Chapter 1
ALARIC SEVERINdidn’t believe in coincidence. He believed in systems, in pressure applied with intent, and in the uncomfortable truth that most failures announced themselves quietly long before anyone panicked. People missed those signals because they wanted to. Because admitting a problem meant admitting vulnerability.
Alaric, the Underboss of Severin’s didn’t missthem.
He stood at the head of the glass-walled conference room, hands clasped behind his back, pale eyes fixed on the live dashboard projected across the wall. White-blond hair, cut with military precision, caught the overhead lights and reflected nothing warm back. He looked exactly the way people expected him to look when something went wrong. Cold. Controlled. Unmoved.
The door opened without ceremony.
Sera Carrington stepped inside.
She carried herself with quiet assurance, tablet tucked against her side, heels silent against the floor. Her hair was pulled back into a knot that never quite managed to tame the golden highlights threaded through the light brown strands. It was a practical style, chosen for work, not for display, and yet it softened her in a way that always struck him when he let himself notice.
He didn’t turn.
“Tell me it’s contained,” hesaid.
She stopped two steps inside the room. He could hear it in the way her breathing changed, the pause she took to choose accuracy over comfort.
“It isn’t spreading,” she said calmly.
He waited.
“Yet.”
That single word slid under his ribs and lodged there.
Alaric turned then, blue eyes cutting to her with surgical focus. She met his gaze without flinching, dark brown eyes steady, intelligent, and warm in a way that stood in stark contrast to his own. People often mistook warmthfor weakness.
He never did.
She set the tablet on the table, aligning it exactly with the edge, and pulled up a mirrored view of the anomaly. Permissions lighting up deep inside Severin Holdings’ financial architecture. Not external. Not brute force. Internal paths flickering where they had no business existing.
No data movement.
No theft.
Which meant intent.
“Walk me through it,” hesaid.
Sera did.
She started with the facts he needed, not the story she could’ve told. That was one of the reasons he’d kept her close to the core of Severin Holdings’ internal controls. Most people wanted to narrate their competence. Sera simply usedhers.
“The first alert didn’t come from our main system,” Sera said, tapping the tablet. “It came from an old backup that sits behind it. Something we almost never touch.”
Alaric’s attention sharpened. “The legacy mirror.”
“Yes. Think of it as a copy of the system we keep locked away in case everything else ever fails,” she said. “It isn’t usedday to day. It’s there so the company survives if something catastrophic happens.”
“Who knows it exists?” he asked.
“Very few people,” Sera replied. “On paper, it’s you, me, acouple of internal security leads, and a handful of finance executives who don’t really understand what they’re authorized to see.”
“On paper doesn’t matter,” hesaid.
“I know,” she agreed calmly. “What matters is that someone knew enough to look for it.”
