“I’d assumed you built it.”

“Thought you said I couldn’t do anything laborious with my hands?”

I smiled. It seems he remembered everything I said, even if it was years ago. “That’s an impressive memory you have.”

“Hard to forget insults. They stick like verbal glue.”

I turned on my back and looked at him. “I’m not going to lie, Wheeler. I despised you back then for how you treated April. I’m not a fan of men who degrade women, and the way you were doing it was arrogant and showy. In a public mall, of all places. Imagine how belittled she must have felt.”

“Yeah, it was a shitty thing to do,” he agreed. “Knowing her now makes it harder to remember, but back then, she was just a human trying to break apart the pack.”

“People are more than who they allow you to see.”

“Not me. What you see is what you get.”

I pulled the sheet up higher. “So you keep saying, but that’s not true. You didn’t have to risk your life bringing me here. Let me see your arm.” Without waiting, I pulled his right arm away from his head, studying his tattoos closely. “Why does the chain have a broken link?”

The silence was so heavy that I could hear the electric buzzing of the fridge.

“You’ve never told anyone, have you?” I asked. “There’s something about your past you’re hiding. You wear ink on your body like armor, but that’s not a confession—it’s a defense. Showing isn’t telling, not when people don’t know what they’re looking at.” I turned on my left side, staring at the marks on his shoulder. Up close, something about them looked off.

“It can never leave this room,” he stressed in a low voice.

“You have nothing to fear. I give you my word I’ll never speak of anything you reveal to me within this room. I’ll tell you some of my dark secrets so we’ll be even in the blackmail game. But I expect the same courtesy.”

He pursed his lips and gave a short nod. “Deal.”

That moment changed everything between us. It’s a rare opportunity when a person removes all the layers and allows you to see who they are at the core. Sometimes we don’t even get that chance with our own family or friends, and maybe it’s easier to let someone you don’t have any emotional connection with see that side of you. There’s no fear of rejection, ridicule, or withholding love. We had nothing to lose.

“So? Do tell.”

Chapter 12

As Wheeler prepared to tell me his dark secrets, I felt a flutter of anxiety. What was the price of this kind of trust between two people who had previously disliked each other? I’d begun to see Wheeler in a different light—glimpses of who he was hiding from the world. A girl in my profession learns a lot about the masks men wear—the double lives they lead. The more I got to know Wheeler, the more he fascinated me. What made a man like him tick? Men weren’t grumpy just for the hell of it. Men also didn’t risk their lives to save a panther, and that selfless act changed everything about the way I saw him.