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Dominic is more than one thing. So am I.

And this choice is mine.

Chapter Thirty-One

Dominic

Three weeks later, my life barely resembles the one I had before Sophia.

She moved into the penthouse. She moved in with boxes and organizational systems and a shelf she installed in my closet without asking and a label maker she uses on everything from spice jars to file folders. The penthouse, which used to be a space I inhabited without occupying, now has her fingerprints on every surface. Her books next to mine. Her coffee mug in the cabinet. A framed photo of her father on the bookshelf, next to the Italian cookbooks I’ve collected over decades.

She’s taken on a new role, restructuring the legitimate side of the business with the same relentless competence she brought to everything else.

The construction company was always real and profitable, but I treated it as secondary, a vehicle to justify cash flow rather than something worth growing. Sophia looked at the books and saw what I’d missed while focusing on the shadow operations: we were underperforming. Badly.

In three weeks, she’s renegotiated four subcontractor agreements, identified two development sites that our team had overlooked, and presented a five-year growth strategy that Gregor described as “the best financial analysis I’ve seen in twenty years of doing this work.” The legitimate revenue is already trending upward. The construction company that used to be a means to an end is becoming something valuable on its own merit.

She doesn’t touch the shadow operations. She made that clear the first week. “I’ll build your legitimate business into something that doesn’t need the other side,” she told me. “But I won’t help with laundering. That’s your problem. I’m the solution to a different problem.” The distinction matters to her, and because it matters to her, it matters to me. The line she’s drawn is clean and I respect it.

The pack is adjusting. Not all of them easily. The older wolves, the ones who remember Viktor’s rule, eye her with a wariness that has less to do with her humanity than with what she represents: change. A human mate in the alpha’s house. A woman who asks questions and demands answers and treats the pack’s centuries of secrecy as an organizational problem to be solved rather than a sacred tradition to be honored.

But the younger wolves like her. Katya adores her with the restrained affection she gives almost everything. And Roman, who was her harshest critic, has come around to a grudging respect that he’ll deny if asked.

Viktor is in Montana. Exiled in everything but name, occupying the family’s property in the mountains outside Kalispell, surrounded by wilderness and silence and the diminishing circle of his own relevance. I think about my father sometimes. About the choices he made and the reasons behind them and the man he was before my mother died and the man he became after. I don’t forgive him for Marco. But I understand him better now than I did before Sophia, because now I know what it feels like to have a mate, and I know what I’m capable of when she’s threatened, and the distance between my violence and Viktor’s is shorter than I’d like to admit.

The estate planning needs to be updated. Our attorney, Whitfield, has been drafting amendments to the family trusts, the legal framework that protects our assets and manages the generational transitions across centuries. The beneficiary language hasn’t been revised in twelve years, and with the legitimate business growing under Sophia’s direction, the structures need to match the new reality.

The problem is Viktor’s signature. His name is on the founding documents. Without it, the amendments don’t have standing. And Viktor is in Montana.

I call Whitfield on a Tuesday morning. He confirms the documents are ready and suggests sending a paralegal to handle the notarization in person. Standard procedure for a client of our size. He’ll send someone from his office on our jet, get Viktor’s signature, and have them back in Chicago by the next evening.

I mention it to Roman over coffee. “I need someone to fly up with the attorney’s paralegal. Make sure Viktor cooperates without making it dramatic.”

Roman sets down his mug. “I’ll go.”

I look at him. The offer is unusual. Roman doesn’t volunteer for errands. He delegates them, or he ignores them until someone else handles the logistics. Flying to Montana to babysit a document signing is exactly the kind of task he’d normally dismiss as beneath his time.

“You sure?” I ask.

“It’s a few hours. I haven’t seen the Montana property in a while. Might as well check on things while I’m there.”

His tone is casual. His heartbeat is steady. Nothing about his expression or his body language suggests anything other than a brother offering to handle a routine task. And yet some instinct, the same instinct that lets me read a room full of wolves and know which ones are settled and which ones are ready to snap, tells me there’s something underneath the casual offer that I can’t see yet.

I let it go. Roman’s reasons are his own.

“Fine. Take the jet tomorrow morning. Whitfield’s sending someone to handle the notarization. Coordinate with her on timing.”

“Done.” He takes his coffee and leaves.

That evening, after Sophia has gone to bed, I take out my phone and look at the photo of the ring. White gold, single stone, elegant in its simplicity. The jeweler finished it yesterday. It’s sitting in a velvet box in my office safe, waiting for a Sunday morning when the light is right and the risotto isn’t burning and the woman I love is sitting on my counter.

I’m going to get down on one knee. In the kitchen. In the room where she once threatened to burn my operation to the ground with a forensic accounting report. I’m going to hold out the ring and ask her a question that is, in the context of what we already are to each other, entirely redundant.

But she deserves the asking. She deserves a question instead of a claim. One choice that belongs entirely to her. I already know what I want her answer to be. Wanting it and taking it are no longer the same thing.

I put the phone away. I walk to the bedroom. She’s sleeping on her side, dark hair across the pillow, the silver scar just visible above the neckline of my shirt. The doubled heartbeat slows as I lie down beside her, syncing into sleep rhythm.

I close my eyes. I think about the ring and the question and the Sunday morning I’m going to ask it.