Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
NELL
Iexpected to hear the sound of a lock clicking. There was only the door shutting. It was the chorus of howls that let me know I wasn't going anywhere near that doorknob.
Wolves. There were fucking werewolves all around me. Shouldn't it be bears if I was a girl locked in a cabin in the woods?
But no, the bed was just right. I loved a firm mattress and soft pillows.
The chair at the desk hugged my curves and was ergonomically perfect at the same time.
He'd even left out a mug of coffee and snacks that I liked.
No porridge. I was going to go criming with a hot beverage and high protein. Yay, me.
I stared at the door, then at the laptop like a live grenade. I should have been terrified. A normal woman would be huddled in a ball, praying to a God she only remembered on holidays.
I wasn't normal. I was the granddaughter of a woman who had been called a witch and cast out to a rural region in northern West Africa, far from the coastal capitals where glass towers caught the sun and wealth and opulence often rivaled the countries who called themselves First World and put ours in third place.
My mother had been no different. She would have lifted a brow at the men turned to wolves, as though she didn't have time for their shenanigans.
Then she would've turned her gaze back out the window as she counted down the minutes until I was old enough to be on my own so she could finally chase my father into the afterlife.
The women in my family didn't raise me to faint. They raised me to survive. They raised me to rise.
Magnus Blackwood thought he was breaking me.
He thought he was forcing me into a corner where my only choice was to become his stooge.
He was not the first man to try to do so, not by far.
He didn't realize that in my world, there was no such thing as a clean hand. I’d known Sterling was a front for the bad guys before I knew bad guys could shift their shapes.
I’d just assumed the monsters wore Italian silk, not fur.
He was offering me a kingdom: Odhiambo to me, it was a map I’d drawn myself.
I wasn't looking for security vulnerabilities; I was looking for the structural ones.
As clients, the Volki were arrogant. They'd come to Sterling two years ago, had looked past me and shaken hands with Junior. They thought that by diversifying their assets across three different jurisdictions. They were untouchable. They didn't realize that I’d built a cross-collateralization clause into their primary loan agreement; a poison pill I’d tucked away a year ago just in case they ever tried to short-change Sterling.
And look where that company loyalty had landed my ass.
Fuck them both. The Volki. The Sterlings. Fuck everyone who had held me down, looked past me, tried to get a leg up on me. I was going to be the one at the top of the mountain now.
What came next was a perfectly legal, catastrophic liquidation.
I triggered the defaults, called in the markers, and watched as the Volki’s three billion began to dissolve into a dozen different escrow accounts.
I was essentially firing their entire board of directors and bankrupting their front companies with a few strokes of a key.
It looked like corporate espionage from the outside looking in, but if a judge ever called me to the bench, I would walk away clean.
I have not and would not ever take the fall for management.
They were all pricks. I was the only one with the balls and brains, and looks to pull this off. Well, Addie could've done it. But Addie wasn't here. I'd tried to save her, and look where it got me.
I'd do it again if I got the chance. But sooner next time. Magnus might be a hottie whose bone I wouldn't mind fetching, but Vidar. Uggh. That one I still didn't trust. I firmly believed a man should never come between sisters or besties. And for me, Addie was both.
I'd get her back. Rescue her from her forced marriage. After I dealt with these files. It took a couple of hours before I was done. But as I moved through the deep-layer archives of Sterling’s private client files, I hit a pocket of data that shouldn't have been there.
It was a repository of back-channel communications; the kind of high-level negotiations that never make it to a formal contract.
I leaned in, the blue light of the screen making my eyes ache.
I wasn't looking at code; I was looking at a conspiracy.
There were logs from the Ironwood archives—internal memos discussing the "Blackwood Problem.
" They had been tracking the Blackwood family’s financial footprint for years, documenting every shipping acquisition, every offshore trust, and every political favor.
And then I saw the file that made my breath hitch. LEGACY / MERGER - PHASE II.
I scrolled through the documents, my heart thudding against my ribs. It was an audit of the Blackwoods' most private vulnerabilities. They had been preparing to squeeze Magnus's family through a set of international maritime laws and a very high-stakes merger involving a family called the Lobos.
Magnus thought he was the one with the leash. He thought he was putting me in a cage by making me his asset. He didn't realize that he’d just given me the keys to his family’s vault.
I began to copy the files into a hidden, encrypted partition—my safety valve. If Magnus ever decided his asset was no longer worth the trouble, I’d make sure he went down with the ship.