,” she begged, her words a hoarse whisper. Her eyes started watering. The faster she blinked to try to cast them away, the faster they fell down her face. “Please.” She didn’t want to see him. She couldn’t. What if she couldn’t go through with it?

All of a sudden, a clatter of excitement went up in the crowd. Camera flashes whipped at the night casting away the shadows and revealing one dark and fearsome face that came from a man standing above the rest.

And he came straight for her.

“Go! Now!”

“Just a little longer, chère.”

Dominic started running with all his vampire speed. She panted as the tightness in her chest squeezed to an impossible point, until her breaths wheezed out from her in a thin stream of air.

Oh god, oh god, oh god.

He came within feet of them. She could almost feel his heat, smell his unique scent, but then the car pitched forward.

Zeke slammed the accelerator down and the car lurched fast. Her mouth dropped as she stared into Dom’s stunned, angry face in the side mirror. He came to an abrupt standstill, staring. So much emotion clouded his eyes she couldn’t begin to decipher all of it, but she’d seen one thing. She’d seen something which could not be unseen—his pain. She’d hurt him.

They locked eyes. He did not come after her and she did not tell Zeke to stop the car. They watched each other until they swung around the bend and she could watch no more.

She’d left him. They both knew it, and she wasn’t even sure why she did it.

Doubt.

Zeke reached over and gave her thigh a pat. Felicity jerked her leg away. “Ah, there, there, darlin’. Ole’ Zeke’ll take care of you now. You want away from Dom? Away from all this?”

His offer was like a prayer answered.

Felicity could stop all of this. She could get out of this car and go back to him. It wasn’t too late to fix this, to tell Dom that she had been acting irrationally but she felt better now. To tell him that she wasn’t terrified about all of this.

But it would all be a lie.

So, Felicity met a pair of bright blue eyes that wavered unsteadily with knowledge she did not quite understand, and nodded. “Yeah, I do.”

Zeke tossed his head back and laughed. The laugh sounded very much like he’d just gotten something he wanted.

Chapter 24

Everyone in the room stood still as if they were trying to become one with their surroundings by melding into it.

Tense didn’t begin to cut the atmosphere of Dominic Blackmoore’s office only hours after his bruid abandoned him at their mating ceremony. Even the air noticed the tension and slowed itself. becoming stifling. No one dared to breathe loud or speak up. Dominic’s brothers simply stared at the wall, at the floor, or at the ceiling, anywhere but in his eyes. Eyes that bordered on violence.

Dominic leaned forward, the leather of his desk chair squeaking as he grabbed the decanter and poured himself another glass. The thick, viscous fluid laced with spirits settled in his body like fire, a fire he stoked with each fresh swallow. His glass clinked on his desk as he slammed the empty cup down.

“I want her found.”

“I’ve already got a team on her,” Grayson said.

Dom stared into his empty glass, and then poured another. “You won’t be able to find her,” he found himself saying. It was as if none of this was happening and he was in someone else’s body dealing with the pain and loss. It couldn’t have been Felicity he saw willingly running from him. He’d seen everything he needed to in her eyes—the fear, the panic, the pain.

She left me.

“Then why bother sending a team after her?”

“Because I said so.”

Vasilius sucked on the end of a cigar. A cloud of smoke billowed around him as he spoke. “We can never find the alpha when he wants to hide. We already know he’s ditched the car. One of the boys spotted it on the side of the highway.”

“I’ll get a team out there.” Grayson pulled out his cell and made the call.

Lucas pitched in his ideas; most of them filled with worry over her being alone with the wild alpha. A man whose sanity was in question.

Dom listened to all this but the voices sounded as though they came from the back of his head. From some faraway distance at the end of a long tunnel.

In his whole life, very few things had ever surprised him. He preferred life this way. Surprises meant he couldn’t prepare for what was about to happen. Unpredictability, not knowing, these were legitimate fears that could eat at him until it consumed him. To ensure that surprises, especially ones he was not capable of dealing with, didn’t happen he planned. It all stayed in his head, but it was there. A neat little plan with all the possible consequences to any circumstance that might warrant it.

Tonight, the night he’d mate with Felicity Shaw, his list had covered the possible consequences.

But not this kind.

His glass started shaking on his desk. He watched it with mute interest before finally pulling his thoughts away to find the cause of it. Looking down, he found his leg brushing up against his desk, and it was shaking so hard he’d been moving the desk.

He jerked his leg back and poured another drink. A light-headed rush swam through his head, muddying his thoughts, making them fuzzy.

He’d prepared for every possible outcome tonight. He’d been prepared for Helena which had been the obvious danger. He knew she’d most likely make good on her threat if only to piss him off, and so he found a way to trap her. He’d had his lawyer draw up a document cutting off her financially. With separation, the male had to pay his bruid a yearly allowance based off the life she’d been accustomed to. If he broke the contract, which he’d been prepared to do tonight, then she could sue him over it. However, after his lawyers were through with her she’d have no money left to hire her own.

He had planned to use the money against her if she dared to challenge Felicity. The only thing Helena valued above herself was money. Money was her power. He’d even prepared himself for the instance in case Zeke, or any other male for that matter, decided to challenge him for the rights to Felicity. He’d spent half the night training with his brothers, fighting until his knuckles bled and his ribs ached and bruised. He’d had to sit down, drink blood, and heal up before he returned to Felicity later that morning so she wouldn’t know. He didn’t want her to worry.