Chapter Thirteen
~ Braham ~
I was awake before the phone lit up. Not the slow, gradual surfacing from sleep—one moment dark, the next sitting upright, hand already reaching for the nightstand before my eyes had adjusted to the pre-dawn gray beyond the glass.
The penthouse hummed wrong.
Not loud. Not quiet. The wrongness lived in the texture—a gap in the ambient mechanical undertone, the silence where something familiar should have been and wasn’t.
My wolf caught it before my mind did. The building’s systems had their own rhythm, their own breath, and something in that rhythm had skipped a beat.
I sat there with my hand on the bedspread, palm flat against the charcoal cotton, and listened to the quiet. The city forty floors below was still mostly dark, the Willamette a black ribbon cutting through gridlines of orange and white.
Mt. Hood floated in the eastern distance, a pale ghost-shape against the not-yet-light, snow-capped and indifferent. My bedroom held its usual pre-dawn chill—the HVAC system dialed back overnight to conserve energy I didn’t need to conserve, a habit from a life that predated penthouse living.
The phone lit up. Blue-white glow hitting the dark walnut of the nightstand, illuminating Ashe’s name. I picked it up on the first vibration.
“Wilson.”
His voice came through stripped. Flat. No inflection, no color, the register he reserved for situations where control was the only currency that mattered. I’d heard it three times in seven years. Each time, something burned.
“Two of Declan’s men on the rooftop perimeter feeds across the street.
East quadrant.” Ashe’s cadence was surgical, each word placed with the precision of a man delivering a diagnosis he’d already verified twice.
“Spotted on the high-angle cameras, not the street-level array. They were there forty minutes ago. They’re gone now. ”
I absorbed this without speaking. My hand stayed flat on the bedspread. The quiet stretched between us, Ashe giving me the room to process because he knew exactly what he’d just handed me.
Gone now was worse than if they’d stayed. Gone meant they’d gotten what they came for. Gone meant this wasn’t an approach. It was reconnaissance.
“They were mapping,” Ashe said. Unnecessary. We both knew. “The camera they were studying covers the east terrace, your master suite window, and the guest suite.”
The guest suite.
The dark walnut floor was cool under my bare feet as I stood, the temperature difference sharp enough to register as information.
My body was already moving through the calculus—timing, angles, exposure—while the part of me that wasn’t a Prime Alpha stood very still in a dark bedroom and listened to the word guest suite echo.
“Come up,” I said. “Quiet. Bring the overnight security logs from the past seventy-two hours.”
“Already pulled. Twelve minutes.”
I ended the call. Set the phone down. Stood in the dark and let the wrongness settle into something I could use.
The shirt came first. Crisp white cotton from the chair by the window, still folded from yesterday.
I shook it out by feel, slipped it over my shoulders, and worked the buttons one-handed while my other hand found the trousers draped over the same chair.
Belt next, leather sliding through loops with a soft hiss that the room absorbed. No socks. Not yet.
I moved through the space by memory and the faint ambient glow of the city through twelve feet of floor-to-ceiling glass. The room was laid out the way I’d built it—efficient, uncluttered, every surface serving a purpose or removed. I could have navigated it blindfolded.
I nearly was.
My watch—the Patek, heavy on my left wrist—caught a sliver of pre-dawn light and threw it back as a thin gold line across the ceiling. I didn’t look at the time. It didn’t matter.
What mattered was the gap in the rhythm, the two men on a roof studying a camera angle that covered the east terrace and the guest suite window, and the fact that Ashe’s team—Ashe’s team—had missed it in real time.
That last piece sat coldest. Ashe didn’t miss things.
Ashe built systems that didn’t allow for missing things.
The fact that he had meant the men were better than we’d credited, or the system had a blind spot we hadn’t mapped, or both, and both were problems I would address before the sun cleared the eastern ridge.
I stopped outside the guest suite door.
The cherry-blossom scent reached me through the gap under the door—warm, specific, layered with the faint milky sweetness that meant Grace was in there too.
I stood there long enough to hear it: Jai’s breathing, slow and even, the rhythm of deep sleep from a man who didn’t surrender to it easily.
No rustle of sheets. No shift of weight.
Just the steady in-and-out of someone who had finally, against considerable odds, found a few hours of something resembling peace.
