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My voice sounds normal. I’m amazed by that. Just minutes ago I watched a man lift another man off the ground with one arm, and my voice sounds like I’m leaving any ordinary office on any ordinary Thursday night. I’ve discovered that I’m capable of a level of compartmentalization that should probably concern me.

Outside, the street is quiet. The cold hits my face and I breathe it in, deep, trying to clear the fear and the adrenaline and the image of Roman’s golden eyes from the back of my eyelids.

The restaurants on the block have closed for the night and the only movement is a cab at the corner and a couple walking their dog across the intersection. Normal things. Human things. I stand on the sidewalk and watch the couple and the dog and I think about how easy it would be to go back to a world where gravity applies equally to everyone and people don’t hold other people in the air with one hand.

I can’t go back. I crossed something tonight. A threshold, the kind you only recognize by how the air feels different on the other side.

I start walking. My apartment is eight blocks from the office and I’ve walked it dozens of times, but tonight the streets feel different. The shadows are deeper. The alleys between buildings yawn open like mouths. I’m hyperaware of every sound, every movement at the edge of my vision. I keep hearing my father’s voice in my head, the way he sounded when he used to walk me home from the restaurant when I was small and the neighborhood was dark. “Keep your eyes up, stellina. See everything. Be afraid of nothing.”

He wasn’t afraid. Not of the Voronovs, not even at the end. The notebook’s final entries are fearful, yes, but not in the way I’d expected. He wasn’t afraid of what they might do to him. He was afraid of what he’d discovered, afraid of the implications, afraid of the size of the secret he’d stumbled into. There’s a difference between fearing a person and fearing the truth about them, and my father, careful and precise and brave in his quiet way, was afraid of the truth.

I understand now.

As I walk, I organize the evidence the same way I organize financial data, sorting the raw information into categories, looking for patterns, testing it against what I already know.

Category one: physical capability. Roman lifted a man who weighed at least a hundred and eighty pounds with one arm, no visible strain.

Category two: sensory perception. My father’s documentation of their apparent ability to react to stimuli almost before those stimuli fully manifest.

Category three: the anomalies I can’t categorize. Body temperature, eye color, their impossible speed…

And category four, the one I’ve been avoiding: how my body responds to Dominic. The dreams that feel less like fantasies and more like communications, as though something inside me is reaching for something inside him across a distance that shouldn’t be bridgeable.

I stop walking. I’m standing on the corner of Monroe and Halsted, two blocks from my apartment, and a thought arrives fully formed, the way the best financial insights do. Not built piece by piece but delivered whole, a pattern that was always there but that I couldn’t see until I had enough data to make it visible.

The pull I feel toward Dominic is related to what he is. Not to his appearance, not to the power dynamic, not to any of the mundane explanations I’ve been offering myself for three weeks. It’s something else. Something biological. Something that operates on the same frequency as the gold in Roman’s eyes and the heat in Dominic’s skin and the speed that human bodies can’t produce.

I walk the last two blocks with my hands in my pockets. In my apartment I lock the door and stand in the kitchen and drink a glass of water and stare at the refrigerator. Then I change into running gear and hope a jog will clear my head enough to decide what I’m going to do with what I know.

Option one: I leave. I walk away from the debt, the job, the apartment, the notebook, the investigation, all of it. I go back to the city that doesn’t matter and the life that was going nowhere and I pretend that I never saw a man held in the air by another man’s hand.

Option two: I stay. I keep working. I keep watching. I keep decoding the notebook and mapping the financial architecture and collecting impossible observations until the picture is complete enough to name.

Option three: I ask Dominic directly. I walk into his office and I sit across from him and I say, “What are you?”

I'm jogging under the Kinzie bridge again when I decide. Option two. Of course option two. I’ve never been the kind of person who walks away from an answer, even when the answer is terrifying. My father wasn’t either, and look where it got him.

But I’m still here. I’m still asking. And whatever the Voronovs are, whatever Dominic is, I need to know the full truth before I let myself fall any further.

Chapter Eleven

Dominic

Igave Roman two weeks. The Cicero crew gives me three days.

Lex calls me at eleven on a Sunday night. His voice has the clipped, compressed quality it takes on when he’s delivering information he knows will detonate. “DeSanto sent a crew to the West Loop tonight. Three men in a black Escalade. They drove past the building where Sophia lives. Slowly. Twice.”

The world goes red. My wolf surges.

I’m standing in my penthouse with my phone in my hand and I can feel the shift pressing against my skin from the inside, the bones in my hands aching to reshape, the muscles in my shoulders bunching and pulling.

“They didn’t stop,” Lex says. He knows what’s happening to me. He can probably hear it in my breathing, the ragged edge that means the wolf is at the surface. “They drove past and kept going. Could be a coincidence.”

“It’s not a coincidence.” My voice comes out lower than it should. Rougher. The wolf bleeds into my vocal cords when he’s this close, and the sound is less man and more animal. “They’re scouting.”

“Agreed. Roman’s already pulled up DeSanto’s known locations. He wants to move tonight.”

DeSanto just drove past the building where my mate sleeps. Where she’s sleeping right now, twelve stories up, with nothing between her and the street but glass and concrete and a security system designed for a residential building, not a fortress.