Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
MAGNUS
The air in the Old Westbury hunting lodge was thick.
Pheromones, mostly. The layered accumulation of apex predators in human skin sitting in close proximity with old grievances and older instincts.
The biological fact of what they were pressed against the civilized veneer of what they were pretending to be.
The lodge was a heritage building, stone-walled and deep-timbered, the kind of place that had absorbed decades of exactly this: powerful men displaying diplomacy while their wolves measured the distance to each other's throats.
A human walking in off the street would have called it tension.
They would have loosened their collar and found a reason to leave quickly.
What they would have been feeling was prey instinct.
The oldest response available to a species that had spent its evolutionary history being eaten by things that looked, right now, exactly like the men sitting around this table.
"Magnus Blackwood," a female voice purred. "You look delicious."
Alpha Sorsha Lobo leaned back in her chair, one long leg crossed over the other, her silk dress slit high enough to be an invitation. She was in her fifties, but the Lobo bloodline was kind to its women; she looked barely thirty.
"Is that a new scent?" Sorsha was also my soon-to-be mother-in-law. Her nose twitched as she looked me up and down. "Dior Sauvage, perhaps?"
I hadn't gone to the cabin before I'd come to the meeting. I also hadn't showered since leaving Nell at the cabin. My wolf liked her scent on us.
I'd come to this meeting alone. It was a calculated risk, a middle finger to the traditional protocol that demanded an Alpha travel with a Second for protection. I didn't need one of my brothers standing behind me to prove I was dangerous. My silence did that for me.
"I don't wear cologne. You're smelling my mother's home-cooking."
I leaned down, offering a kiss to each of Sorsha's cheeks.
She inhaled more of the scent. I let her, pulling away slowly.
She didn't challenge me. The Lobos were a smaller pack, but still fierce.
They held territory that sat at the junction of three pack boundaries, a geographic choke point that made them impossible to ignore and expensive to antagonize.
"Good to know you're a man with a healthy appetite. My daughter doesn’t cook, but she is ripe for the plucking. You should have us over for dinner this weekend."
To Sorsha, her daughter was a commodity, a piece of fruit to be traded for territory. To me, Rosalind was the cage door. I was not ready for that door to snap shut behind me. Not when I had another woman currently trapped in my cabin in the woods.
"My mother is still planning Vidar's wedding. You want my union with your daughter to be grand. We'll wait until next year."
I didn't give her time to debate. I turned to reach out a hand to Elias O’Shea—formerly Elias Vane.
He looked different since he’d ripped his father’s throat out and taken the Vane pack for himself.
He looked settled, but I knew better. The pup had pressure coming at him from every angle as an untried alpha.
His Second, Cillian, stood behind him. Cillian wore a slim-fit suit and thick-framed glasses, looking more like an MIT professor than a pack enforcer.
I knew better than to underestimate either of them.
Nerds with wolf blood were the ones who calculated exactly where to place the knife.
"Elias," I nodded.
"Magnus," he replied, his voice level.
He was bound to my brother Vidar by marriage, but he wasn't a Blackwood lackey. He'd proven that when Vidar had given him the choice to be a spy in his father's pack and Elias had balked. Then, a few days later, the Vane heir had taken the crown for himself. He had my respect.
Valentino Lupetto sat across from him. He was flanked by one of his twin brothers, Casanova.
The Lupettos were sharp-featured men who looked like they’d just stepped off a yacht in Capri.
Valentino gave me a respectful nod, but his jaw was tight.
The Lupettos were rebuilding fast after the execution of their father.
They were grateful for our help in removing Dante Lupetto from the game board, but they weren't going to play nice for long.
And then there was the empty chair. Or rather, the chair occupied by Barrett Ironwood.
Barrett was a weak-chinned stooge we’d installed to lead the remnants of the Ironwood pack. He sat there, sweating through his polyester suit, nodding at everything I said before I even said it. He was a placeholder, a puppet whose only job was to give the Blackwoods a second vote on the council.
"Where are the Russians?" I asked, though I already smelled the answer.
The double doors at the end of the hall swung open. Viktor Volkov stepped in, followed by his sister, Katya. They were a wall of Slavic muscle and cold, gray eyes. Viktor didn't bother with pleasantries. He slammed his hands onto the oak table. The wood groaned under his strength.
"Blackwood," he spat. "My shipping accounts in the Caymans are frozen. My mergers at Volkov Industrial are hitting a compliance wall."
Huh. Nell was faster than I thought. Had she just pulled off everything I'd tasked her with in less than a day? It should've been impossible. Clearly, she was far more brilliant than I had expected.
Viktor stood there, eyeing me, bushy brow raised expectantly.
"I'm sorry for your troubles. Do you need a hug?"
