An exit from their shared professional life and apparently their personal life as well, she realized. His words felt like a physical blow, and she wanted to hunch against the pain. The small timer on his computer calendar dinged, an indication she had run down the clock on her allotted fifteen minutes, running down the clock on their relationship without even realizing it. The parroting back of her words spoke volumes, she thought; told of how long he’d been chewing on them and the way they’d evidently set into his heart like a blade, one she’d unwittingly cast. I only meant to keep you chasing.
She barely remembered drifting back to her desk, drifting through the rest of the day, the rest of the week, the rest of the month. She remembered the anger she felt several days later, once the shock had faded. They’d begun their relationship on a joint decision, but he’d completely left her out of the negotiations on its ending, and she wasn’t quite sure she could forgive him that. The first full moon without him was an agony, and she couldn’t forgive him that either. He’d done this to spite her rather than talking through his emotions and what he wanted. She ignored that she was just as culpable in that regard; she had been playing games from the moment he’d taken up residence in the fishbowl office.
Most aggravatingly, he was right — the whispers had faded after that second week of his absence, at least until he’d gone on vacation. The social media profile was being shared around the junior associates, the information shared with her by the sweet goblin woman who cleaned the offices on her floor. She managed to put it out of her mind the rest of the day, ignoring the renewed giggles that followed her exit from the common rooms, waiting until she was secure in her own apartment.
He didn’t have public social media accounts, but somehow this girl’s, this stranger’s DreameStream photo reel had become public knowledge, and she realized he’d done that to spite her as well. She’d expected someone half his age, a blonde with big tits and no gag reflex, like the one who’d sucked him off at the Lupercalia party, but instead, the young woman who smiled up from the photograph was maybe a handful of years younger than herself. She was petite and small-boned, with dark hair and eyes, and the knowledge that he’d taken someone on vacation — someone who looked like her, to the same sort of tropical locale she’d wanted to visit with him — had broken something in her brain.
The scream that had ripped from her throat had been primal in nature. She screamed and raged, and her wolf screamed along with her. She flipped her coffee table, flung a book at the mirror in the hallway, had felt as if she might spontaneously turn, her wolf shifting in her bones and wreaking havoc on everything in her path. She wanted to shred his skin with her nails, castrate him with her bare hands, and make him pay with blood for every sharp word and insult to her work, for the endless stream of messages expecting later hours, more research, more, more, more. She wanted to make him realize how miserable he would be without her. She was humiliated, was beyond furious, hated him . . . and she loved hating him, she realized. She loved hating him, and she hated how much she loved him.
With the destruction had come clarity.
She was not giving up that easily, and if that was what he wanted, he could go fuck himself. She led him, not the other way around. He had said she was a talented litigator, and she knew more about him than anyone outside his immediate family. She had watched his father make his sons dance like puppets, and she would do the same. She loved having Grayson Hemming chase her, and despite this grievous misstep, Vanessa knew she could make him chase her again.
She was familiar, of course, with the WDL. She had passed whatever unspoken test his father had set for her — her werewolf pedigree, her early career history as a public defender, focusing on werewolves and shifters — and she’d gone the extra mile, earning extra credit, like the kiss-ass she’d always been, ensuring that the pro bono cases she had worked on to fulfill her bar requirement had been for the Werewolf Defense League, an organization with which he had close ties.
“It’s a shame you left public practice,” he’d mused, voicing the opposite of the first conversation she’d had with his wife. “The WDL could use someone like you.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” she had laughed, ducking her head in an appropriately bashful fashion. “Organizations like that need heavy hitters. I wouldn’t be qualified to do much more than filling the coffee machine.”
His smile was glinting and sharp, another thing Grayson had inherited.
“Gray said you’re brilliant. Passionate and driven, those were his words. Are you calling my son a liar?”
She gave him her best earnest-before-the-judge smile in return, gratified to note that Jackson’s wife was sitting close enough to the mouth of the room to observe their conversation.
“Let’s see,” she mused. “A philanderer. A snob. Entirely too pleased with himself, and a world-class prick. But he’s definitely not a liar.”
His father’s laughter was a smooth roll, his sharp canines glinting in the sunlight pouring in to the room’s glass walls. She knew she ought not to feel a little thrill of victory every time she said or did something to make Jack Hemming smile at her, specifically at her, which she had learned was very different from his normal generic surface-level smile, but it couldn’t be helped. Vanessa wasn’t sure how she’d managed it, but she had somehow carved out her own private audience timeslot sitting before the haughty patriarch each week, joining the rotation of his sons.
It wasn’t something his daughter-in-law was afforded, not that she seemed to want it. She didn’t know if Jackson’s wife, Victoria, had cottoned on to the game; she didn’t think so. The woman had instead devoted herself to being a pillar of the community and having a good relationship with her mother-in-law, and although Vanessa liked Grayson’s mother enormously, Sandi Hemming didn’t have any of her sons jumping through hoops of fire based entirely on her whims. He was haughty and manipulative, but she had very quickly discovered he was the only opinion that seemed to matter in the entire town. Excellent news for her, as he found her interesting and intelligent, and very good for his son.
“Will you keep an ear to the ground for me? I’ll be picking up some pro bono work later this year, and I would like to do something for the right cause. If something crops up where I would be useful, please send it my way.”
He had done so, and she was forced to admit that she had genuinely enjoyed the work she had done for the organization. It had given her a moment of serious pause, wondering if she would be happier working for an organization like the WDL instead of being a corporate cog in big law. She had noodled over the possibility before returning to the office after her pro bono sabbatical, but once she was back, she was quickly swept up in the day-to day-grind, and the notion was quickly forgotten.
She’d been surprised to learn that they were well acquainted with Grayson, that he had started a bi-monthly drop-in clinic for werewolves in need of legal advice and unable to afford representation, and that he had been volunteering his services to the organization since he was in law school. She had beamed in pride at the time, realizing that the news wasn’t actually that shocking. After all, anything Jackson did, Grayson did bigger. Jack Hemming was not at all enthusiastic about carrying on the mantle of tradition expected of his name, but he did believe in service to the community, particularly the werewolf community, and each of his sons had done their part over the years. Jackson did similar work with the WDL, offering quarterly financial planning workshops and budgeting advice for struggling families and those escaping packs. Learning that Grayson had outdone his brother’s contribution was the least surprising thing in the world, and for the last year and a half, she had gone with him, spending two days every other month offering legal advice to young women nearly half her age, holding the hands of toddlers and carrying newborns, attempting to emancipate themselves from their packs before their children got any older.
