Page 11 of Ruthless Bond

Her first day was instructive. The reports came in throughout the afternoon, small updates from people I’ve positioned to watch her without being obvious about it. Patricia says she’s quiet, diligent, and asks precise questions. The kind of questions that show she’s not just scanning the surface of those files.

Gregor called me at three o’clock, his voice carefully neutral. “The new analyst flagged two vendor contracts in the Pilsen project,” he said. “She asked why the subcontractor registrations overlapped with the intermediary LLC.”

I closed my eyes when he told me that. Not because the question was dangerous. Because it was exactly the right question, asked on her first day by a woman with a forensic accountant’s instincts who smells like vanilla and makes my wolf want to tear through the floor to reach her.

I told Gregor to note her questions and route them to me personally. Any concerns about financial structures go through the alpha’s desk, not the finance department’s. It’s a leash dressed up as trust, and she’ll probably see through it within a week.

My phone buzzes. Roman.

“I saw your pet project,” he says when I answer.

“And?”

“She didn’t blink.”

“I told you to be civil.”

“I was civil. I just gave her a look. That’s the most civil version of what I wanted to say.”

“Which was?”

“That putting a financial analyst inside our books is the single dumbest thing you’ve done in a century, and the only reason I can think of that you’d do it is that you’re thinking with something other than your brain.”

I let the silence stretch. Roman is pushing. He’s been pushing for months, testing the boundaries of my authority with the careful, persistent pressure of a wolf who wants to know where the line is. Not because he intends to cross it. Because he wants to know how hard he’d have to push if he decided to.

“She’s an asset,” I say. “She knows Marco’s network. She knows faces and routines. If Marco hid something, she’s our best chance of finding it before someone else does.”

“Or she finds it first and hands it to the feds.”

“That’s why Katya’s on her.”

He’s quiet for a beat. “You’re playing a longer game than I’d play.”

“That’s why I’m alpha.”

He hangs up without responding. That’s Roman. He’ll push right up to the edge and then pull back, not out of submission but out of a calculation he’ll never admit to: he knows I’m usually right. He hates that I’m usually right. The resentment is a low-grade fever that never quite breaks.

I put the phone down and make myself sit at my desk and open the report my youngest brother, Lex, sent over this morning. Territory. The human crew that’s been encroaching on our South Side properties. They’re organized enough to be a nuisance and stupid enough to be dangerous, which is the worst combination. Smart enemies are predictable. Stupid ones get people killed.

Lex has been monitoring them for three weeks. A crew out of Cicero, running guns and low-grade narcotics through a network of corner stores. They’ve started pushing into neighborhoods we’ve controlled for decades, testing fences, seeing what gives. Two of our human associates have been approached. One was offered a partnership. One was threatened.

The smart move is to push back hard enough to reset the boundary without escalating into something that draws police attention. Roman wants blood. I want precision. The argument we’re going to have about this is the same argument we have about everything, played in the same key, and I’m tired of conducting it.

But I can’t think about territory right now. I can’t think about Lex’s report or the Cicero crew or Roman’s restlessness. All I can think about is the scent drifting up through a floor of concrete, and how she looked at me when I shook her hand, and the micro-expression that crossed her face when I named the debt.

Calculation.

She took that deal for reasons I haven’t fully mapped yet, and the part of me that’s been running this pack for thirty years knows I should find those reasons and neutralize them. But the wolf doesn’t want to neutralize anything. The wolf wants to go downstairs and stand next to her desk and breathe her in until his lungs are full of her. The wolf wants to touch the inside of her wrist where the skin is thin and her pulse runs close to the surface. The wolf wants to press his nose into her hair.

I push back from the desk and walk to the window. The city is turning dark, lights coming on in the buildings across the street, the lake turning black as the sky loses its gray.

My inner circle meets on Thursdays. Thursday nights are older than Voronov Construction. Older than the high-rise, older than the shell companies, older than most of the laws we currently break.

In the human world, they would call it an executive committee. In ours, it is the alpha’s circle.

Every territory decision passes through that room. Every challenge. Every death. Every wolf who wants protection, permission, punishment, or blood.

Humans think the Voronov organization has a hierarchy because we’re criminals. They have it backward. The criminal organization has a hierarchy because we are wolves.