THE WOLF'S OBSESESION - He wasn't supposed to Love Me

The silence in the penthouse wasn’t empty. It was heavy, pressed down by forty stories of Manhattan glass and steel.

Elena sat on the edge of a bed that cost more than her father’s house, her bare feet sinking into a rug so thick it felt like moss. She wasn’t crying. Crying was a luxury for people who hadn’t just been abducted in the middle of the night.

Instead, she was studying the room.

It was an old habit. As an art restorer, Elena spent her life leaning inches from canvas, looking for the hairline fractures, the hidden layers of dirt, the places where the painting was lying. She looked for the flaws. It was how she survived.

*Flaw number one:* The lighting. The floor-to-ceiling windows offered a panoramic view of the city, but the ambient light in the room was sterile, designed to keep a circadian rhythm off-balance.

*Flaw number two:* The lock on the heavy oak door. It was electronic, but the strike plate was reinforced with steel. It wasn’t meant to keep people out. It was meant to keep her in.

She pulled her knees to her chest, her calloused fingers tracing the small, faded scar on her left palm. Her father had stolen fifty million dollars from the De Luca crime family. Elena knew the math. She knew the penalty. She just hadn’t expected the penalty to be delivered by a man who looked like he hadn’t slept in a decade.

The electronic lock didn’t click. The door simply swung open, silent on its hinges.

The air pressure in the room changed instantly.

Dante De Luca filled the frame. He didn’t stride in with the arrogant swagger of a man who owned the city. He moved with a quiet, lethal economy, like a predator conserving energy for the strike. He wore a black shirt, the top buttons undone, revealing the edge of a cross tattoo inked onto his right wrist. His dark hair was graying at the temples, and a pale scar cut cleanly through his left eyebrow, disappearing into his hairline.

He didn’t look like a monster. That was the problem. He looked like a man holding back the ocean with his bare hands.

Elena forced her spine straight. She refused to shrink. She looked at his face, searching for the hairline fracture in his expression.

Dante stopped exactly three feet from the bed. He didn't reach for her. Instead, he kept his hands buried deep in his trouser pockets, but Elena could see the white-knuckle tension in his forearms. He was restraining himself.

In his right hand, he held a steaming ceramic mug. He stepped forward and set it on the mahogany nightstand. The clink of the ceramic against the wood sounded like a gunshot in the quiet room.

"Chamomile," he said. His voice was a low, rough baritone that seemed to vibrate in the floorboards. "It helps with the shock."

Elena stared at the mug, then up at his face. "Is it poisoned?"

The corner of Dante’s mouth twitched. It wasn’t a smile. It was a ghost of one, a fleeting fracture in his stone facade. "If I wanted you dead, Elena, I wouldn’t have driven four hours to pull you out of your apartment."

"Then why am I here?" she asked, her voice steadier than she felt. "My father stole your money. I know the debt. I know the penalty. But I don't have fifty million dollars. You need to let me make a call. I can find his accounts—"

"Your father is dead."

The words didn’t land immediately. They hung in the air, suspended, before dropping like a guillotine.

Elena’s breath hitched, a sharp, physical pain blooming behind her ribs. *Dead.* The word echoed in her skull. Her father—the coward who had remarried six months after her mother’s funeral, the man who had looked at her with calculating eyes for the past week, the man who had sold her to save his own skin.

She hated him. She hated the casual cruelty of his betrayal. But beneath the rage, a sickening, messy grief clawed at her throat. She wasn't ready to lose him. Not like this. Not in a basement.

Grief tried to rise, hot and blinding, but Elena shoved it down into a dark, locked box in her chest. *Survival first. Grief later.*

"How?" she whispered.

"Heart attack," Dante said, his tone devoid of pity. "Or poison. Marco’s men aren’t picky. He traded you for time, Elena. He thought fifty million and his daughter would buy him a head start." Dante’s jaw ticked, a muscle feathering near the scar on his cheek. "I took the money. And then I let Marco kill him anyway."

Elena’s hands curled into fists, her nails biting into her palms. The sheer, casual cruelty of it made her stomach turn. "You took the money. You got your revenge. The debt is settled."

She stood up, her legs trembling slightly, but her chin held high. She stepped into his space, forcing him to look down at her. "Then let me go."

Dante didn’t move. He just watched her, his dark eyes tracking the rapid rise and fall of her chest. He looked at her not like a prize he had won, but like a puzzle he was desperate to solve.

"The debt dies with him," Dante said quietly.

"Then I'm free."

"You don't understand." Dante took a single step closer. The scent of him—cedar, cold air, and something dark and metallic—wrapped around her. The white-knuckle tension in his arms pulled tighter.

"Three years ago," Dante said, his voice dropping to a fractured whisper, "you looked at me in a gallery. You asked me one question. One question nobody else ever asked."

Elena froze. She searched her memory, but her mind was a blank canvas. "What question?"

Dante’s gaze dropped to her trembling hands, then slowly rose to meet her hazel eyes. The mask of the Wolf slipped, just for a fraction of a second, revealing a terrifying, hollow hunger beneath.

"You already know," he said.

He turned and walked toward the door, leaving her alone with the chamomile tea, the steel-reinforced lock, and a memory she didn't even know she had.

***

Morning in the penthouse did not arrive with sunlight. It arrived with the sterile hum of the climate control and the sharp, electronic chirp of the front door unlocking.

Elena was already awake. She was standing by the floor-to-ceiling windows, watching the city wake up forty stories below. She hadn’t slept. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw her father’s blood on the floor, or heard the heavy, suffocating silence of the man who had taken her.

But she hadn’t cried. Crying was a reaction, and reactions were unpredictable. Elena preferred to observe.

The heavy oak door swung open.

Dante De Luca stepped into the room.

He was dressed in a flawless, charcoal three-piece suit. His dark hair was styled back, the pale scar through his left eyebrow stark against his skin. He didn’t carry tea today. He didn’t offer a greeting.

He walked to the center of the room and stopped. He kept his hands buried deep