Chapter 3

By morning, I had almost convinced myself I'd imagined the whole thing.

Almost.

The scratches on the outside of my door—four long, deep grooves carved into solid oak—told a different story.

I traced them with shaking fingers. No human fingernail could do this.

When I walked into the kitchen, Lucian was already there, fully dressed in a crisp white shirt, looking like he'd slept perfectly. A cup of coffee sat waiting for me across the marble island.

"Good morning," he said, not looking up from his phone. "How did you sleep?"

"What happened to my door?"

He didn't even flinch.

"I told you. I sleepwalk."

"Sleepwalkers don't leave claw marks."

His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. Then he looked up, and his eyes were so calm, so controlled, that it almost made things worse.

"I have a condition. It's managed. That's all you need to know."

"That's not even close to all I need to know. I need to know what I married."

The word what instead of who slipped out before I could stop it. Something dangerous shifted in his expression—not offense, but recognition. As if I'd gotten closer to the truth than he expected.

Before he could respond, the elevator doors chimed, and a woman strode in like she owned the place.

She was tall, platinum blonde, and terrifyingly elegant, wearing a white dress that probably cost more than a car. Her ice-blue eyes landed on me, and her smile could have frozen a volcano.

"So this is the girl?"

Lucian's entire demeanor changed. His warmth—what little there was—vanished. He stood straighter, and an invisible wall slammed down behind his eyes.

"Helena. You weren't invited."

"I don't need an invitation to visit my brother's home." She circled me slowly, her heels clicking on the marble like a metronome. "Interesting choice. She's pretty, I suppose. In a stray-cat sort of way."

Every word she spoke dripped with contempt so refined it almost sounded like a compliment.

"Tell me, darling." She stopped right in front of me. "What exactly do you bring to the Voss family? Money? Connections? Breeding?"

"Helena." Lucian's voice dropped to a register I hadn't heard before. The air pressure in the room seemed to shift. "That's enough."

Helena ignored him entirely. She leaned in close to me, and her perfume hit like a wave—expensive and suffocating.

"You know what the last contract girl did when she found out what Lucian really is?"

My heart hammered. "What do you mean, 'the last one'?"

Helena's smile widened. She was enjoying this.

"She ran. Made it about six miles before—"

"HELENA."

The glass in Lucian's hand shattered.

Not dropped. Not slammed. Shattered—as if his grip alone had crushed it into dust. Blood dripped from his fingers onto the white marble, and he didn't even seem to notice.

Helena finally stopped talking. She looked at the broken glass, then at Lucian's bleeding hand, then at me.

"Oh," she breathed, and for the first time, her composure cracked. Something like shock—or fear—flashed in her eyes.

"You actually like this one."

She looked at me with an expression I couldn't read. Pity? Fascination? Warning?

Then she turned and walked straight to the elevator without another word.

As the doors closed, she called out, "Good luck, little stray. You're going to need it."

The silence she left behind was deafening.

I turned to Lucian. Blood was still dripping from his hand, but the cuts were—

I blinked.

The cuts were closing. Right in front of my eyes, the torn skin knit itself together, the blood stopped, and within seconds, his hand looked completely unharmed.

He noticed me staring and slowly closed his fist.

"Vivian…"

"What are you?" I whispered.

He met my eyes, and for one unguarded moment, I saw it: exhaustion, loneliness, and a desperate, terrifying hope that made him look almost human.

"Come to dinner with me tonight," he said instead of answering. "My family wants to meet you. All of them. I'll explain everything before we go. I promise."

"Everything?"

"Everything."

He held out his hand—the one that had just healed from crushing glass.

Against every rational thought in my body, I took it.

His skin was burning hot again.

That evening, as I was getting ready in my room, I found a note tucked inside the dress that had been laid out for me.

It wasn't Lucian's handwriting.

"He won't tell you the truth. So I will. Look in the drawer of his study desk. Bottom left. You'll find what he really is—and what happened to the woman before you."

It wasn't signed.

My hands were shaking, but I walked to his study. The door was unlocked.

I opened the bottom left drawer.

Inside was a single photograph: a woman who looked eerily like me, smiling at the camera. On the back, someone had written a date—exactly one year ago.

Beneath the photo was a death certificate.

Her cause of death was listed as "animal attack."