Chapter Four
~ Braham ~
The elevator’s echo didn’t fade. Not really. Sound traveled differently at the top of a city, and the glass sucked up whatever decibels survived the forty stories between here and the wet, sodium-lit streets.
I stood at the window, my left hand braced to the cold glass, fingers splayed. Portland’s grid worked west in a hundred pulsing veins, rain on the glass smearing every headlight and office lamp into something less than real. If you wanted to pretend you owned it all, this was where you’d start.
Behind me, the office was all sharp edges and old smoke. My desk—more battlefield than workspace—held the residue of the last hour: empty water glass, a slick of coffee cooling in the mug, the folder on my mate. Flynn. Jai. Small, sharp, and impossible to ignore.
He’d taken the exit with his chin up and his pulse running just north of calm. If he was coming back, he’d make it look like his own idea, and I respected that.
Hell, I banked on it.
The elevator had made it halfway to the ground before Ashe came back. No knock, just the hinge-click and the soft, even tread of shoes across my imported carpet. I didn’t turn. There was no point.
He stopped a precise three paces behind me.
I caught his reflection in the window: black suit, white shirt, eyes that belonged on a sniper, not an executive assistant.
The wolf in him was orderly. Everything about Ashe was built for function over flourish.
That’s why he’d lasted longer than any beta I’d ever employed.
“Status.” I didn’t need to raise my voice.
He started in, deadpan. “Building secure. Staff cycling out as ordered. The pup’s cry has not repeated since he left.”
He meant “since the mate left.” Ashe wasn’t a sentimentalist, but I could hear the analysis between every clipped syllable. This was pack business, not just oddity. I kept my hand to the glass and let the city fill my periphery.
“We’re going to have guests,” I said. “Tonight, maybe tomorrow. I want faces for every door, and a dead zone around the garage entrance.”
“Done.”
“The men on bikes. You see their plates?”
He had. He always did. “Registered to a shell out of Troutdale. Rented under a false front, but the credit card backstops to a procurement office in DC.”
“Wolves?”
Ashe shook his head, fraction of an inch. “No scent trace. No visible tells. Human muscle, but disciplined.”
“Contractors, then.” It narrowed the universe of possibilities, but not enough.
“Find out who hired them.” I didn’t have to say how.
“And while you’re at it, find out what the hell a newborn wolf pup is doing in a liquor box on Belmont.
If her parents are alive, I want them in this office by sunrise.
If they’re dead, I want to know when, where, and why. ”
“Understood.” He waited. He knew there was more.
I turned, finally, and met his eyes. “If you were me, would you leave her out there?”
He didn’t blink. “No, sir.”
“Good. The child stays with me.”
Ashe’s expression never changed. That was its own answer.
“Also,” I said, “get Vera on the line and have her bring up whatever passes for a crib and baby gear from the estate. If it’s not here by morning, I’ll make the call myself.”
He almost smiled. “It will be here.”
The pup would be safer here than in any clinic, and the best way to keep her breathing was to make sure nothing touched her without my say-so.
I let my hand fall from the window, palm tingling from the cold. “That’s it. Go.”
Ashe moved like he always did: one silent stride, then gone. The door caught on its automatic soft-close, clicking behind him.
Alone, the office felt bigger. Still smelled of cigar and cedar, but under it now, the faint ghost of cherry blossom—his scent—stuck in the air by the exit.
Not strong, but persistent. The desk chair still held the impression of where I’d sat, knees almost brushing his when he’d squared off and refused to drop his gaze.
I closed my eyes, just for a second, and could see him there: jacket too thin for the weather, hair in disarray, a fucking lollipop in his cheek as if he could insulate himself from the world’s worst truths with sugar.
Maybe he could.
The city lights pressed against the window like a tide. I stood there longer than I needed to, watching the rain chase itself down the glass. There was a shape to this kind of silence, a contour you could only find in the minute after a thing you never wanted actually happened.
I set my jaw. When I finally moved, I made a list: the wolves who owed me, the humans who would kill for a shot at my pack, the parents who would never, ever abandon a pup unless the alternative was worse.
Somewhere in that list was an answer.
And, for the first time in a decade, I was invested in finding it.
I didn’t sit at my desk when I needed to think.
