Page 68
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Dominic
Igo to the compound.
I haven’t slept. I haven’t eaten. The bond has been a raw nerve for two days, but something changed this morning.
The wolf stopped pacing. He stopped keening. He went quiet.
That is considerably more dangerous.
But I’m not going to the compound because of the bond. I’m going because my father killed a man under my authority and hid it from me. Today I get the truth.
Viktor occupies a suite in the east wing of the compound. The room is comfortable but diminished, a fraction of the space he once commanded, and the reduction in square footage mirrors his reduction in authority. He was alpha for over a century. Now he’s an old wolf in two rooms, watching his sons run the pack he built and saying nothing about it in public while orchestrating quiet resistance in private.
He’s sitting by the window when I walk in. He doesn’t look surprised. He’s nearly three hundred years old and nothing surprises him anymore, least of all the arrival of his eldest son with fury in his eyes and the smell of a fractured mate bond clinging to his skin.
“You look terrible,” he says.
“Marco Marchelli.”
The name falls into the room and Viktor’s expression doesn’t change. Not a flicker. Not a twitch. He's been expecting this conversation.
“Sit down, Dominic.”
“I’ll stand.”
“Then stand.” He turns from the window. His eyes, which were once the same gray as mine, have faded to something paler, almost silver, and they hold a clarity that age has sharpened rather than dulled. “What did she find?”
“A notebook. In cipher. Fourteen months of observations. Temperatures, reaction times, behavioral patterns. He documented everything. And at the end, he documented you.”
“He was a man who saw too much and made the mistake of saying so.”
“He was a man who confronted you about what he’d discovered and then died of a heart attack ten days later.”
Viktor’s mouth tightens. Not with guilt. With impatience. As though the conversation is taking longer than necessary to arrive at a point he reached decades ago.
“Marco Marchelli was a good man. He was loyal, meticulous, and genuinely fond of this family. I trusted him with businesses I wouldn’t have trusted to most wolves. For fifteen years, he never gave me a reason to regret it.”
“Until he learned what we are.”
Viktor’s expression doesn’t change. “Until what he knew became more dangerous than what he’d earned.”
My wolf presses against my skin. “He was your friend.”
“Yes.”
The answer is immediate. No denial. No qualification.
Somehow that makes it worse.
“Then why?”
“Because curiosity doesn’t stay intellectual. It grows. It becomes a need to share, to document, to tell someone. Marco was careful, but careful men still talk. To friends. To family. To daughters.” The last word carries a weight that makes my jaw clench. “He was a single point of failure, Dominic. One man, one conversation, one moment of weakness, and the secret that has protected this pack for centuries is compromised. I couldn’t allow that.”
“So you killed him.”
“I made a decision. The same decision I’ve made four times in nearly three hundred years, when a human got too close to the truth and the risk of exposure outweighed the value of mercy. I don’t enjoy it. I never have. But the pack’s survival requires that some calculations end in subtraction.”
