Page 13 of Ruthless Bond

But I do. Every night. And every morning I put on my armor and go to work and sit twelve feet from the elevator he walks out of and pretend that the scent of him doesn’t rearrange something fundamental inside me.

Katya has noticed. She doesn’t say anything, but I catch her watching me sometimes with an expression that sits halfway between sympathy and warning. One afternoon, walking back from the coffee cart, I try a different angle.

“My father,” I say. “What was he like? At work, I mean. When he was with the Voronovs.”

Katya doesn’t break stride. “Careful.”

“Careful how?”

“Careful like a man who understood what he was close to and respected the distance.”

“But he stopped respecting it. Didn’t he?”

She looks at me. The sympathy is still there but the warning is louder now, sitting in the lines around her mouth and the steadiness of her gaze.

“Sophia. There are questions I can’t answer. Not won’t. Can’t.”

“Because he told you not to?”

“Because some things aren’t mine to tell. And because the people who do tell them need to be the ones who decide when.”

I want to push harder. I want to grab her by the shoulders and ask her what happened to my father and why his notebook reads like the diary of a man who discovered something impossible. But Katya is the closest thing I have to a friend in this building, and I can feel the edge of what she’s willing to give me, and pushing past it will cost me the only alliance I’ve built.

“Okay,” I say.

She nods once. We walk back in silence.

That night, I decode another page of the notebook. It’s a single entry, longer than the others, written in my father’s most careful hand. The letters are small and even, each one placed with deliberation.

“Something is wrong with these people. I’ve been watching for months and I can’t explain what I see. How they move. The way they communicate without speaking, turning toward each other in meetings like they’re hearing a frequency I can’t. The heat in them. V. runs 101.4 on an infrared thermometer I borrowed from the kitchen. That’s not a fever. That’s a baseline. Human baseline is 98.6. These people are not baseline.”

“I need to understand what they are. Not to use against them. Because I’ve spent fifteen years working alongside a family I thought I knew, and I’m starting to realize I don’t know the first thing about them.”

I close the notebook and press it against my chest and think about my father sitting in his restaurant after hours, pointing an infrared thermometer at the men he spent years working beside, trying to make sense of a reading that didn’t fit any biology he understood.

And I think about Dominic’s hand around mine, burning hot, and the dream I had last night where he held me against him and his skin felt like a furnace and I didn’t want him to let go.

101.4 degrees.

Not a fever. A baseline.

The notebook is still pressed against my chest when my phone buzzes. A text from a number I don’t recognize.

I need to review your father’s financial records. My office, 9 PM.

No name. No signature. He doesn’t need one.

I look at the clock. 8:47.

I change my shirt, brush my teeth, and tell myself I’m going because he’s technically my employer and this is a work meeting and the fact that I can hear my pulse pounding in my ears has nothing to do with anything except professional obligation.

Chapter Seven

Dominic

Itold myself I had a reason for calling her up here.

I do have a reason. Marco’s financial records need to be discussed. There are threads in his accounting that I haven’t been able to trace, payments routed through channels I don’t recognize, and she’s the person most likely to identify where her father’s money went in its final months. This is a legitimate meeting. A necessary one. It serves the pack’s interests.