Page 9 of Roar Me Like You Mean It
I search his face, trying to gauge whether this is a power play or something closer to belief.
“You’re saying he’s not human,” I say, flat and measured.
He doesn’t blink.
“I’m saying you should walk away.”
“And if I don’t?”
He turns, looks at me fully for the first time, and I see something in his expression that I didn’t expect. Something like fear, low and quiet, tucked behind professional concern.
“Then you’d better be ready to lose more than just a case.”
The words hang between us. Heavy. Final.
He doesn’t wait for a response. Just adjusts his cufflinks, nods once, and leaves me standing alone again with the city watching.
Inside, the party continues to blur around me—soft laughter, clinking glass, a hundred conversations stitched together in a tapestry of performance. I don’t rejoin it. I stay there, letting the cold wind rake its fingers through my hair, trying to make sense of a man who shouldn’t be able to unnerve me, and yet somehow already has.
There’s something about him that I can’t file away. Not yet. Something I haven’t figured out how to name, but I feel it inthe way my pulse changes around him, in the way my breath shortens when he looks at me without smiling.
It’s foolish and dangerous. But it’s real.
So I turn back toward the party, step into the golden light of the hall, and move through the crowd with the same poise I’ve always had. But when I pass him, standing in shadow like he was carved from it—something flickers across his face. Not recognition. Not even victory.
Interest.
And even worse, mine answers back.
5
MALEK
The taste of her is still in the air, and it’s not perfume. Not champagne either. It’s something finer, more potent, threaded into the oxygen like smoke after lightning splits a tree. There’s nothing sweet about it. It’s sharp, alive, laced with iron and the kind of heat that makes the blood stir whether I want it to or not.
I haven’t spoken to a woman like that in longer than I care to measure. Not just bold, not just clever, but built from something that doesn't bend when it should. Most people flinch when they feel pressure. Jennifer Callahan leaned into it like she wanted to see what would happen when it pushed back.
And now I’m standing in one of my training floors, two levels below the executive suites, barefoot and half-shifted, because that’s the only way I know to quiet what she stirred.
The room is industrial by design—cold steel beams, padded black mats, mirrored walls that show me the animal in real time. I never bring anyone down here. No assistants, no guards, not even the wolves who swear fealty to my name and legacy. This space is mine. A cage for the lion that doesn’t sleep nearly as long as it used to.
I rotate my shoulders, feeling the bones stretch and tighten, skin prickling as claws push halfway through my fingers. The transformation doesn’t take long, but I stop it halfway. Let it linger just under the surface where it burns, where it breathes. My control is better than it used to be, but not perfect. Never perfect.
I face the training dummy in the center of the floor. High-grade polymer. Reinforced titanium core. Built to absorb the kind of hits that shatter ribs. I move toward it in a slow circle, studying it like it might talk back.
She seems unafraid of me.
I smile, low and dark.
The first strike is clean. My right palm connects with the dummy’s sternum, sending a crack up the reinforced frame. I don’t stop. I follow with a backhand from my left, claws half-formed, not enough to rip but enough to leave a message.
By the third hit, the structure groans.
By the fifth, it splits down the center.
I don’t breathe heavily. I don’t sweat. But the growl that rips from my chest isn’t quiet. The room swallows it like it's been waiting, like it knows the sound.
I step back, hands shaking, and force myself to still.
