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“You’re not handling anything. You’re vibrating. I can feel you from across the building and it’s making the younger wolves nervous. An alpha running this hot without a resolution makes the whole pack tense. You know that.”
I do know that. The alpha’s emotional state cascades through the pack hierarchy in ways that are difficult to describe to anyone who hasn’t lived inside the dynamic. When the alpha is settled, the pack is settled. When the alpha is agitated, every wolf in range feels it in their chest, a low-frequency anxiety that has no obvious source. I’ve been broadcasting agitation for days, and my wolves are absorbing it like secondhand smoke.
“I’m handling it,” I say again, and Roman leaves without arguing, which is worse than if he’d pushed, because it means he’s decided that whatever I’m handling, I’m doing it badly, and he’s making his own plans accordingly.
Thursday night. Pack meeting. Five wolves in a room where we don’t pretend to be human.
Lex delivers the security update first. He’s methodical, precise, the kind of wolf who turns chaos into bullet points. The DeSanto situation has gone quiet. The surviving crew members have scattered. The message was received. Two of DeSanto’s supplier connections have severed ties. The territory pressure has eased.
“For now,” Lex adds. “DeSanto himself is still out there. He’s gone to ground but he hasn’t left the city.”
“Keep monitoring,” I say. “If he resurfaces, I want to know before he has breakfast.”
Lex nods and moves on. Then he says something that changes the temperature of the room.
“There’s something else. I’ve been running the federal monitoring protocol, and the task force that’s been looking at our financials has escalated. They’ve assigned a dedicated analyst. She’s been requesting records from the county assessor’s office, pulling property transfer documents, cross-referencing ownership records. Standard stuff for a financial investigation, but the scope is wider than I’d expect for a routine probe.”
“How wide?” I ask.
“She’s going back forty years.”
The room goes still. Five wolves processing the same implication. Forty years of property records means she’ll see ownership passing from one Voronov identity to another, the transfers mapping the pack’s habit of cycling through names. “That’s not financial,” Roman says. “That’s structural. She’s not following money. She’s following the family.”
“It could still be financial,” Lex says, though his tone says he doesn’t believe it. “Real estate is a common vector for laundering investigations. She might be mapping our property portfolio to look for irregularities in valuation or transfer pricing.”
“Or she might be wondering why the same family has owned the same buildings for four decades without any of the principals aging in their corporate photos.” I lean back in my chair. “What do we know about her?”
Lex pulls up a file. “Her name is Rachel Matthews. Twenty-eight, Yale law, two years at the SEC before moving to the DOJ task force. She’s smart. Her supervisor trusts her but doesn’t micromanage, which means she has latitude to chase threads.”
“She’s dangerous,” Roman says flatly.
“She’s doing her job,” I say. “Which makes her dangerous, yes.”
The irony is not lost on me. I have a federal analyst pulling four decades of property records from the outside, and I have Sophia Marchelli sitting one floor below me pulling financial threads from the inside, and both of them are building pictures that I can’t afford to let them complete. The difference is that Rachel Matthews is a professional threat I can manage through legal strategy and misdirection. Sophia is something else. Sophia is a threat I’ve invited into my house. And need in my bed.
I assign Lex to monitor the task force with increased frequency. I tell him to flag any contact between the analyst and the county assessor’s office in real time. I tell him to pull our older corporate photos from any database that might show up in a federal search and replace them with images that are slightly different, digitally altered, enough to break a facial recognition match. It’s a stopgap. It buys time. It doesn’t solve the problem.
The meeting ends. The wolves file out. Roman stays.
He doesn’t sit. He stands by the door with his hands in his pockets and his shoulder against the frame, and there’s something different about him tonight that I can’t immediately identify. The usual restlessness is muted. He’s not coiled the way he usually is, not vibrating with the compressed energy that makes every room feel too small for him. He looks almost settled. Distracted, but settled, and on my brother those two qualities have never coexisted before.
“The law firm called today,” he says. “The estate planning people. They need signatures on the amendments to the family trusts.”
“Send Lex.”
“I already went.”
I look at him. He meets my eyes and there’s nothing confrontational in his gaze, which is unusual enough to warrant attention. Roman’s default expression when he talks to me is a carefully calibrated blend of deference and challenge. Tonight the challenge is absent, and what’s left isn’t deference either. It’s preoccupation. My brother is thinking about something that has nothing to do with me or the pack or the territory or any of the things that have consumed his attention for the past decade.
“How did it go?” I ask.
“Fine.”
One word. Clipped, quick, delivered with a dismissiveness that’s designed to close the subject. But his heartbeat ticked up when he said it, and his scent carries a faint undertone I haven’t smelled on Roman before. Something warm. Something almost sweet.
Interesting.
I should ask. I should push, the way I push on every anomaly in the behavior of my wolves, because anomalies are where threats hide. But I’m too consumed with my own crisis to investigate Roman’s. My brother is acting strange after a visit to the law firm, and under normal circumstances I’d be mapping every possible explanation for that strangeness. Right now I file it away and let him go because my wolf is already drifting back to the thirty-eighth floor, to the heartbeat one story below, to the woman who kissed me back with both fists twisted in my shirt.
