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His hand tightened in my hair. The sound he made against my mouth was deeply satisfying. I did it again and felt his whole body shift in response. The control of him stuttered the way an engine did when someone else's hand found the wheel unexpectedly.

He pulled back just an inch. His breath hitched. His amber eyes burned into mine. “I'm going to fuck you, Nell.”

"Yeah." I gave another squeeze of his cock. "That's the idea."

"Once." He made it sound like a warning, a promise, and an apology rolled into a single syllable.

I had already implied that with the whole not mixing business and pleasure line. But sure, let him think it was his idea. I wasn't fool enough to hurt a fragile male ego with a cock his size. "Deal."

"In the cabin. Not my parents' house."

He let go of my hair and grabbed the hand that was around his cock. I was treated to a fantastic view of his backside. Magnus’s heritage was Asian and some kind of Icelandic or Norse. The combination gave him the body of a sleek pirate who kept some of the booty for himself.

He began to lead me toward the tree line, his pace urgent, his body still radiating that intoxicating heat. I followed, my mind already calculating the logistics of the next hour: how I would maintain my distance, how I would ensure this stayed a transaction. Most men who agreed to a one-night stand surprisingly got clingy in the morning. Tomorrow morning I wanted to go home and take a shower before heading into the office as the new CEO of the company.

But we didn't make it to the woods.

The heavy padding of boots on gravel cut through the silence. A tall, shadowed figure emerged from the side of the house. The man looked grim, his tactical gear reflecting the moonlight.

Magnus didn't let go of me, but his entire posture changed. The lover vanished. He stood there, naked and lethal, a king interrupted.

"We have a situation." The man glanced at me pointedly.

"Speak," Magnus commanded.

“The Volki; they’ve hit the Queens terminal. Our entire shipping operation is currently in flames.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

MAGNUS

Istood at the perimeter of what had been, four hours ago, a functioning distribution hub. The Queens terminal smelled like burning rubber, spilled diesel, and blood. Twelve thousand square feet of cold storage, three loading bays, and a logistics operation that moved Blackwood supply lines through the eastern seaboard with an invisible efficiency that kept our name off federal watchlists was now a crater with walls.

The Volki hadn't used a car bomb. They'd used something military-grade, the kind of ordnance that didn't show up in civilian channels without significant connections and even more significant money. This had been planned — bought and paid for — before Viktor was at the council table. Before the alerts hit his phone. Before he turned his back on me in front of every Alpha in the room.

He had come to that meeting already at war.

I walked the perimeter with Huxley at my shoulder. Our shoes crunched over broken glass and debris that had been thrown thirty feet from the blast site. Three of our enforcers were dead. Two more were in a Blackwood-controlled medical facility with injuries that would have killed human men. The cold storage units had been destroyed along with their contents; twelve tons of premium Wagyu and A5 cuts that had cleared Japanese customs three days ago, two refrigerated shipments of exotic game that the Fang Dynasty's chef had been waiting on for a month, and three additional consignments whose contents I would not be naming in any report.

I looked at each of the dead without looking away. That was the only thing I could give them right now. I was angry about the waste of food. I was pissed about the loss of life.

"They knew the layout," Huxley said, his voice stripped of everything except the operational. "Entry points, camera positions, shift rotations. Someone gave them a blueprint."

I crouched beside a section of blown wall, examining the scorch pattern. "This was placed from the inside of the east loading bay. They had someone in here before the device went off."

Huxley's jaw tightened. "I'll find them."

"What's the status on Newark?"

"Our intelligence says they're moving on the hub within forty-eight hours. Possibly less." Huxley pulled up his phone, showing me a map with three additional Blackwood transit points flagged in red. "If they take Newark the same way they took this, we lose the entire northern corridor. Everything we move through conventional channels becomes a target they already have the address for."

I looked at the map. Then at the three flags. Then, at the smoking ruin of what had been a functioning operation hours ago.

My wolf was not helping. It was still running hot from the garden; from vanilla and heat and that sound Nell had made when I'd pulled her hair. The beast didn't understand why we were standing in broken glass instead of a cabin, balls deep and claws dug into the toy we wanted, when playtime kept getting snatched from us. The wolf pulled at me with the insistence of an animal that had decided on a direction and could not comprehend the obstacles.

I shut it down. Locked it behind the part of me that had been trained since childhood to function in exactly these conditions. Pulling my phone out, I called the only person whose control outstripped mine.

"How bad?" Vidar asked after the first ring.