Chapter 2
MALACHI CROSS
Force was what men used when they had already failed.
I learned that long before Chicago ever glittered under my window.
It was a lesson I learned back home in New Orleans where the air stayed heavy and the city tested you for sport.
The loudest man in the room was usually the one already losing.
Hurricanes did not announce themselves with bravado.
They just came, slow and inevitable, turning streets into rivers and promises into debris.
New Orleans taught me that lesson the way it taught everything else, with heat on your skin and consequences that lived etched on your skin.
Unstoppable. Unassailable control lived in design.
It lived in systems that expected greed, predicted panic, and closed before anyone could realize.
It lived in doors that locked without drama, in cameras that watched without blinking, in elevator banks that obeyed without asking because they belonged to the building, not the people inside it.
If a man wanted to act up, fine. He could puff himself up and feel brave for a minute, but the tower didn’t negotiate with ego. Its systems denied him what he wanted. Doors stayed shut, elevators refused to answer, and access evaporated until he realized he messed up.
Pack Meridian did not notice problems. We engineered them, then watched the world blame coincidence.
Outside my windows, Chicago glittered in expensive denial.
Snow dusted the ledges and collected in the seams of rooftops, turning the river into a black ribbon edged in white.
The skyline stood tall as if height could buy innocence, and Meridian Tower rose among those buildings with the clean arrogance of money, glass, and steel, power dressed as safety.
That performance was for the world. Inside, Pack Meridian did not perform. We contained.
My office reflected that philosophy. There were no photographs and no sentimental corners where a man could hide weakness and call it humanity.
There was only a desk, controlled lighting, and a wall display wired directly into the tower’s nervous system.
They calibrated even the silence here, the kind that made visitors lower their voices without knowing why.
The display pulsed once, contained and clean.
TERMINAL LOCK ENGAGED: HAWTHORNE & VALE / FLOOR 17 / WORKSTATION 17F-3C.
I watched the words settle, then read the cascade beneath them. Timestamps populated the sidebar. Keystrokes organized themselves into a neat trail. Access routes rendered into a map of behavior. Meridian always built a record when we decided someone mattered.
We set the trap, but the alarm itself never impressed me. Alarms were for people who needed to be warned. Pack Meridian did not warn. We reigned.
My earpiece warmed against my skin.
Elijah spoke before I asked. “She reached the convergence point.”
“She,” I repeated, not for clarity but for commitment. Meridian recorded everything. Always had. Always would. “How did she get through?”
“She patiently navigated,” Elijah said. Even his calm carried a thin thread of interest. He looked like a man who had been bored too long and had finally found something worth watching. “She moved through the system like she understood it. It was not a mistake, nor was it luck.”
No. Luck did not move like that. She was a professional who moved with intention. She could read an organization’s skeleton through its paperwork, and it meant she had not wandered into the wrong systems by mistake.
I gestured, and the wall display widened, detail unfolding. Every attempt made, and every attempt avoided. Every permission requested, and every refusal acknowledged. Every dead end she did not waste time on. Action was cheap. Behavior was everything.
I watched the employee on the cameras. She did not rummage.
She did not grab everything within reach.
She read, confirmed, and isolated. When the system tightened and the tripwire recognized her, she did not thrash.
She did not fight it. She did not dispute it.
She stopped, as if she could feel the moment the walls closed in.
That was the first sign she understood danger.
The second sign was in the way she exited her desk, as if she expected that this day might come. Quick and quiet.
“Identity,” I said, pulling her information up on my screen .
A file populated on the display.
NYX brOOKS. FINANCIAL COMPLIANCE AUDITOR.
I let out one slow breath. She didn’t move like an auditor. She moved like a forensic accountant.
Hawthorne and Vale stamped her designation neatly at the top.
BETA.
Meridian’s internal scan flagged it as something else, quiet and proprietary, far less interested in corporate fiction.
UNREGISTERED.
Not bonded. Not claimed. Not filed in any pack system that mattered.
Her portrait was corporate, professional, and neutral. Hair pulled back. Face composed. Eyes trained to be forgettable, the photograph designed to make a woman disappear into the wallpaper. It almost worked.
