The trick to carrying four champagne flutes on a tray through a room full of wolves is to never let your heartbeat spike. Wren had learned that the hard way, in her first month, when a stack of glasses had gone down like cymbals because some junior Voss cousin had looked at her a beat too long.

She didn't spike anymore. She'd trained it out of herself the way you train out anything — badly, painfully, and then all at once, until one day it's just gone.

"Table nine wants you," Priya muttered, falling into step beside her with a tray of her own. "Specifically you. Some finance guy keeps asking where 'the girl with the good memory' went."

"Tell him the girl with the good memory has a name tag."

"He can't read it from that angle, Nora, he's staring at your—"

"Priya."

"I'm just saying, if you wanted to marry rich, this hotel is *lousy* with options."

Wren didn't answer that one. Six months ago she'd have laughed. Six months ago a lot of things had been different.

The Aurelia's grand ballroom was doing what it did best tonight — glittering, quietly, expensively, the kind of party where nobody actually drank the champagne so much as held it like a prop. Voss Collection's autumn gala. Investors, board members, three visiting pack Alphas who'd flown in on the company jet, and enough old money in one room to buy a small country and still complain about the appetizers.

Wren kept her tray level and her eyes on the middle distance, the way you did when your entire survival depended on being furniture that occasionally spoke.

She saw him before she heard the room shift.

Cassius Voss didn't enter rooms so much as reorganize them. Conversations found a new gravity. Even the string quartet seemed to play a half-step more carefully. He was in black, unornamented, the kind of expensive that didn't announce itself, and he had the particular stillness of a man who had spent years teaching his body not to give anything away.

Wren's hands did not shake. She had promised herself, a long time ago, standing in a hotel bathroom in a city three states from here, that they never would again.

Her wolf had other opinions.

*There he is,* Fen said, low and unimpressed, somewhere behind her ribs. *Want me to bite him or just glare?*

*Neither. We're working.*

*We're always working. It's boring. Bite him a little.*

Wren ignored her, because ignoring Fen was a skill she'd had to build right alongside the not-shaking. She turned the tray, angled her body toward the kitchen doors, and told herself, the way she told herself every single time, that she did not need to look at him again.

She looked at him again.

He wasn't looking at her. That was the whole point of Nora Hale — she was a woman he had never once looked at, not really, not the way he'd looked at Wren Ashford for one unbearable, electric month before he'd decided she was a liability. Cassius Voss had rejected his fated mate in front of three hundred people, and the woman he'd rejected didn't exist anymore. She'd been very thorough about that.

"He's coming this way," Priya said, delighted, the way only someone who didn't know the whole story could be delighted.

"He's coming toward the bar, which happens to be behind me."

"Sure. The bar." Priya adjusted her own tray, smirking. "You're doing the thing."

"What thing."

"The thing where you go somewhere else in your head. You've got customer-service face on, but your eyes went somewhere colder."

Wren didn't answer, because Cassius Voss had just stopped four feet away, and every part of her had gone very, very still.

Up close he looked tired in a way the photographs never caught — a thinness at the edges, a man running a company and a pack and a grief he'd never named, all at the same time, on the same reserves. His eyes swept the room the way they always did, cataloguing threats and investors with equal precision.

They landed on her for exactly one second.

Something in his jaw tightened, almost imperceptibly. His wolf, she knew — she *knew*, the way you know weather is coming before the sky changes — had reacted before he had. His nostrils flared, just slightly. His gaze sharpened.

Wren held the tray steady and did not breathe.

Then he blinked, and whatever had crossed his face smoothed back into the practiced nothing he wore like a second skin, and he said, "You're new," in the tone of a man cataloguing hotel assets.

"Three months, sir," Wren said, in the flat, pleasant register of Nora Hale, a woman with no opinions about him whatsoever. "Nora Hale. Front of house."

"Hale." He said the name like he was testing its weight and finding it unremarkable, which was exactly the point. "You were at the Ashford settlement briefing. Taking notes."

Her pulse did not spike. She was almost proud of that.

"I was, sir. Someone had to write down all the ways the Ashford family embezzled themselves into bankruptcy." She kept her voice light, curious even, a woman with no stake in the sentence at all. "Fascinating case, from what I heard."

Something flickered behind his eyes — not recognition, not yet, but something adjacent to it, a held breath he didn't seem aware he was holding.

"Fascinating isn't the word I'd use," Cassius said.

"No," Wren agreed. "I imagine it isn't."

He looked at her one beat too long. Long enough that Priya, three feet away, went very quiet. Long enough that Fen went still and sharp and focused behind Wren's ribs, a held growl with nowhere to go.

Then someone called his name from across the ballroom — Julian's voice, easy and warm, the voice of a man who had never once in his life been suspected of anything — and Cassius's attention snapped away like a rope cut clean.

"Ms. Hale," he said, already turning.

"Sir."

She watched him go, watched the room reorganize itself around him again, watched Julian Voss fall into step at his elbow with a smile that had once made Wren feel safe and now made her stomach turn to ice water.

Julian's eyes found her over Cassius's shoulder.

He didn't smile at her. He didn't need to. He just held her gaze for exactly as long as it took to make sure she understood that he saw her — all of her, the whole inconvenient truth of her — and then he looked away first, unhurried, like a man setting down a card he'd play later.

*He knows,* Fen said, all the humor gone out of her voice.

*I know he knows.*

*He's going to use it.*

Wren picked her tray back up, and did not let her hands shake, and walked back toward the kitchen like a woman with absolutely nothing to lose.