Page 55 of Ruthless Bond

I put on his shirt. I go to the bedroom. He’s lying on the bed, sweatpants on, arms behind his head, watching me with those gray eyes. The gold is still absent. He looks human and tired and beautiful.

“Come here,” he says.

I climb into bed beside him. His mouth brushes the scar and warmth moves through me. I close my eyes.

Tomorrow, I will open the notebook. And this time, I won’t stop until I’ve read everything.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Dominic

“She reorganized the payment routing for the Henderson project.”

Roman is standing in my office with a manila folder in his hand and an expression on his face that tells me the conversation we’re about to have is one neither of us will enjoy.

“She what?”

“The Henderson project. The mixed-use development on Ashland. Sophia restructured the payment routing through the subcontractor accounts. She consolidated four intermediary LLCs into two and rerouted the vendor payments through a single escrow structure.”

I take the folder. I open it. The documentation inside is immaculate, each page organized with the precise, systematic logic that I’ve come to associate with everything Sophia touches. She’s diagrammed the old payment structure and the new one side by side, and the new one is cleaner, more efficient, and transparently legitimate.

That’s the problem.

“She made it harder,” Roman says flatly.

“She made it better.”

“She made it harder to do what we actually use those accounts for. The intermediary LLCs she consolidated? Those were the buffer layer between the clean revenue and the wash. She’s removed the buffer. The payments now route through a structure that’s audit-proof but also laundering-proof. She’s essentially sealed the pipe we’ve been using to move money through that project.”

I look at the diagram. From a legitimate business perspective, her restructuring is superior in every way. More efficient, lower transaction costs, better regulatory compliance. Any CFO in the country would approve it.

And it makes it impossible to route undocumented cash through the Henderson project without leaving a trail that a first-year auditor could follow.

She didn’t do this on purpose. She doesn’t know the Henderson accounts are part of our laundering infrastructure. She saw an inefficient financial structure and corrected it cleanly, thoroughly, and efficiently.

“This is what happens,” Roman says. He’s not yelling. His voice is controlled, which is worse. “This is what I told you would happen when you put a financial analyst inside our books. She’s not working against us, Dominic. She’s working for us. And her work is destroying us.”

“She can be redirected.”

“To what? You’ve already expanded her access twice. She’s seen enough. She understands the structures. Even if you pull her back to reconciliation, she has enough in her head right now to map our entire laundering operation from memory. And that’s assuming she hasn’t already.”

He’s right. The realization settles into my chest with the weight of something I’ve been refusing to look at. Sophia is too smart for the role I’ve put her in. I gave her access because the wolf demanded proximity and I dressed the demand in professional justification, and now she’s done exactly what a brilliant financial analyst does when given access to a company’s books: she’s understood them completely.

“What do you want me to do, Roman? Fire her?”

“I want you to tell her the truth.”

The words land like a punch. I stare at my brother. He stares back. There’s no challenge in his expression, no anger. Just the flat, exhausted honesty of a wolf who’s been watching his alpha drive toward a cliff and is tired of shouting warnings.

“Tell her what we are,” he says. “Tell her about the bond. Tell her about the mark. All of it, Dominic. Because right now she’s operating inside our organization with incomplete information, and incomplete information is what gets people killed.”

“That’s not your decision.”

“No. It’s yours. And you’re not making it, which means it’s going to make itself, and when it does, the fallout is going to hit the entire pack, not just you and your mate.” He drops the folder on my desk and leaves.

I sit at my desk and look at Sophia’s diagram and think about my brother’s words. “Tell her the truth.“ Roman wants disclosure. Viktor wanted action. Even Katya, in her careful conversations with Sophia, has been pushing toward a truth that can’t stay buried forever.

Everyone around me can see what I can’t admit: the secret is unsustainable. The longer I keep it, the worse the reckoning will be. Every day that passes without the truth is another day of evidence that I chose deception over trust, and when the truth finally arrives, each of those days will be a weight on the wrong side of the scale.