Chapter 13 #2
I dropped into my chair, let the pain in my shoulder pulse through me, and watched the camera feed from the perimeter.
Everything outside was frozen and motionless.
But inside the compound, you could practically taste the anticipation—the way everyone moved a little too quiet, eyes always just a hair too bright.
They all knew what was coming. They were just pretending it wouldn’t matter.
I thumbed through the reports on Iron Valor my people had been compiling.
More promising than I’d hoped: two officers already at each other’s throats, their Luna’s moods were wild and erratic.
The toy drive was shaping up to be the best-attended in years.
The perfect setup. I laughed, then coughed, the old scar tissue in my throat buzzing like an electrical burn.
On the next page: the latest from Parker Reid.
Parker wasn’t like the others. Most hackers?
Pathetic scavengers—cash or fear bought them.
But her? She was a blade sharpened on stone, cold and precise.
The kind that cuts deeper the harder you grip it.
I’d dealt with lone wolves before, snarling things who thought themselves untouchable, but Parker…
she wasn’t that. No, she circled Iron Valor like a storm that returns each month, predictable only in its inevitability.
Full moon runs, shifts, vanishing before dawn.
No attachments. None that I could find, anyway.
Her brother? A weeping cockroach. Offered her up like a trinket when I came to carve my due from his ribs. Weak blood. How had they shared a womb?
First time I saw her, I almost laughed. Expected some mousy code-rat, hiding behind thrift-store armor.
Instead, she walked in like she’d spun her own gravity.
Five feet of nerve and hunger, wild dark hair tinged with pink, eyes electric blue.
Didn’t blink when I let the monster breathe.
Just stood there, tasting the danger, wrists loose at her sides—ready, not afraid.
“Will this save his life?” She asked, no tremor, no plea.
As if her brother’s worthlessness was a fact, not a regret.
I admired that. Hypocrisy’s a stench I can’t stomach.
She made my skin itch. Not because she defied me.
No, any fool can bark. But because she mirrored the parts of me I’d buried under corpses and ash.
Same gnawing void behind the ribs. Same contempt for rules that aren’t hers.
Wanted to crack her open just to see if she’d bleed ambition instead of red.
Wanted to… well. Monsters have appetites.
She’d worked for a few weeks on a plan to siphon over a hundred grand from Iron Valor’s accounts without tripping alarms. And that’s just the beginning.
The bank security gave her friction, firewalls, encryption, singing hymns in binary.
But she’d bent it. I’d gotten an email from her telling me as much.
Wanted to meet to give me the details about how it’ll go down.
That girl was an artist when it comes to this shit.
Tonight, I’d sit back and watch her create a masterpiece.
Once she triggered the worm in Iron Valor’s network, every financial asset they had should be rerouted through a chain of shell companies that all led, eventually, to me.
They’d be bled dry as a gutted stag. It wasn’t about the money.
It was about humiliation. The only thing Bronc cared about more than his pack was his reputation.
Stripping him bare would be the real kill shot.
I leaned back, propped my boots on the desk, and let my mind wander.
If Parker worked out, if she stayed on the leash, we could take more than Iron Valor.
We could bleed the vamps in Kazmir’s kingdom, sabotage the demon lord’s empire.
She could be a weapon, a bomb I could drop wherever I wanted.
Or I could just watch the world burn, take her with me, see who survived.
There was a knock at the door.
“Come,” I said, and Parker slipped in, hood down, hair wild, shoulders squared. She looked like she’d spent the last six hours in a server room or a bar fight, maybe both.
She closed the door behind her, then took the chair across from me. “Looks like you’re set to go,” she said, voice even. She nodded at my laptop. “Can I show you?”
I rarely let anyone touch my computer, but she was interested in keeping her brother alive. She wouldn’t dare put him in danger by fucking me over.
“By all means.” I slid my open laptop over to her and watched her fingers fly across the keyboard. She watched the screen, then turned it back to me so I could see.
“Funds will hit the first offshore at midnight. All they’ll see is a denial-of-service, like they’ve got a worm but no infection.”
I nodded. “All the accounts?”
“They have several. This is just the first. It will happen in a sequence. The first tonight. The second tomorrow and the last the next night. They’ll be so busy trying to figure out what went wrong on the first, they’ll never see the next.”
I almost smiled. “Good. You know you’re the only reason I haven’t killed your brother yet?”
She looked at me, flat. “I know. That’s the reason I’m doing this.”
That got a real smile out of me. “You value family, Parker. I like that.”
She leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “What happens after the transfers? Am I done?”
I watched her. She wasn’t nervous, not exactly, but her left hand kept clenching and unclenching, like she was rehearsing a punch she knew would never land.
“No,” I said. “You’re not done. Not until I say.”
She glared, and for a second her wolf surfaced, pupils wide and black. “I’ve done everything you asked.”
“And you’ll do more,” I said, voice low. “You want your brother alive? You do what I say.”
She stood up, hands balled into fists. “Fuck you.”
I was on my feet before she knew it; the chair clattering against the wall.
I moved faster than she thought I could.
I caught her by the throat, my hand inside the turtleneck she wore, and pressed her up against the cinderblock wall, squeezed just hard enough to see her eyes bulge, my mouth close enough to feel her breath.
“You’re mine,” I said. “You have been since the moment I first laid my eyes on you. I was just waiting for you to figure it out.”
She clawed at my wrist, but it was a show. I could feel her pulse, could feel the wolf in her wanting to bite and run. “I hate you,” she said, voice ragged.
I leaned in close enough to bite the shell of her ear. “You hate yourself more.”
She shuddered, then went limp, not submission but something closer to resignation. I loosened my grip, let her slide down the wall. She didn’t fall. She didn’t cry.
I waited. She caught her breath, put her hand on the bookshelf to balance herself, wiped her mouth, then glared at me with new hate. “If you touch my brother—”
I cut her off. “You’ll what? You’ll kill me? Try it. You won’t be the first.”
She laughed, bitter. “I’ll do worse.”
For a second, I believed her.
I decided it was best at this moment if I let her leave. She had nowhere to go, no one to turn to. She could go back to her lonely little house and stew all by herself and enjoy her last days of freedom. There was nowhere she could run that I wouldn’t find her.
“You’re dismissed, Parker. Remember, you can run, but you can’t hide.”