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The women in my family didn't raise me to faint. They raised me to survive. They raised me to rise.

Magnus Blackwood thought he was breaking me. He thought he was forcing me into a corner where my only choice was to become his stooge. He was not the first man to try to do so, not by far. He didn't realize that in my world, there was no such thing as a clean hand. I’d known Sterling was a front for the bad guys before I knew bad guys could shift their shapes. I’d just assumed the monsters wore Italian silk, not fur.

He was offering me a kingdom: Odhiambo & Associates. A CEO title. Independence from the glass-tower boys who had spent years trying to look down my blouse while I hid their tax liabilities.

And Magnus... He’d looked at me like I was a rare vintage he intended to savor. I’d seen the way his eyes tracked the movement of my chest, the way his pupils flared until the gold swallowed the brown. It was primal. It was hungry.

Hunger could be managed. A man who wants you sexually is a man with a blind spot.

My fingers flew across the keys with muscle memory. If I was going to be a criminal, I was going to be the best damn criminal to ever do it.

I didn’t need to be a hacker to dismantle Volkov Industrial. I was the one who had drafted the articles of incorporation. I was the one who had structured the tiered holding companies that kept their blood money looking like clean dividends. To anyone else, the ledger was a labyrinth; to me, it was a map I’d drawn myself. I wasn't looking for security vulnerabilities; I was looking for the structural ones.

As clients, the Volki were arrogant. They'd come to Sterling two years ago, had looked past me and shaken hands with Junior. They thought that by diversifying their assets across three different jurisdictions. They were untouchable. They didn't realize that I’d built a cross-collateralization clause into their primary loan agreement; a poison pill I’d tucked away a year ago just in case they ever tried to short-change Sterling. And look where that company loyalty had landed my ass.

Fuck them both. The Volki. The Sterlings. Fuck everyone who had held me down, looked past me, tried to get a leg up on me. I was going to be the one at the top of the mountain now.

What came next was a perfectly legal, catastrophic liquidation. I triggered the defaults, called in the markers, and watched as the Volki’s three billion began to dissolve into a dozen different escrow accounts. I was essentially firing their entire board of directors and bankrupting their front companies with a few strokes of a key. It looked like corporate espionage from the outside looking in, but if a judge ever called me to the bench, I would walk away clean. I have not and would not ever take the fall for management.

They were all pricks. I was the only one with the balls and brains, and looks to pull this off. Well, Addie could've done it. But Addie wasn't here. I'd tried to save her, and look where it got me.

I'd do it again if I got the chance. But sooner next time. Magnus might be a hottie whose bone I wouldn't mind fetching, but Vidar. Uggh. That one I still didn't trust. I firmly believed a man should never come between sisters or besties. And for me, Addie was both.

I'd get her back. Rescue her from her forced marriage. After I dealt with these files. It took a couple of hours before I was done. But as I moved through the deep-layer archives of Sterling’s private client files, I hit a pocket of data that shouldn't have been there. It was a repository of back-channel communications; the kind of high-level negotiations that never make it to a formal contract.

I leaned in, the blue light of the screen making my eyes ache. I wasn't looking at code; I was looking at a conspiracy. There were logs from the Ironwood archives—internal memos discussing the "Blackwood Problem." They had been tracking the Blackwood family’s financial footprint for years, documenting every shipping acquisition, every offshore trust, and every political favor.

And then I saw the file that made my breath hitch. LEGACY / MERGER - PHASE II.

I scrolled through the documents, my heart thudding against my ribs. It was an audit of the Blackwoods' most private vulnerabilities. They had been preparing to squeeze Magnus's family through a set of international maritime laws and a very high-stakes merger involving a family called the Lobos.

Magnus thought he was the one with the leash. He thought he was putting me in a cage by making me his asset. He didn't realize that he’d just given me the keys to his family’s vault.

I began to copy the files into a hidden, encrypted partition—my safety valve. If Magnus ever decided his asset was no longer worth the trouble, I’d make sure he went down with the ship.

CHAPTER FOUR

MAGNUS

Istood on the edge of the clearing. My lungs burned with the sweet, post-run ache that only came from pushing the wolf to its absolute limit. Steam rolled off my bare shoulders in thick, ghost-like plumes, catching the silver of the moonlight.

Behind me, the shadows of the North Woods shifted. One by one, the heavy padding of paws on damp earth slowed to a halt. The pack breathed as one; a collective, heaving lung that tasted the iron tang of adrenaline.

I turned. My spine straight, my human skin tingling from where the fur receded.

Huxley, our head enforcer, was the first from the pack to shift back. He stood six-four, a wall of scarred muscle with eyes that still held the predatory amber of his wolf. Behind him, Kael and Bram reached for the gear bags we kept stashed in the hollow of an ancient oak. Naked bodies stepped into expensive tracksuits and slid feet into sneakers that cost more than most people's car payments. We were not the kind of pack that left our men to dig through a hollow log for someone's old flannel shirt. Those wolves existed in paperback fiction for teenage girls. Whatever those paperback wolves were doing in the Pacific Northwest, it had nothing to do with us.

“Good run, Magnus,” Huxley said, his voice a low, gravelly rasp. He didn't look at my face. His gaze didn't rise above my throat; the submissive acknowledgment of the hierarchy. “The younger males are getting faster. Kael almost nipped your heels at the creek.”

I let out a dark sound that was almost a laugh. “A wolf who doesn't hunger for the lead is a wolf I can't use.”

I knew the value of these runs. My father had taught me that loyalty wasn't built in boardrooms or over signed contracts; it was forged in the mud, in the synchronized heartbeat of the chase. The men needed to see me in the lead. They needed to feel the weight of my strength and the reach of my shadow. I’d been running with these men since I was sixteen, when the weight of the Blackwood name was still a new collar around my neck.

I never doubted my brothers. Vidar and Gunnar, even our baby brother Ivar, we were blood and bone, a unified front. But the pack? The pack needed a reminder. They needed to know the heir wasn't just a strategist in a bespoke suit. He was the apex.

“Huxley,” I said, my voice hardening into the register of a command. “I’m keeping a human woman in the cabin. I want you and a rotating detail on the perimeter. Stay back—five hundred yards, at least. I don't want your scents crowding the porch.”

Huxley’s brow furrowed, his tactical brain whirring. “You think the Ironwood stragglers are going to make a move? Or is it the Volki?”