Page 14 of Mane in Finance

"Ah, fuck…" He groans.

The table digs into my thighs, and I reach back, grabbing his wrist, holding on. He leans over my back, chest hot against me, mouth at my ear.

"Take it," he rasps, and I do, pushing back harder.

His cock drags over that perfect spot again and again. The rush of heat and pulsing travels through me, and I come a third time, quieter, body locking up around him. My mouth wide open in a silent scream.

He follows, burying himself and pulsing hard, flooding me. His hips stutter through it, grinding deep until his orgasm slows. We stay like that a moment, breathing hard, his weight a solid press along my back. He eases out carefully, and I attempt to straighten slowly with my legs unsteady. He turns me, pulls me against his chest, arms wrapping tight. No words, just the thud of his heart under my ear and the residual tremor in both our bodies. My forehead rests against his shoulder.

Outside the night stays dark and quiet. Inside, the only sound is our slowing breath and the faint creak of the floorboards under our bare feet. He keeps one hand low on my back, thumb stroking idle circles, anchoring us both while the heat fades into something quieter, steadier.

Morning arrives with us by the woodstove, finally lit, the danger of last night burned down to gray light through the one window.

Lucian's watching me the careful way he watches everything, except the guard's gone out of it. I've spent time decoding that face. This morning there's nothing to decode.

"We should raise Kian," I say, and don't move.

"In a minute." He hands me coffee made on a camp burner, bitter and perfect. "Sophie. Whatever happened last night, I'm not going to pretend it back into a working relationship. I'd rather remember than agree it didn't happen."

"Neither do I." It surprises me how easily it comes. "But I'm not softening on you. I'll still call your bad ideas, bad ideas."

"I'd notice if you stopped. I'd assume you were replaced." The corner of his mouth moves. "That's the part I didn't expect. It doesn't make you less useful to me. It makes you more."

turn the mug slowly in my hands, letting his words settle.

"Partners, then," I say. "The real kind."

"The real kind." He pulls me in. "Now let's go find their truck."

12

LUCIAN

We're back at the manor three days when I catch myself choosing Sophie over the pride, and the discovery unsettles me more than any attack has.

It's a small thing. A relocation call comes in during breakfast, a wolf family in Idaho needs a route by nightfall, and my first instinct isn't to reach for the phone. It's to finish the conversation I'm having with Sophie about her coffee preferences, because she's laughing at something and I like that sound. I catch the impulse and correct it, but the correction costs me effort it never used to, and I notice.

Hector notices too. He finds me in the study after, closing the door behind him with the quiet that means a hard conversation. "You hesitated this morning."

"I still took the call."

"After you hesitated." He doesn't sit. "I've watched you run this pride for years without a single wasted second. Now there's a woman at your breakfast table and you lose some of those seconds. I'm not judging you for it, Luke. I'm telling you it could be a problem, and problems get people killed."

"You've made this speech."

"I'll make it as many times as I have to." His scarred hands stay loose at his sides, but his voice has gone flat and serious. "An Alpha who's reachable is an Alpha with a pressure point. They must know by now she matters to the network. If they learn she matters to you, they stop trying to kill her and start trying to take her, because leverage is worth more. I've buried people we loved because someone found the safe places. Burying her isn't something I'd handle well, or you for that matter." He meets my eyes.

I don't argue, because he isn't wrong. I've spent two decades keeping everyone at a careful distance precisely so no one could be used against me. Sophie dismantled that a while ago, but I'd still do it again.

"I hear you," I tell him. "I'm not going back to distant. But I hear you."

Sophie's waiting in the vault anteroom with a fresh print and an off-white color in her face.

"Stop looking guilty about whatever Hector just said and look at this instead." She slides the page across. "I stopped chasing the diversions. I went after the revision log, every ledger system records who edits an entry and when. Yours were scrubbed, not deleted, scrubbed."

"Explain the difference like I didn't grow up in this."

"Deletion leaves a hole an auditor can see. Scrubbing rewrites the edit so the changed entry reads as if it was always the original." She taps a decades-old column. "Someone went back through your family's history and smoothed every alteration until the theft looked native to the book. This isn't a thief taking a slice off the top. This is a forger rewriting your past so the crime was never there to find."