But tonight, it fit. There was a baby in my arms—absurd, dense, and so out of scale with the rest of me that if a photographer had walked in, the image would’ve gone viral before sunrise.
Two-twenty-five of Prime Alpha, custom suit straining the shoulders, and a human infant the size of a football splayed boneless across my chest.
It would be humorous if it wasn’t me.
The humidor on the desk still smelled like Cohibas, and the scotch in the crystal decanter was a sixteen-year Islay that should have gone for double the price I paid.
In theory, it was the kind of office that intimidated anyone who entered it. In practice, I just liked the way the furniture made other men’s confidence shrink two sizes.
The baby was heavy for her age. Newborns usually came with a certain sickly, uncertain feel—fragile, unfused, all cartilage and panic. This one, once she stopped screaming, had a presence.
She went inert the second I wrapped a hand around her, like my pulse was the only lullaby worth listening to.
The scent off her hair was weird: not new baby, but a high note of cherry blossom, subtle and persistent, the clear residue of Jai’s body pressed against hers for a long, desperate sprint.
If I closed my eyes, I could smell his skin through her.
It made concentration an exercise in pain.
I catalogued what I knew about my mate so far:
- Hazel eyes that mapped exits before they mapped faces
- Shoulders sloped and relaxed, but the hands never stopped moving
- A gait that said “military” even before he said “Ranger”
- The way he’d cradled her, hating every second, but refusing to do it wrong
- The way he’d left—fast, but not out of fear. Out of calculation.
- The sarcasm, which was a shell, and the anger, which was not
I could have put together a case study for a graduate seminar on the subject of Jai Flynn, but none of it added up to the thing I needed: a reason. Why this human, why this child, why now?
The scotch glass on the desk was half empty and sweating in my hand. The room’s only light came from the city outside, orange and blue and slivered with the rain’s refractions.
The baby’s breathing was steady—too steady. I kept waiting for her to crack, to shatter into the crying fit that had called Jai back from the curb. She didn’t. She was either in shock or, more likely, just bored with the world’s ability to surprise her.
I set the glass down and let my palm drift up and down her back, cataloguing the bone structure, the pattern of her tiny breaths. I felt her heart hammering in triple-time, and I remembered, for a split second, what it felt like to hold something that could die from a mistake.
My own heartbeat slowed. I’d had to learn that as a teenager: keep it under seventy, even when the wolf wants to punch through your chest.
The mate bond was not supposed to hit like this. I’d seen it in other wolves, usually with a long fuse—attraction, then denial, then the slow realization that biology had outsmarted you.
Mine was instant. I’d known it the second Flynn locked eyes on me in the office, and I’d seen the same recognition (rage, disgust, curiosity) surface in him.
The rest of the world didn’t matter when you were in a room with your mate.
That was the theory. The practice was a lot uglier. He’d walked out to prove he could.
I had to respect it.
Ashe returned with no ceremony. He entered with a legal pad in one hand, a thin folder in the other, and the same grim focus as always. He set the folder on the desk, careful not to disturb the glass or the baby, and stood at attention.
He started without invitation. “The parents are dead. The father, Cormac Daly, was beta in the Ridgeline Pack. The mother, Lena, was also Ridgeline. They swore loyalty three years ago, no history of dissent or infraction.”
I nodded, hand still moving down the baby’s back. She didn’t even twitch.
“Three days ago,” Ashe continued, “they left their home for Portland. Stated reason: urgent business with Prime. There was a record of the request in pack admin—marked urgent, no subject given. They never arrived. They were intercepted at the city edge, just after passing the weigh station on I-5. No bodies recovered, but evidence of violence: blood spatter consistent with gunshot and blade, plus canine marks from at least two assailants.”
“Wolves?”
Ashe didn’t hesitate. “Unlikely. Scent traces overlapped, but one was heavily masked—old blood, possibly pig, smeared deliberately. The rest points to human contractors, but at least one wolf involved for certain.”
The air in the office sharpened.
“Continue.”
“The mother ran, carrying the infant. Made it as far as the city center. There is footage of a woman matching her build on two security feeds; both times, she’s carrying a blanket-wrapped bundle. Last sighting puts her three blocks from the alley where the pup was found. After that, no trace.”
“She hid the child,” I said, just to hear it out loud.
“Yes. Then she doubled back, likely to assist her mate. Neither survived. No further sign.”