Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
NELL
The first thing I registered was the scent.
It smelled of expensive tobacco. It made me think there was an old man in my bedroom which was an absurd thought. I didn't know any old people. At least not one that I'd let into my bedroom.
Tobacco wasn't the only scent. It smelled like a storm. Like rain and grass, but also fire and heat; like the air right before a thunderstorm breaks on a summer night.
I was dreaming. Or I was remembering. Either way, I was in that in-between space of wakefulness and sleep. Whatever I was seeing behind my eyelids held some kind of connection to what was going on in the present in my bedroom.
The sun beat down on my skin. I lifted a hand to shade my eyes.
My hand looked… weird. It was my hand. My familiar fingers.
The nails pristine. The cuticles rough where I often chewed when I was thinking hard.
But my fingers were smaller. And the heat wasn’t coming from the sky—it was coming from the weight pressing me into the earth.
My back was on the ground. Soft grass beneath my shoulders.
I couldn't move, but I wasn't afraid. There was a rhythmic, heavy huff of breath against my ear.
My nostrils filled with the smell of earth and river water and warm, green-dark forest. I was a city girl, a New York City girl.
I had no idea how I knew what red earth smelled like.
Then, the sensation: a tongue, wide and sandpaper-rough, dragged across my cheekbone.
It was wet and hot, a possessive lap that started at my jaw and ended at my temple.
I reached out. My fingers sank into a coat of fur so dense it felt like velvet over muscle.
I felt the prick of sharp claws against my shoulder—not breaking the skin, but pinning me there, a gentle reminder of the power holding me down.
When I opened my eyes in the dream, I didn't see a man.
I saw a pair of glowing amber suns staring back at me, swirling with a gold so bright it burned.
The beast let out a low, vibrating growl that I felt in my marrow. It wasn't a threat. It was a claim.
The gold flared, blinding me. The twin suns vanished into a cold, clinical reality.
I jerked awake. My heart was a frantic drum in my chest. The ghost of that rough tongue still tingled on my skin. My fingers trembled as they touched the exact spot on my cheek where the dream-beast had licked me.
The skin was cool. Dry.
I took a shaky breath, trying to scrub the image from my mind.
It was just the shock; I told myself. The brain does strange things when it’s traumatized.
Because I'd been traumatized. I remember that part now. I’d seen monsters in the park.
My subconscious was processing the horror of it in the dream.
I wasn't in the park any longer. I wasn't in my bed. I had no idea where I was. But I knew the man sitting in the corner of the room, watching me.
He wasn't in his wolf form. That beast had been gray and massive.
Bigger than the captive animals I'd seen at the zoo.
The man in the corner watching me with those dark eyes was more dangerous than either of them.
More dangerous than the wolf caged behind glass.
More dangerous than the wolf running free in the dark.
Those wolves had only one nature. The man had learned to hide his.
Magnus Blackwood was dressed in a suit that cost more than my two month's rent.
His fingers moved with maddeningly slow precision as he straightened a silver cufflink.
He looked civilized. He looked like the boardrooms and the spreadsheets I understood.
When he turned his head, the light caught his eyes.
For a split second, they weren't brown. They were the exact amber gold from the dream.
"Good, you're awake." He pressed a cigar into the ashtray with a turn of his wrist. The ember died with a brief, defiant flare; the scent spiking sharp and sweet for one moment before it faded. "Now we can get started."
The voice was a growl refined into a baritone.
I'd seen him as a man, then as a wolf, and a man again.
He'd been in the park with the sickening sound of bones snapping and reforming. I remembered seeing Addie’s face, then the wolves—monsters the size of small horses with eyes that held too much human intelligence.
I remembered the copper tang of blood in the air.
The snarls. The screams. Addie's calm voice telling me it was going to be okay as her brother tore out her father's throat —with his fangs.
I'm a strong woman. The sight of blood didn't faze me. The sight of what lived beneath the skin — the white and glistening things that had no business being visible in open air — that was a different matter entirely. I'd fainted.
The memory of blacking out hit me with more sting than the sight of a wolf-man.
I, Nell Odhiambo, the woman who managed the chaos of Sterling you’re sequestering a witness who saw a murder.”
Multiple murders. But was it manslaughter when they weren't men at the time?
I distinctly remember the gray wolf taking out a brown wolf.
And there had been a black wolf, which I'm sure was Addie's asshole of a husband.
Vidar Blackwood had been the reason I was in the park trying to get my best friend away from her new husband, who I still think was at least emotionally, if not physically, abusing her.
“Witness. Asset. Call yourself whatever you like. Right now, other people want to steal you because of your involvement in Sterling one he never gave much credit to.
His idiot of a son had given me even less credit as I grew their business from seven to nine figures.
“If you want my work, we can discuss a salary, stocks, and benefits package. You don't keep me in…"
I looked around, expecting to see the clean lines of a hotel room: neutral walls, a minibar, blackout curtains.
What I saw instead were logs. Not decorative logs.
Not the reclaimed wood aesthetic of a Manhattan apartment trying to evoke something rustic.
Actual logs, hand-fitted, the kind that had been placed one on top of another like those wooden toy building blocks.
The ceiling was exposed beams. The floor was wide-plank wood, worn smooth by years of use.
A stone fireplace occupied most of one wall, its mouth dark and cold.
There were no curtains on the windows. Outside were trees. No street. No buildings. No sound of traffic, or sirens, or the ambient hum of a city that never fully went to sleep.
I was not in Manhattan.
I was not anywhere near Manhattan.
I was in a cabin in the middle of the woods that looked like they had never heard of a zip code.
“This isn't a job interview, Petronella.” Magnus walked toward the bed, his movements fluid and dangerously graceful. He stopped just out of reach, looming over me. “This is a change in management. You belong to the Blackwood infrastructure now.”
“I don't belong to anyone.”
He leaned down, his face inches from mine.
I could smell him properly now. The heat coming off his skin was unnatural.
The earthy scent of tobacco and the burning tang of cloves clung to the back of my throat.
Magnus looked at me, and for a split second, his mask slipped, replaced by something hungry and primal. He closed his eyes and inhaled.
"What are you doing?"
"Hold still," he commanded.
"I will not be a docile victim."
Magnus's eyes opened. The gold in them made me catch my breath. "I have never once taken a woman against her will."
With a face like his, I believed him. I had a flash of memory of him carrying me after I fainted, gently settling me into the crook of his arm. He could've hurt me, could've taken advantage of me in that state. He hadn't. He'd made sure I was safe.
"My wolf wants to sniff you." He closed his eyes and did it again. Inhaled long, slow, deep.
"Why? So you can track me if I try to run."
Magnus opened his eyes. "Do not run from me, Petronella."
I swallowed. He watched my throat work. Somehow I knew it wasn't the man watching me; it was the beast inside of him. I should've been more afraid than I was. But I knew he wouldn't hurt me. I definitely got the sense he might kill me. But felt relatively certain he would make sure it didn't hurt.
The other thing I knew for certain? Magnus Blackwood was totally into me. He wanted me. And it was for more than just a business proposition.