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“Good boy,” he said, his voice genuinely kind.

Fenrir started walking back toward the SUV, then paused. “Your mother has been talking to the Lobo pack. Sorsha Lobo has a daughter—Rosalind. She’s young yet, but the contract has been signed. You’ll have years to sow your wild oats, Magnus. Play with whatever toys you find. But remember…”

He looked at me over his shoulder, the moon catching the early gray in his beard.

“Blackwood men are loyal to their wives. Family first.”

"Yes, sir."

CHAPTER ONE

NELL

The first thing I registered was the scent.

It smelled of expensive tobacco. It made me think there was an old man in my bedroom which was an absurd thought. I didn't know any old people. At least not one that I'd let into my bedroom.

Tobacco wasn't the only scent. It smelled like a storm. Like rain and grass, but also fire and heat; like the air right before a thunderstorm breaks on a summer night.

I was dreaming. Or I was remembering. Either way, I was in that in-between space of wakefulness and sleep. Whatever I was seeing behind my eyelids held some kind of connection to what was going on in the present in my bedroom.

The sun beat down on my skin. I lifted a hand to shade my eyes. My hand looked… weird. It was my hand. My familiar fingers. The nails pristine. The cuticles rough where I often chewed when I was thinking hard. But my fingers were smaller. And the heat wasn’t coming from the sky—it was coming from the weight pressing me into the earth.

My back was on the ground. Soft grass beneath my shoulders. I couldn't move, but I wasn't afraid. There was a rhythmic, heavy huff of breath against my ear. My nostrils filled with the smell of earth and river water and warm, green-dark forest. I was a city girl, a New York City girl. I had no idea how I knew what red earth smelled like. Then, the sensation: a tongue, wide and sandpaper-rough, dragged across my cheekbone. It was wet and hot, a possessive lap that started at my jaw and ended at my temple.

I reached out. My fingers sank into a coat of fur so dense it felt like velvet over muscle. I felt the prick of sharp claws against my shoulder—not breaking the skin, but pinning me there, a gentle reminder of the power holding me down. When I opened my eyes in the dream, I didn't see a man. I saw a pair of glowing amber suns staring back at me, swirling with a gold so bright it burned.

The beast let out a low, vibrating growl that I felt in my marrow. It wasn't a threat. It was a claim.

The gold flared, blinding me. The twin suns vanished into a cold, clinical reality.

I jerked awake. My heart was a frantic drum in my chest. The ghost of that rough tongue still tingled on my skin. My fingers trembled as they touched the exact spot on my cheek where the dream-beast had licked me.

The skin was cool. Dry.

I took a shaky breath, trying to scrub the image from my mind. It was just the shock; I told myself. The brain does strange things when it’s traumatized. Because I'd been traumatized. I remember that part now. I’d seen monsters in the park. My subconscious was processing the horror of it in the dream.

I wasn't in the park any longer. I wasn't in my bed. I had no idea where I was. But I knew the man sitting in the corner of the room, watching me.

He wasn't in his wolf form. That beast had been gray and massive. Bigger than the captive animals I'd seen at the zoo. The man in the corner watching me with those dark eyes was more dangerous than either of them. More dangerous than the wolf caged behind glass. More dangerous than the wolf running free in the dark. Those wolves had only one nature. The man had learned to hide his.

Magnus Blackwood was dressed in a suit that cost more than my two month's rent. His fingers moved with maddeningly slow precision as he straightened a silver cufflink. He looked civilized. He looked like the boardrooms and the spreadsheets I understood. When he turned his head, the light caught his eyes. For a split second, they weren't brown. They were the exact amber gold from the dream.

"Good, you're awake." He pressed a cigar into the ashtray with a turn of his wrist. The ember died with a brief, defiant flare; the scent spiking sharp and sweet for one moment before it faded. "Now we can get started."

The voice was a growl refined into a baritone. I'd seen him as a man, then as a wolf, and a man again. He'd been in the park with the sickening sound of bones snapping and reforming. I remembered seeing Addie’s face, then the wolves—monsters the size of small horses with eyes that held too much human intelligence. I remembered the copper tang of blood in the air. The snarls. The screams. Addie's calm voice telling me it was going to be okay as her brother tore out her father's throat —with his fangs.

I'm a strong woman. The sight of blood didn't faze me. The sight of what lived beneath the skin — the white and glistening things that had no business being visible in open air — that was a different matter entirely. I'd fainted.

The memory of blacking out hit me with more sting than the sight of a wolf-man. I, Nell Odhiambo, the woman who managed the chaos of Sterling & Associates with not a hair out of place, had collapsed like a Victorian cliché of a damsel. My grandmother would've chupped, making a sound between a hiss and a suck of her teeth, which was West African for seriously, Petronella? She would've been right. In three decades and two coasts, I'd seen things that would've required significant therapy if I'd had the time for it.

"I don't want to get started. I want to go home."

Magnus frowned. It looked like it was supposed to be sympathy. It came across as patronizing. If I had him pegged correctly, he was the eldest of the Blackwoods, heir to a restaurant and shipping dynasty — and, based on what I'd witnessed earlier that afternoon, a criminal organization that dabbled in the murder of rivals.

"I'm afraid you're not going anywhere, Ms. Odhiambo."

He pronounced the Luo surname perfectly. Though my family had immigrated from Ghana over two decades ago, my grandmother's people were Kenyan. She'd reverted to her family name after she allowed missionaries to rescue her from the witch colony her husband had cast her and their daughter off to. The story went that when old granddad told a patient there was no hope, my grandmother's herbs proved him wrong. Male ego bruised, she was cast out to a colony of accused women — no men, no hunger, no violence. She and my mother would have stayed in that paradise indefinitely, except someone decided my teenage mother had been possessed by a demon and sent the Christian missionaries to them.