Page 4

The cabin was quiet, save for the frantic, shallow breathing of the woman in my bed. Though frantic might be the wrong word. Fear smelled of copper and cold. What came off her skin was warmer than that.

Nell smelled of vanilla. Vanilla cream. Not the kind I put in my coffee in the morning. The kind that was put on before going out for a date and remained on bedsheets the morning after.

My wolf was at the surface. Claws scraped against the inside of my ribs. Scent her. Taste the heat between her thighs. Mark her so she smells of nothing but us. The beast didn't care about corporate bylaws or the Lobo Alliance. He just wanted to put his nose up her skirt and lick the sweat off her skin.

I hovered over her, close to giving in to my base desires. My dick was a hard, heavy ache against my fly. It had been months since I’d let myself have a woman. My flings were always the same: brilliant, sharp-tongued professionals, academic-minded STEM girls who looked like they belonged in a library. Women who wore glasses as a shield and kept their hair in tight, practical buns with nothing but a sharp No. 2 pencil holding them together. There was nothing more satisfying than unraveling that competence, seducing the logic right out of them and leaving before the sun could make it personal.

Nell was the ultimate version of that craving. She didn't have glasses on. Her hair was a dark cascade of spiraling, interwoven locs against the pillow. That business brain of hers was humming. I could practically see the gears turning as I laid out her plight.

She was a woman who had spent ten years directing the flow of wealth for who she thought were the most powerful men in the city. She had no idea that beasts like me and my kind actually controlled puppets like the Sterlings, the suits on Wall Street, and the badges in the government.

Now she knew the truth. She’d seen the shift. She’d seen the blood. She’d seen me.

My wolf paced. He wanted me to strip bare of my clothes and my skin. He wanted to present himself to her. He wanted to crowd her space, to loom over her until she felt the breadth of my strength and realized there was nowhere left to run but into my waiting claws. He wanted her to see the muscle, the scars, and the raw power of the apex predator that had already decided she would be his plaything.

Family first, my father’s voice echoed from that snowy clearing years ago.

Desire was noise. I had a pack to secure. The other packs had been moving against us; quiet coordination, back-channel negotiations, the kind of alliance-building that happened in rooms we weren't supposed to know about. The Ironwoods were gone now; the Vanes were bound by blood to Vidar, and the Lupettos were cannibalizing themselves under Gunnar's gift to the dead alpha's sons.

Dismantling one conspiracy had not dismantled the hunger behind it. The Volki were still out there. They were a pack built on old-world brutality and new-world greed, patient in the way that dangerous things were. They didn't just want our territory. They wanted the Blackwood name erased from the ledger entirely. They had been laying the groundwork for that erasure long before the Ironwoods fell.

"Whatever protection you think you’re offering isn't worth becoming your mistress."

"You're awfully preoccupied with sex, Ms. Odhiambo. I was under the impression that I was dealing with a brilliant business mind. Perhaps I was mistaken."

Her jaw tightened. I noted the spike in her scent. Again, not fear. This time it was a hot, jagged flash of anger.

"Anytime a man has trapped me in a classroom, a copy room, or a boardroom, it’s not my brain he's interested in."

My hackles rose in a murderous snarl. A cold rage flooded my system. The thought of some faceless, mediocre man cornering her—using her brilliance while leering at her blouse—made me want to hunt. I wanted names. I wanted to find every man who had ever made her feel like a placeholder and show them what a real monster was capable of.

Instead, I let my gaze travel over her slowly. I didn't hide the appraisal. I catalogued the curve of her throat, those spirals coiled over her shoulders, the defiance in her posture as a businessman. I was calculating her worth as a tool. To my wolf, I was promising that she would be the last taste of woman I chose to have before my arranged marriage locked me into a life of cold, political duty.

"Right now, your brain is the only thing keeping you from being a very pretty corpse."

"Where's Addie?"

"With her husband. Elias is with his new pack after he ripped out the throat of the old alpha. Remember that?"

She looked away.

"Addie saved you once. Now you'll have to save yourself."

I pulled Nell's laptop from her bag and set it on the bed. The device was open; the password bypassed. I think that brought her out of her shock.

"How'd you get into⁠—“

"The Volki, the Lupettos, the Vanes—you thought they were just crime families. You were wrong. They're wolf packs. They used Sterling to build a cage to try to trap my family. You built the shell companies, the offshore diversions, and the cross-collateralized loans that were supposed to starve my family out."

Nell pulled the computer towards herself, eyes flicking left and right over the data on screen. "I was doing my job. I didn't know⁠—"

"I know you didn't. But you saw the murder in the park. You saw me. And more importantly, you saw the Ironwood data that showed four out of six packs were aligned against us." I stepped closer, invading her space until she had to look up. "You are an asset, Ms. Odhiambo. But you are also a massive liability. One needs to outweigh the other."

I saw the moment the anger flickered out and the professional shift took over. Her eyes narrowed. Her mind was already three moves ahead, calculating the risks.

"What do you want?" she asked.

"The Volki have three billion in assets tied up in the Volkov Industrial merger you structured last year. If that merger goes through, they will have the capital to start a war. I want you to dismantle it."