The floor-to-ceiling reinforced glass behind Julian didn't just break. It detonated.
The sound was a physical slap to the eardrums. A blast of freezing, rain-soaked New York wind whipped into the penthouse, carrying a wave of glittering, razor-sharp shrapnel.
Elara didn't scream. Her lungs forgot how to work.
A massive shadow blotted out the ceiling lights. Before she could process the movement, two hundred pounds of tailored muscle slammed into her waist.
Smack.
"Guh—" The air violently evacuated Elara's chest.
She hit the carpet hard, Julian's heavy frame pressing her flat against the floorboards. Her glasses flew off, skittering somewhere into the blurry distance. Her left knee slammed into the base of the obsidian desk with a sickening crack of pain.
But her first, panicked thought wasn't about her knee.
My spreadsheets! Through her severely myopic vision, she saw three hundred pages of meticulously indexed offshore accounts swirling into the storm like a bureaucratic blizzard. Hours of data entry. Ruined.
"Stay down," Julian snarled right next to her ear.
It wasn't the smooth, arrogant voice from a minute ago. It was wet, guttural, and violently territorial.
Elara squinted. Three figures had swung through the shattered window. They moved with a jerky, insect-like wrongness. They smelled like rotting meat and wet asphalt. Mercenary ghouls.
Julian moved. One second he was a heavy weight crushing her ribs, the next, the weight was gone. A sickening crunch echoed through the room, followed by a wet tearing sound that made Elara's stomach heave.
She scrambled under the desk, coughing violently as drywall dust coated her tongue. It tasted like chalk and pennies. She frantically patted the carpet. Glasses. Where are... got them. She shoved the bent frames onto her face. One lens was cracked right down the middle.
Through the spiderweb fracture, she saw a rogue ghoul bypass Julian. It was making a straight, frantic line for the desk. More specifically, for the thick manila folder of original audit files she had just put down.
"Don't you dare!" Elara gasped.
She grabbed the nearest object—a heavy, brass geometric paperweight—and hurled it. It flew three feet wide of the ghoul and smashed directly into a minimalist, abstract glass sculpture in the corner.
Crash. Crap, Elara thought, her heart hammering against her ribs. That's coming out of my paycheck. The ghoul lunged for the folder.
A blur of torn charcoal wool and glowing gold slammed into it from the side. Julian. His fangs were fully descended now—long, curved, and terrifyingly real. He grabbed the ghoul by the throat and hurled it against the far wall with enough force to crack the structural pillar.
But the ghoul's flailing, filthy claws caught the lapel of Julian's suit. The momentum threw the billionaire off balance. He stumbled backward, his heavy boots slipping on the scattered tax forms.
He fell backward, straight into the space under the desk. Straight into Elara.
It was a clumsy, chaotic collision of elbows and knees. As Julian crashed down, his head snapped back. His jaw clenched in pain, and his descended fangs grazed the tight, pulsing skin right at the crook of Elara's neck.
It wasn't a bite. It was a scrape. A millimeter of broken skin.
But the second his venom mixed with her blood, a bizarre, electric shock wave snapped through the cramped space under the desk. It felt like sticking a wet fork into a toaster. Elara gasped, her vision flashing white for a microsecond.
Julian froze instantly.
The remaining ghoul shrieked and scrambled back out the broken window, but Julian didn't move to chase it. He stayed perfectly still, his massive frame hovering over Elara.
The wind howled. Somewhere near the door, Liam the assistant dropped a stapler.
Julian slowly pulled back. His chest was heaving, his bespoke tie ruined. He stared at the tiny drop of blood welling on Elara's collarbone. The golden glow in his eyes flickered, replaced by a look of absolute, unadulterated horror.
Not horror at the monsters. Horror at what he had just done.
He touched his own mouth. He could taste it. The sudden, terrifying weight of the Mate Bond was slamming into his chest like a physical anchor.
"What..." Julian's voice was a harsh, vibrating rasp. He stumbled back a half-step, looking at Elara as if she were radioactive. "What did you do to me? Why does my wolf..." He clamped a hand over his own sternum, his jaw clenching in absolute fury. "Did I just accidentally mark a civil servant?"
Elara rubbed her neck. It stung like a papercut. "I am a federal employee who is going to sue you for workplace endangerment." She wiped a smear of drywall dust off her blazer, her fingers trembling slightly. "Do you have any idea how much it costs to dry-clean this—"
Bzz. Bzz.
Her cheap smartphone vibrated in her blazer pocket. It sounded obscenely loud in the sudden, ringing quiet of the ruined office.
Elara frowned. She pulled it out. The screen was cracked from the fall, but the automated banner notification from the Supernatural Revenue Service Credit Union was perfectly legible.
URGENT ALERT: ACCOUNT FROZEN.
Dear Miss Vance, due to the recent Supernatural Mating Registry update (Time: 11:42 PM), your financial profile has been legally merged with your Mate: THORNE, JULIAN.
Current Joint Liability: -$32,450,000.00 (Outstanding Tariffs & Penalties). > Your credit score has been adjusted to: 140.
Elara stared at the screen.
She stopped breathing.
She took off her glasses, wiped the cracked lens on her dusty sleeve, put them back on, and stared at the numbers again.
"Thirty-two... million..." she whispered.
The air completely left her lungs. Not from the alpha standing over her. Not from the monster attack. From the sheer, soul-crushing weight of the deficit.
Julian glared at her, still clutching his chest. His predatory instincts were violently warring with his aristocratic disgust, completely disoriented by the chaotic feedback loop of the bond. "Stop panicking. Your heart rate is giving me a migraine."
Smack. Elara slapped her hand against the desk, using it to slowly crawl out from under the obsidian slab. Her ruined knee throbbed.
The rational, deadpan auditor was gone. In her place was a woman who had just watched her ten-year plan for a two-bedroom mortgage burn to ashes.
She picked up her red pen from the floor. Her thumb found the clicker.
Click. Click. "You," Elara said. Her voice was shaking, but not from fear. It was a rage so profound, so purely bureaucratic, that it made Julian actually take a half-step back. "You parasitic, tax-evading, overgrown bat."
She shoved the cracked phone screen directly into his face.
"You didn't just bite me. You ruined my credit score."