"What I need is the new face of Sterling and Associates. Whoever you've installed over there just put their hands in my pocket. I want them on their knees."
Get in line, buddy. "The Sterling transition has been complex, Viktor. We're auditing all third-party interests to ensure the Ironwood taint hasn't spread into the client accounts."
"Audit my balls," Katya snarled. Her hand moved toward the hilt of the blade she kept at her hip. "Sterling built our shell companies. Sterling held our keys. You've absorbed that firm, and now our liquidity is evaporating. That is not a coincidence."
"Sterling's infrastructure is being reviewed and consolidated," I said. "If your accounts are experiencing disruption, I'd suggest your own compliance team examine your exposure."
"Our exposure," Viktor said, his voice dropping into something more dangerous than the shouting, "is that whoever is running Sterling's back-end systems right now is either very loyal to you or very afraid of you. Either way, they are dismantling us. And we want them stopped."
I kept my face smooth. The Volkovs knew about Sterling's systems. They knew someone was inside those systems. They did not know it was a woman sitting in my cabin eating plantain chips and getting her vanilla scent all over my sheets.
"The Sterling transition is a Blackwood internal matter," I said. "Any disruption to your accounts is a consequence of the Ironwood audit. Take it up with Barrett."
Barrett, to his credit, nodded vigorously inside his cheap suit.
Viktor opened his mouth to retort. His pocket began to vibrate. Then Katya's. A series of high-pitched pings echoed through the stone room. It was the sound of a dozen high-priority alerts hitting at once.
Viktor pulled out his phone. His brow furrowed as he scrolled. His face turned from red to a sickly, ashen gray. His eyes widened, his pupils dilating until he looked like he was staring at a ghost.
"What is it?" Sorsha asked.
"It's …gone," Viktor's hands shook. "Three billion rubles… it’s been liquidated."
A jolt of pure, unadulterated electricity shot down my spine. Nell. She'd effectively cut the legs out from under the Volki. It was a masterpiece of structural violence.
It was also a problem I hadn't planned for.
I hadn't given her a timeline. I hadn't staged the room, positioned my exit, or calculated the fallout of three billion in Volki liquidity evaporating while I was sitting alone at a table full of Alphas and their Seconds with nothing between me and their teeth but a suit.
I didn't let a single flicker of surprise reach my face.
"You did this," Viktor roared, lunging across the table.
I was faster.
The gun was in my hand before he cleared the woods — not pointed at Viktor, but at Katya. The logic was simple. Everyone in the room understood it immediately: Viktor was too furious to be rational, which made him too furious to be an effective hostage.
But Katya was cold. Katya was calculating. And Viktor would die for his sister.
Family first. It wasn't just a Blackwood motto.
Nobody moved.
No enforcers came through the door. No Second stepped forward.
Not even Elias, which told me the boy was smarter than his age and the new-alpha-smell suggested.
There were rules older than pack law: you don't interfere in a direct challenge.
You sit on your hands and wait to see who's left standing.
Gun trained on his sister, I didn't take my eyes off Viktor.
"I want to be clear about your intentions." My voice was the same temperature it had been all evening. "Are you challenging me and my family, Viktor? Or are you having a bad day because you had a business booboo?"
The room held its breath.
Viktor's chest heaved. The fury in his eyes was volcanic. Beneath it something older and colder was working: the survival calculus every Alpha learned before they learned to walk.
He looked at his sister. At the gun. Back at me.
He breathed out through his nose. A long, slow exhale that was its own kind of answer.
"You're right, Magnus. We're civilized wolves.
" He straightened his jacket with both hands, the gesture deliberate and unhurried.
"My sister and I are going to handle our business.
And then we'll rip out the throats of each of your family members with a silver steak knife.
" A thin smile. "You know. Like gentlemen. "
He turned his back on me. It was the height of disrespect. Katya followed her brother's lead, turning her back on my gun.
I'd heard pack silences my entire life. There was the silence of submission; heads down, eyes averted, the collective exhale of wolves who had accepted the hierarchy. There was the silence of grief. The silence of a hunt suspended mid-breath.
This was none of those. This was the silence of calculation. Of predators doing math.
It moved around the table like a current. Valentino's jaw tightened; a man counting odds. Even Elias — bound to my family by blood and marriage — had gone unreadable. His Second shifted his weight behind him with the precision of a man repositioning before a strike.
It was Sorsha who concerned me. Her smile hadn't moved, but her eyes had gone very, very still. She was the oldest Alpha at the table, the one who had survived the longest, and she hadn't done that by being slow.
"The talks are suspended," I said. Not over. Suspended. A man who says over is closing a door. A man who says suspended is telling you he will be back, and that the terms will be worse. "My office will be in touch to reschedule."
I walked out with no one at my back.