Only the camera could not erase what she was made of. Even in stiff lighting, her skin held depth, a rich brown that I wanted to run my hands down. It carried warmth and glow, almost hypnotizing me in her light. Her mouth was full and deliberate, softness with boundaries.
And the body the photo tried to crop into corporate acceptable lines still pushed through. Shoulders rounded with strength. A fullness in her chest that the blouse could not hide. Curves that did not apologize, even when she stood still and gave the company her most controlled version of herself.
A curvy beta? That was something I’d never seen in all my life.
The brilliance hidden beneath the benignity was also a calculated move. She didn’t want to be noticed, so she wasn’t. At least not until now. Under scrutiny, her image failed to mask her beauty, her determination, or her intelligence.
It made my jaw tighten, and not because I admired her.
My first thought should have been a breach. But I was a man who recognized what belonged to him the moment he saw it. The certainty settled behind my ribs and did not move. Proof and permission be damned.
I stared at her photograph longer than I needed to. A controlled man would have clicked away. I kept looking because the picture was not enough, and that fact irritated me to the point of gritting my teeth.
She shouldn’t entice me. A beta rarely held an alpha’s attention, but I couldn’t help wanting to scent her just from what I’ve seen. My curiosity piqued.
We ran scent scrubbers through the vents. We had to. Too many alphas. Too many instincts. Too many eyes. This company was on the up and up. We couldn’t afford lawsuits after rut induced fighting broke out or worse and assault on another employee.
Though omegas could not work, even an omega visitor could dismantle the company. One exposed heat on a public floor turned employees into a spectacle.
Meridian did not fear omegas. Meridian feared what uncontrolled men did around them.
Who sent her?
I tapped open her employment record.
Patterns emerged, one after another, the way truth always did. No social links. No work friendships. No outside family listed. No digital chatter. She was a person nobody would look for. A ghost.
Her coworkers described her as pleasant, professional, and a hard worker. Sterile praise, the kind you offered when you didn’t know someone well enough to care. Nyx Brooks moved through Hawthorne and Vale like a shadow.
Then the second pattern rose: avoidance.
Every time managing partners scheduled in-person rounds, any time leadership would be physically present, Nyx Brooks called out sick.
Not a few times. Consistent. Fever. Migraine.
A stomach bug. Family emergency when she had none listed.
She worked, collected her checks, and vanished before the boss ever held her gaze long enough to notice the cracks.
Curiouser and curiouser. People knew betas for their strong immune systems, yet this one always seemed to find a reason to avoid upper management.
“Why does an accountant avoid being seen?” I asked aloud.
We moved money the way veins moved blood–quiet, constant, and with purpose. We controlled access to people, to systems, to bodies. We didn’t survive because we were loud. We survived because we were everywhere, threaded through the city and the country in ways that never made the news.
Pack Meridian sat at the center of that infrastructure. I was the Alpha Prime.
That was not a title handed down by ceremony. It was a reality enforced by order.
I was born in New Orleans, raised in humidity that was thick, on second line drums that rattled your ribs, on the smiles that meant you were safe right before a man did you dirty.
I learned which streets flooded first, which people lied easiest, and how fast somebody turned you in wasn’t my problem.
So I built a world where people didn’t get to improvise with my safety.
No king ruled alone. I built my pack on friendship. Brotherhood. But I was still the boss. We had a mole within our midst and though she intrigued me, I still wanted to know how the hell she’d gotten here to begin with.
Nyx Brooks.
She should feel happy working for our company. I’d grown this business until we were leading in the Midwest. Yet, she spat on the opportunity.
Omegas could not work corporate jobs like this. Not openly. Not unbonded. Not in a tower saturated with alphas. Nyx Brooks should be thankful she didn’t have to lead a life like that. We gave her a position. I opened a door to her not many women could walk through.
At least she was just a beta. An omega would’ve been a headache of massive proportions.
An unclaimed omega was not just a risk. It was temptation, and temptation made men sloppy.
I did not tolerate sloppiness, and I did not like the quiet, involuntary interest that curled in my gut as soon as her name became more than a file.