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Below it, a single word, circled three times.

I stare at it. My father wrote this word in a cipher he taught his eight-year-old daughter and circled it three times and hid it in the lining of his coat.

I read the word.

I say it out loud, alone in my apartment, in a voice that doesn’t sound like mine.

“Wolves.”

The word sits in the air. It doesn’t disappear. It doesn’t dissolve into absurdity the way it should. It hangs there, fully formed, filling the silence with a meaning that reorganizes every piece of evidence I’ve collected over the past five weeks.

The body temperature. The speed. The strength. The eyes that change color. The growl in Dominic’s chest when he kissed me. The howling my father heard on the property outside the city. The way they communicate without words, turning toward each other in groups, responding to signals no human can detect. The scent. The heat. The pull.

They change.

I close the notebook.

I should be afraid. I should be packing a bag, calling Becca, booking a flight back to a world where the laws of biology haven’t been rewritten by a family of impossible men. A reasonable woman would be terrified. A reasonable woman would run.

I’m not running.

Not because I’m brave. Not because I’ve made peace with what I’ve discovered. Because even now, even sitting on my bed holding the truth in my hands, the pull is still there. Warm and steady and patient, sitting in my chest like a second heart, oriented toward a man who walks through conference rooms in tailored suits and runs through forests at four in the morning and whose skin burns with a heat that no human body can produce.

The truth doesn’t kill the wanting. If anything, it sharpens it. Now I know what he is, and I want him anyway, and that want is either the most honest thing I’ve ever felt or the most engineered.

I sit on my bed in the dark, in a monitored apartment in a building he owns, and I let the truth settle into my bones like a temperature change.

Chapter Seventeen

Dominic

The Cicero crew is broken, but the problem they left behind is still breathing.

DeSanto hasn’t resurfaced since the warehouse, and the vacuum his crew left has drawn new opportunists into the ecosystem. A crew out of Gary, Indiana, has started testing the South Side borders, running product through a network of gas stations we’ve been watching for two weeks. They’re smarter than DeSanto. Better funded. And they have a connection inside the CPD’s narcotics unit that’s giving them advance warning of enforcement activity, which means they’re operating with a level of impunity that threatens the equilibrium I’ve spent years building.

The territory is fraying. I can feel it through the subtle vibrations of the pack bond, through the reports my wolves bring me, through the instinct that sits at the base of my skull and tells me when something is wrong with the world I’m responsible for. Something is wrong. The balance is shifting, and if I don’t reassert control, the shift will accelerate.

Roman has been handling the intelligence. He’s good at this, the hunting, the tracking, the patient accumulation of data that precedes decisive action. The tension between us has eased since the warehouse night, not into comfort but into a functional partnership that’s closer to what we had before the resentment set in. He respects what he saw in me that night. I’m not sure I respect it in myself, but the result is the same: when I give Roman an order, he follows it without the half-second delay of silent challenge that used to precede every interaction.

Thursday night. The Gary crew makes their move.

They hit a Voronov-owned gas station on the South Side. Not a robbery. A message. They shoot out the windows, beat the attendant, and leave their product on the counter like a business card. Three people call 911. Patrol cars are there within minutes. My name is on the property records.

This is different from DeSanto. DeSanto was a blunt instrument, all ambition and no craft. The Gary crew is strategic. They hit a property they knew would draw police attention, which means they’re trying to create a situation where my response has to be measured against the risk of law enforcement scrutiny. They’re boxing me in. And they’re doing it at the worst possible time, with a federal task force already pulling at my financial records.

I call a meeting. Not the formal pack meeting. A smaller circle: Roman, Lex, and two of our best trackers. We meet in the basement of the compound, the room we use when we need to talk as wolves rather than businessmen.

“I want them found tonight,” I say. “Not their operation. Them. The men who were at the gas station. I want to know where they’re sleeping.”

“And then?” Roman asks. He’s leaning against the wall, arms crossed, his energy coiled tight. He already knows the answer. He’s asking because he wants to hear me say it.

“And then we handle it. Off the radar. No bodies for the police to find. Clean.”

Roman nods. There’s no argument this time. No push for more authority, no frustration about my caution. He understands what I’m authorizing and he agrees with it, and the alignment between us feels like something old and familiar clicking back into place.

Lex does the tracking. He’s the best we have, a wolf whose senses are refined to a degree that borders on supernatural even by our standards. Within three hours he has a location: a rented house in Roseland, south of the expressway, where four members of the Gary crew are lying low.

We go at two in the morning.