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Grass and dirt and the sky cycled past out of order. Something caught my hip. My elbow hit a rock. I stopped at the bottom of the slope against the concrete lip of a drainage channel, with my face in the dirt and my playlist still going in one earbud because the other had come out somewhere on the way down.

I lay there. The music continued, inappropriately upbeat. Ironically, Cardi B was singing Up.

My phone had not made the trip in my pocket. I could hear it — or rather, I heard the sound of the screen cracking and the device settling somewhere above and to the left.

I rolled onto my back and looked up at the slope. It was not a large slope. It was maybe fifteen feet of steep embankment. In the context of the things that had tried to kill or inconvenience me in the last month — wolves, corporate warfare, an elevator, Magnus Blackwood's tongue — it was genuinely not impressive.

It had, however, been enough.

I sat up. My elbow was bleeding, a shallow scrape that stung with the injustice of minor injuries. My hip would bruise. My left ankle, when I assessed it, did not feel like itself. Not broken, but twisted. Enough that when I put weight on it experimentally, standing up from the drainage channel with one hand against the concrete for balance, the ankle communicated its displeasure in clear and unambiguous terms.

I sat back down.

Above me, the park continued its evening. The top of the embankment was out of sight of the main path. I had gone further than I realized when I veered off. Or the slope had carried me further than I thought. Either way, I could not see the detail. The detail could not see me. My phone was somewhere above me.

I could shout. The detail would hear me. They would come. I sat with that option for a moment.

I had been rescued once in my adult life, and it was by a wolf who had carried me out of a park in his arms, put me in a cabin, blackmailed me into corporate espionage, and was now sexually tormenting me.

I was also not seriously hurt. I was a grown woman with a twisted ankle and a cracked phone. This was not a crisis. This was an inconvenience.

I was not a damsel. I had never been a damsel. Damsels waited in towers for someone to notice the light in the window. I had been screwing in my own lights and climbing my own walls since before I was old enough to vote.

I did not need a man to carry me out of the park. And I absolutely, categorically, did not need Magnus Blackwood in charge of my orgasms.

I was going to get up. I was going to climb that embankment on my own. I was going to walk back to my residence, draw a bath, and take care of the situation myself. Then I was going to make a cup of tea, open my laptop, and finish the Omondi proposal, because Darius Omondi had treated me like a professional and his tea operation deserved a proposal that reflected that.

I was going to do these things. In that order. Without assistance.

I planted my good foot, put my hand against the concrete lip, and stood up. Then I put weight on my left foot.

The ankle had not changed its opinion. A loud, non-negotiable opinion that communicated itself directly from my foot to my brain in a single white-hot transmission. My leg buckled. I went back down to the ground with considerably less dignity than I had risen from it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

MAGNUS

The pack meeting had been running for two hours and forty minutes. The agenda had three items remaining. I was pretending complete attentiveness while managing four other things simultaneously behind a face that showed none of them.

The current agenda item was territorial boundary documentation for the northern corridor, which was important and which Vidar was handling with his usual competence and which did not require my active participation beyond the occasional nod that signaled I was present and engaged. Meanwhile, I checked my phone under the table.

Detail check-in, I texted. I had been running them every forty minutes since I left Nell. Darius Omonodi had disappeared from the building by the time my men reached the ground floor. Only a shifter could do that.

Subject went for a run. Park perimeter. No threats. All clear.

Nell running? The image of all those curves in motion; her locs pulled back, her perfect handful sized breasts ignoring the containment of a sports bra. Was she fast? She couldn't possibly match my wolf. But I'd like to chase after her. To corner her. Then to pounce.

I put my phone face down on my thigh.

That could not happen. I was getting married. The thought arrived with the flat insistence it had been arriving with for weeks, the internal memo I kept sending myself that kept getting filed without being read.

I was getting married. I should ask for a photograph of Rosalind. I should know what my future wife looked like before I met her at an introduction dinner arranged by our mothers.

I should use her name more. Rosalind. I had been thinking of her as the Lobo princess for so long that the name felt like a foreign language.

Rosalind.

Rosalind Lobo.