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Gunnar kicked off expensive sneakers that held not a speck of dirt. "It's the girl who fainted. You're prettier with your eyes open."

I was more upset that he remembered me fainting than the lame come on.

I opened my mouth to explain it was the viscera and not the wolves that had made me weak-kneed, but the room was flooded with more Blackwoods. Addie rushed in, her face pale with relief when she saw me. She threw her arms around me. For a second, we were just two girls on my sofa drinking wine out of coffee mugs again.

"Nell! Thank God," she breathed, pulling back to scan me for injuries. "I've been going crazy. Magnus wouldn't tell me anything."

My knees did the thing they had done in the park; that treacherous loosening, weakness of a body that had been holding itself together on adrenaline and stubbornness and had just encountered something safe enough to approve of letting go. It finally felt real. All of it. The murder. The kidnapping. The blackmail. The wolves.

Addie was a wolf.

Still, I gripped her arms. Breathed through it and told myself I was fine. Which I was. Mostly.

Vidar stood behind her, his expression like a thundercloud. He looked at me with a cold, simmering resentment that made my stomach flip. We hadn't gotten along at our first meeting. Or our second. Our third was going just as well. I'd accused him of being an abusive husband. I stood by that statement. Case in point, he clearly didn't want me around my best friend.

And then... the air pressure in the room changed.

Magnus stepped across the threshold. He was in a tailored suit which was unfair to womankind. When his gaze landed on me, the temperature in the kitchen rose ten degrees.

"What are you doing in here?" he asked, his voice a low, dangerous rumble.

"I invited her to lunch," Ivar said, popping the straw into his juice box.

"I told you to stay at the cabin, Ms. Odhiambo," Magnus said, ignoring his brother. He stepped toward me, his presence so massive it felt like he was sucking the oxygen out of the room.

Addie stayed by my side. I noted her husband reached for her, but she threaded her arm through mine. That did not win Vidar to my side. I decided to focus on the Blackwood in front of me.

"I did what you asked. And then I got bored."

"What did he ask you to do?" asked Addie.

"She dismantled the Volki," Magnus said.

"What do you mean, dismantled?" Addie asked.

"She did a hostile takeover," Ivar grinned and went back to sipping his apple juice box.

"Volkov Industrial is gone." Magnus explained. "Liquidated. The Volki board is dissolved; their holding companies are hitting default notices. Their Alpha was at the council table when every alert hit his phone simultaneously."

I shrugged. "That's what you said you wanted me to do."

"In under six hours."

"Three hours."

Fenrir's eyes moved to me with a slow, deliberate attention that felt nothing like the suspicious assessment from the garden. This was something else. The look of a man recalibrating.

Gunnar let out a low whistle. "You bankrupted the Russians. That's hot."

"Structurally erased them," Ivar corrected, slurping the dregs of his juice box.

Addie looked at me with the pride of a woman who had always known what her friend was capable of and was now watching the rest of the world catch up.

"That's extraordinary," Mei Ling said, still regarding me with those jeweler's eyes. Whatever flaw she'd been looking for, she appeared to have stopped searching. She looked at Fenrir. Once again, something passed between them.

Vidar said nothing. But his expression had shifted from thundercloud to something more reluctant and considerably more dangerous: respect he didn't want to give.

"My work here is done," I said. "I held up my end. I want the company."