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Five wolves, my most trusted, gathered in a room where we don’t pretend to be human. This week’s agenda is the Cicero crew, the South Side properties, and a problem with one of our supply lines that’s been losing inventory. Standard operations. The work of holding a territory that spans half a city, the constant maintenance of a machine our family has been running for nearly a century and a half.

I should be focused on that. I should be thinking about the pack, the territory, the threats that multiply every year as the world gets smaller and harder to hide in.

Instead I’m standing at the window thinking about her walking into my building this morning with her shoulders back and her jaw set, dressed like a woman going to war, and I’m thinking that she’s the most dangerous thing in my life right now.

Not because of what she knows. Not because of what she might find.

Because I walked past her desk this afternoon. I didn’t plan it. My feet made the decision without consulting my brain, and I was on the thirty-eighth floor before I recognized what I was doing. I walked through the finance department on the pretense of checking a project timeline with Patricia, and I passed within three feet of her desk, and my hand brushed her arm as I went by.

It wasn’t an accident. My body is incapable of being near her and not reaching for her. The touch lasted less than a second. My fingers against the bare skin below her sleeve, a contact so brief that anyone watching would have seen nothing.

She looked up. Her lips parted. I saw the flush start at the base of her throat and climb, and I smelled the shift in her scent, the warm deepening that told me her body was responding to the contact in ways she didn’t understand and couldn’t control.

I kept walking. I didn’t look back.

But I felt it for the rest of the day. The phantom heat of her skin against my fingertips. The knowledge that one touch, one fraction of a second, and her entire body oriented toward me like a compass finding north.

The bond is a weapon. And I’m not sure who’s holding it.

I leave the office at eight. In the elevator, her scent is fading but still present, a trace of where she stood this morning and this evening, a map of her movements written in the air. I breathe it in one more time before the doors open to the garage.

Thursday. Pack meeting. Territory. Business.

I can do this. I’ve been doing this for decades. One human woman with dark eyes and her father’s secrets is not going to be the thing that breaks me.

I get in my car and drive home and tell myself that lie all the way there.

Chapter Six

Sophia

I’ve been working on the notebook every night for two weeks.

The cipher isn’t hard, not once you know the key. My father taught it to me as a substitution game: shift each letter by a rotating count, three forward, then two back, then five forward, repeating. A child’s puzzle. But he layered it, running the substitution twice on certain pages and adding a secondary shift on dates and dollar amounts. It took me three nights to figure out the double layer, and another two to crack the date encoding.

Now I can read it almost as fast as English, and I wish I couldn’t.

The notebook spans fourteen months. The first half is financial. My father documented money flowing through the Voronov organization like a forensic auditor, which is ironic because that’s apparently a genetic trait. He tracked payments to vendors I now recognize from the company files on my desk at work, noting amounts, dates, routing numbers, and the names of intermediary LLCs. He drew diagrams in the margins showing how cash moved in loops, touching legitimate accounts just long enough to leave a clean fingerprint before disappearing into the next shell.

He saw exactly what I see. The architecture of a laundering operation built by someone brilliant and maintained by people who know what they’re doing.

But the second half of the notebook shifts. The financial entries thin out and the observational notes take over, and that’s where the pages start making me sit back against the headboard and breathe.

My father was watching the Voronov inner circle. Not their money. Them. Their bodies, their movements, their behaviors. He wrote about meetings that ran until midnight and then the principals vanished for hours, returning with dirt under their nails and a wildness in their eyes that he found difficult to describe. He wrote about a night when he arrived early to open the restaurant and found the back door ajar, the alley behind it marked with gouges in the asphalt that looked like claw marks. He wrote about Dominic Voronov catching a glass that fell from a shelf with a speed that didn’t track with human reflexes.

“He moved almost before it fell,” my father wrote. “Like he knew.”

I set the notebook down and look at the ceiling of my expensive, monitored apartment and think about the man whose office is one floor above me at work.

Ten days. Ten days of working in his building, breathing his air, and I am losing a fight I didn’t know I was in.

It started with the hallway. The first time he walked past my desk, his hand grazed my arm, and I felt the contact in places that I should not. A flush that started in my throat and spread downward. A pulse between my legs that came out of nowhere and left me gripping the edge of my desk like it was the only thing keeping me from sliding out of my chair.

I told myself it was adrenaline. Proximity to danger. A stress response.

Then it happened again. And again. He kept finding reasons to be near me. Walking through the finance department, stopping to ask Patricia a question while standing close enough to my desk that I could feel the heat radiating off his body. Holding the elevator door for me with his hand inches from my waist. Handing me a coffee one morning, his fingers overlapping mine on the cup, and the contact lasted two full seconds and I thought about those two seconds for the rest of the day.

I dream about him now. Not hazy, half-remembered dreams. Vivid ones. His hands. His mouth. The weight of him pressing me into something solid, a wall, a desk, the floor, it doesn’t matter. I wake up sweating with my hand between my thighs and his name on my tongue, and I lie there in the dark hating myself because this is not who I am. I don’t lose control. I don’t fixate. I don’t lie in bed aching for a man who is holding a debt over my head and who might know how my father died. Or worse.