4
VIVIAN PARK
The glass explodes like a soundbite.
One second I'm outlining margin protections—how we hedge against hostile bids, how we reassure shareholders—and the next a line of sparking light tears across the boardroom window. Shards rain inward. Cold wind presses against my skin as if a hand is pushing me off the stage. Someone screams. I count heartbeats: one, two, three. Everything after that moves in jagged, impossible slow motion.
A round punches the oak conference table where my nameplate sat. It shivers, then cracks. Someone drops. My first instinct—honed on a thousand floors of crisis control—is to shield the people nearest me. The reflex against panic is older than any spreadsheet. The second instinct, newer and raw, grabs me: scent. Cedar, salt, iron. Behind it, something older, keyed into a part of me I had never let anyone touch.
He's there before the second shot can crack the air.
Tall as the threat I felt that night at the gala, moving with a predator's economy of motion. He doesn't run—he intercepts. Hands like knives. A face I can't place beneath the glaze of other senses. He catches the man at the side door between heartbeat and sound. The assailant goes silent as a blade slides free. Theroom freezes around us, waiting for me to react the way I've always been taught: measured, decisive.
My voice comes out thin. "Security."
"We have perimeter," Lucien says. The name isn't his—he's been using Vale Meridian this week—but the sound sends another image through me: cliffs, a lighthouse, a high place where orders are barked and obeyed. The mate-bond's imprint flares—an invasive, intimate memory that doesn't belong to me but settles in my bones like a reputation.
People shout. Someone is filming.
The board sees everything. The cameras see everything. In three minutes this will be three million people passing judgment on me as a leader and a risk.
"Get her out," Lucien orders. Controlled, clinical—and the low depth of the words vibrates through that cedar-salt trail and settles under my ribs. It's the most dangerous sound I've ever heard.
I keep my hands up. "I'm not a target."
"Not anymore." He doesn't ask. He doesn't wait.
He takes my wrist. Not rough, but absolutely owning the space between us. Up close, his scent is a map: iron and salt, cedar and old leather. It's not just smell. The bond gives flashes—crowns, a rearing wolf, a hall of masks. They make my breath hitch.
He moves me back and down the corridor, across the lobby, through a side door I never knew existed. Glass clinks, shoes staccato on tile, people milling like startled fish. Reporters mass at the front, cameras rolling. He doesn't look at them. He looks only at me.
"Who are you?" I ask, because names are liabilities but still need cataloguing.
"Lucien," he says. "Black."
The name fits the wax seal I found in my glove that night at the gala—the rearing wolf around a crown. My chest tightens. If the gala contact was recognition, this is the follow-through: a man whose presence rearranges the rules of a room. The board watches him move with lethal choreography and sees the immediate threat stopped. They don't see the way the bond tightens when he's near me—the invisible leash humming between us.
The press will see him take a life.
He escorts me to the helipad. In the aircraft the world narrows to the rotors' rhythm and the cedar-scent that refuses to leave me. In the footage later, he'll be the stranger who saved me. In other reels they'll call him the killer. I don't know which version I'll be allowed.
The island smells of pine and salt and an old history I can feel at the edges of my teeth. The house is the kind of ancestral property you see in films about past power: stone, shuttered windows, portraits whose eyes seem to follow you. Men in suits who move like second skins lay out rooms and perimeter. Lucien ignores them and leads me down a corridor lined with tapestries threaded with strange sigils.
"I can't stay in the city," he says. "Not now. Not with cameras and warrants and the way your regulators are wired."
"You're not law," I say. My tone is brittle. "You're a problem."
"Not for long." He meets my eyes, and the bond lashes me with an image of procedures—the legal scaffolding his house can deploy, treaties, consular claims. He is not a rogue. He is an heir with leverage. "My family holds consular ties. The island has a chartered status with enough teeth to slow a freeze and keep you away from immediate public processing. Think of it as a buffer."
"Buffer in exchange for what?" My pulse drums at my throat. The girl who grew up with empty cupboards still ticks off the cost of anything that smells like protection.
He watches me, and I know the bond makes secrets visible like under-ink in a ledger. He doesn't probe, but his presence is pressure that asks me to be smaller. I won't be smaller. Not for him.
We reach a sitting room where a window looks out at a gray cliff and the heaving ocean. He sits close enough to touch and not close enough for my mouth to go slack. The bond thrums again, a living thing.
"I don't want your hospitality to look like a surrender," I say. "I have shareholders, regulators, procedures."
"You have me," he answers. "Which is not the same thing."
