But Kade wasn't listening to any of it.
His attention was split between the woman in his lap and the man sitting three chairs down from Richard Winters. Ethan Cross—Maya's fiancé, supposedly. The man whose body language screamed tension and barely controlled emotion from the moment Dakota had entered the room.
Kade's instincts as an Alpha, honed by years of reading wolves and assessing threats, were picking up something wrong. The way Ethan couldn't quite look at Dakota directly. The death grip he had on the table. The scent of distress rolling off him in waves that his carefully neutral expression couldn't hide.
And there was something else—something in the way Dakota's presence affected him, in the way his wolf would be reacting to her proximity. Kade knew what mate bonds looked like, how they felt, how they manifested.
This man had been connected to Dakota. Maybe still was, beneath the mark Kade had placed over whatever claim had been there before.
