Roar Me Like You Mean It

Chapter 1

MALEK

The boardroom smells like cedar oil, new carpet, and fresh-cut power. Clean, precise, expensive.

I watch the men around the obsidian table fidget in their chairs, eyes flicking toward each other like mice realizing the cat is still hungry.

Most of them are older, pale-faced from too much time behind screens and not enough behind consequences.

Their suits are cut to perfection, hair parted just so, but none of that masks the way their hearts hammer just a little too fast when I don’t speak right away.

Let them wait.

Silence can be a blade. And in this room—on this floor, in my tower—every breath they take is by my permission.

The light above is muted, casting everything in a gray glow, softening nothing.

Geneva sprawls out beyond the wall of windows behind me, steel and glass catching the dying light like teeth.

“Mr. Thorne,” Markelson begins, clearing his throat with a little too much urgency. “What Mr. Cho meant was—”

“I know what he meant,” I say without raising my voice. “That doesn’t make it less idiotic.”

Across the table, Cho stiffens. He’s younger, sharper than the rest, thinks he understands power because he’s read a few books about it and convinced himself he sees angles no one else does.

What he doesn’t see is the line he’s crossed, and the fact that I already decided how this ends before I walked in.

“We’ve had internal concerns,” Cho says, pushing forward despite the weight of his own sweat. “About the visibility of certain projects. The oversight structure is—”

“Is what I designed,” I interrupt, leaning back in the chair with the slow grace of someone who could end his career with a look. “Your ‘concerns’ are noted. Now forget them.”

He flinches, but to his credit, doesn’t back down. Markelson does, eyes cast low, fingers fiddling with his pen like a man wondering if he just backed the wrong horse.

They always wonder. Right until I remind them.

I stand. Not fast. No need for theatrics. Just enough to remind them I don’t need a title to rule this room. My shadow stretches long across the table as I walk its length, passing behind them like a storm cloud made flesh. Cho stiffens when I stop behind his chair.

“You think I didn’t see what you were trying to do?” I ask, voice quieter now, more dangerous. “You think Sullivan from the DOJ landed here on his own? That a federal investigation just happened to sniff at the one division I buried deeper than a Cold War missile silo?”

No one answers.

I place a hand on the back of Cho’s chair. His spine goes ramrod straight.

“You sent him. And when that didn’t work fast enough, you came for the board.” I pause. “I admire ambition. But not when it overreaches.”

Another beat of silence, stretched taut and trembling.

“Get out,” I say.

No yelling or threats. Just a command.

They scatter. Markelson fumbling with his folder, Cho muttering apologies, the others grabbing tablets and clearing data like it’ll save them. It won’t. The door closes behind them with a soft, final click.

The quiet that settles isn’t peace, it’s dominion.

I cross the room toward the windows and press one hand to the glass. The city breathes below, lights winking on like stars fallen to earth. I built this: every contract, every corridor, every loyal shadow in every corner of the world. Not through trust. Through control.

And control is what keeps the lion asleep.

Or so I tell myself.

The tug starts low, behind my ribs, like a hook I didn’t know was still lodged there. It’s not a thought, not a sound. It’s something older. Deeper. Like instinct waking from a long sleep.

My breath slows. Muscles tense.

I know this feeling.

I haven't felt it in over a century, and still I recognize it the way a dying man knows the sound of his own name.

The Seal.

Not the artifact—not the bastardized symbol Darius dug up from the ice—but the oath that was woven into our blood when we stood shoulder to shoulder in a circle of fire and bone and swore ourselves to something bigger than war. The Pact wasn’t a code. It wasn’t a promise.

It was binding.

And it’s calling again.

I close my eyes, jaw clenched, hands curling into fists.

The pulse flutters through me, not painful, but invasive. Like the touch of a ghost you almost forgot was real. My body remembers even if my mind refuses. That magnetic pressure behind the sternum, the heat rising from nowhere, the sound that isn’t a sound.

Darius is trying to summon us.

And the fool doesn’t understand it’s already too late.

I stagger back from the window and shake it off, the way you shake off a fever dream.

I make my way across the suite and into my private office, where the walls are dark walnut, the shelves lined with books no one else is allowed to read.

There’s no tech in here. Nothing digital.

Just the weight of history and the kind of silence that dares you to speak.

I open the bottom drawer of my desk. There, wrapped in black velvet, is the coin.

I unwrap it carefully, not because it's fragile, but because I respect the dead.

Gold, hand-forged, a lion’s head stamped into one side, the blood crescent on the other. Cassian gave it to me the night before the final battle—the night we lost Roman, and maybe ourselves. He said it was from a time when the world still believed in gods.

I never had the heart to throw it away.

I turn it once in my hand. It’s warm. Not from the room. From the pull.

I should melt it down. I should toss it into the lake and never look back.

Instead, I pocket it.

My phone buzzes once on the desk, piercing the stillness. Lysa’s voice comes through the secure line, crisp and alert as always.

“Mr. Thorne, the security chief is waiting with intel on the Zurich breach.”

“Give me twenty,” I reply.

“Understood.”

She disconnects without another word. That’s why I keep her, because she doesn’t need to ask why my voice dropped, why the air in the room feels heavier than it did five minutes ago.

I head for the hidden stairwell behind the bookcase and descend two levels to the gym. The air is colder here, metallic with the scent of old sweat and ozone. No staff. No cameras. Just me and the mats and the weapons I keep for the days I forget what I really am.

I strip out of my dress shirt and step barefoot onto the training floor. Stretch once. Then let the change come.

Not all the way. Just enough to feel the bones shift, to let the beast breathe. My nails stretch into claws, eyes flicker golden, my jaw unhinges slightly, teeth longer, sharper. The lion stretches beneath my skin, impatient, prowling.

The Seal call lingers in my blood.

Darius thinks he can reunite us. Thinks he can rebuild what we lost.

He forgets.

Some ruins are meant to stay buried.

I slam my fists into the reinforced bag until the seams split, until the chain groans overhead, until the thrum in my chest quiets again.

I stop eventually, the torn bag now leaking sand into the mat. My hands, slick with red, felt nothing.

I stand there for a while, breathing hard in the dark.

Then I wipe my hands, put the lion back in his cage, and climb upstairs to deal with mortals who still think this is just a business.

Let them.

It’s safer that way.