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“Alexei Voronov. Most people call me Lex.”

Of course he’s a Voronov.

“Another brother?”

Something almost like amusement touches his mouth. “The youngest.”

“How many of you are there?”

“Three.”

“Good to know.”

“Usually.”

He pushes off the pillar and walks closer. His movements are fluid, precise. “I knew your father.”

Everyone here knew my father. I’m starting to realize he lived an entire life I never saw.

“I’ve been hearing that a lot today.”

He nods. “You’ll hear it more.” He pauses, and then he says something that I didn't realize I needed to hear. “He was a good man, Sophia. He was so proud of you. I'm sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you,” I reply, swallowing a lump in my throat.

The elevator arrives. He gestures for me to go ahead. I step in and turn around to find him still standing by the pillar, watching me with pale, quiet eyes.

The doors close.

Back in the apartment, I lock the deadbolt and the chain and pull the notebook from the nightstand. I sit cross-legged on the bed and work through the cipher with the legal pad balanced on my knee. The first several pages are what I suspected: a ledger. Payments flowing in and out of entities I’m starting to recognize from the company files I reviewed today. My father was tracking the same financial structures I spent the morning mapping. He saw it too. The layered vendors, the intermediary LLCs, the money moving in circles designed to make its origin disappear.

But the later entries aren’t financial. They’re observational. Dates and times and notes about people. Members of the Voronov inner circle, described not by name but by initials and physical details. Their movements, their habits, their patterns.

My father was watching them. Carefully, systematically, over a period of months.

I decode one more line before my eyes start to blur. It’s a simple entry, a single sentence in my father’s precise handwriting, run through the cipher he taught his eight-year-old daughter.

Something is wrong with these people. Different.

I close the notebook and stare at the ceiling and think about Dominic Voronov’s hand around mine, burning hot, and how Roman moved through a room like a predator.

Different.

I turn off the light and lie in the dark and try not to think about gray eyes and the scent of something I still can’t name but can’t forget.

Chapter Five

Dominic

Ican smell her from a floor above.

It shouldn’t be possible. Even for a wolf, a floor of steel and concrete and recycled air should be enough to dilute a single human’s scent into nothing. But steel, concrete, and distance don’t seem to matter to the bond. The bond has threaded her scent into my nervous system so thoroughly that I could find her blindfolded in a stadium. Vanilla and warm skin and the faintest trace of the coffee she drank this morning.

I know she’s at her desk. I know her heartbeat is steady, which means she’s focused, not anxious. I know she had coffee at lunch because I tracked her scent to the lobby and back.

I know all of this without leaving my office. Without looking at a screen. Without picking up a phone. I know it the way I know where my own hands are in the dark.

I stand at my window and press my forehead against the glass and let the cold seep into my skin. It helps. Slightly. The wolf settles from a roar to a hum, and I can think again.