The rut lived closer to the surface at this hour. It always did. The pre-dawn cold pressed against the windows, and my body responded the way it always did—heat building along the spine, pooling low in the gut, the particular restlessness that came with the territory of being what I was.
But what moved through my chest as I stood outside that door had nothing to do with want and everything to do with the oldest, coldest certainty a wolf like me carried: the knowledge of what belonged to me and what happened to anyone who reached for it.
Jai’s breathing didn’t change. Grace was silent. The suite held its quiet, and I stood in the hallway and let the certainty settle into something I could carry.
I did not open the door. Opening the door would wake him, and he needed the sleep more than I needed the sight of him. Instead, I turned and walked to the kitchen.
The coffee was where I kept it—the good beans, not the ones Jai had brought from his apartment, though those had their own merits. I measured by feel, grounds into the filter, water into the reservoir, and hit the brew cycle with a press of my thumb that was more habit than thought.
The machine hissed to life, the sound familiar and right, and the first rich notes of coffee cut through the pre-dawn quiet like an anchor finding bottom.
I braced my hands on the counter and watched the eastern horizon begin its slow bleed from black to grey. Mt. Hood held its pale outline, patient, and the city below was still mostly dark, the river a seam of deeper black against the grid.
Twelve minutes. Ashe would be punctual. The logs would be thorough. The problem would have edges I could grip, and I would grip them, and by the time Jai woke up, the perimeter would already be adjusting.
The coffee dripped. The machine hummed. The wrongness in the penthouse’s rhythm was still there, but I had a name for it now, and names were things I could work with.
I poured the first cup black and didn’t wait for it to cool.
Ashe arrived in eleven minutes and forty-three seconds. I didn’t need to check my watch. I’d been counting.
He came through the private elevator with the same quiet inevitability he brought to everything—dark clothing, tablet under one arm, expression set to the particular neutral that meant he’d already done the math and didn’t like the answer.
No greeting. No wasted motion.
He crossed to the twelve-seat dining table and spread the security logs across the dark walnut in a single fluid motion, printed feeds and time-stamped stills laid out in sequence like evidence at a trial nobody had scheduled.
I stood over the table with my first cup of coffee going lukewarm beside me and let my eyes move across the images. Two men. Dark clothing. Gliding along the eastern parapet with the kind of movement that didn’t happen by accident.
“Pack-trained,” Ashe said. Not a question. A classification. “Watch the spacing. Three meters between them, consistently. They’re holding sight lines at ninety-degree offsets. That’s not contractor behavior. That’s pack protocol.”
I’d seen it already. The way the lead man paused at each junction, the sweep of his gaze covering exactly the angles a trained wolf would cover, nothing wasted.
The second man hung back, positioned to watch the approach vector while the first studied the camera. Professional. Disciplined. The kind of movement that came from years of running together under someone who didn’t tolerate sloppiness.
“The camera they’re focused on.” Ashe tapped a still with one finger. The image showed the lead man’s face angled upward, his body oriented toward the eastern facade. “Covers the east terrace, your master suite window, and the guest suite. Nothing else in that sight line is worth the exposure.”
I picked up the coffee. Drank. Lukewarm, bitter, exactly what I needed. “An extraction approach for an adult target wouldn’t use that vector. Too exposed. Too many sight lines from neighboring buildings.”
“Correct.” Ashe didn’t soften it. “This was reconnaissance for a pup-sized target in a room they’d already identified. Which means—”
“Floor plans.” I set the cup down. The sound it made against the walnut was sharper than I intended. “They have someone with access to the building’s architectural records.”
Ashe nodded once. The muscle below his jaw tightened—the only tell he ever showed, and he showed it now, which meant the implication had landed exactly as hard as it should have.
“Resource problem. Significant one. The plans for this building aren’t public record.
They’re held by the developer’s office under NDA, and the security protocols on that server are not trivial. ”
I looked at the stills again. Two men on a roof, studying a camera angle with the focused attention of people who knew exactly what they were looking for.
The time-stamp read 03:17. Forty-three minutes ago.
Gone by 03:22, according to the feed time-stamps Ashe had annotated in red pen at the margin.
The coffee was cold now.
I didn’t care.
“Could they have made entry last night?” I asked.