I turn. The woman approaching is in a sleek navy pantsuit, her dark hair pulled back in a tight bun. She looks mid-forties. Beta, judging from the neutral scent.
“Ms. Esperanza,” I greet her with a smile, keeping my spine straight. I’ve memorized the names and faces in the chain of command. Maria Esperanza has been Valerio’s personal assistant for over a decade. She runs the day-to-day at Eclipse, and aside from family, no one gets closer to him than her.
She returns the greeting with a crisp nod and a clipped, professional smile.
“Mr. Valerio wants the security assessment done before the end of the month.” She gestures toward a hallway that leads deeper into the building, already moving. “We’ve had some… concerns about vulnerabilities in our system.”
Yeah. I fucking bet.
I’ve pieced together enough from my own digging to know exactly what kind of “concerns” she means. Viktor Sokolov, Valerio’s top underboss, has been skimming for months. I’ve traced at least three shipments that never made it to their destinations—inventory that vanished into thin air.
Marco had stumbled onto one of those shipments while doing a routine pickup for a mid-level crew. And it had cost him his life.
The timeline fits too perfectly to be a coincidence. Marco makes the pickup on a Tuesday. By Friday, cops are kicking down his door with an anonymous tip and planted evidence.
Three weeks later, they called me to identify what was left of him. His jaw was swollen and wrong, knocked loose from the hinges. His fingers were cold when I touched them. Purple bruises and broken bones told the whole story. He had been beaten to death, yet the guards claimed they “didn’t see anything.”
The grapevine said Valerio ordered the hit himself. Couldn’t risk anything that would connect my brother to Sokolov and then to the organization. Whether Sokolov lied to him about what Marco knew, or whether Valerio just didn’t care enough to verify before signing off on the execution, the result is the same.
My brother is dead because someone in the Valerio organization needed a convenient fall guy, and Valerio either ordered it or was too sloppy to notice his underboss running a side operation.
Either way, he’s responsible.
I’m going to put a bullet in his head for that. Then in Sokolov’s. Hell, I’ll put a bullet in everyone’s head if it comes down to it, even this woman who looks sweet enough to bake cookies but apparently clocks in for Satan every morning. Shame.
“The main servers are in the sub-level,” Esperanza is saying, leading me through a maze of hallways. Cameras line every corridor, and the back of my neck prickles with the feeling that I’m being watched. Security gets tighter as we move deeper into the building. There are guards at each corridor entrance. Unlike the distracted asshole scrolling through his phone in the lobby, these men are alert, eyes tracking my every move.
We reach a checkpoint with keycard access, and Esperanza swipes us through into another long hallway. This one has a guard in tactical gear, armed to the teeth. He watches me like I’m a threat worth remembering.
So, the downstairs security is for show. This is the real thing.
Noted.
My hand drifts toward my side, feeling the gun’s weight through the fabric.
“But Mr. Valerio wants to speak with you first before you begin. He likes to personally vet anyone with systems access.”
My heart kicks against my ribs.
He wants to see me now?It wasn’t part of the plan to walk into Valerio’s office blind on day one. My intel said Esperanza handles all outside consultant onboarding, that I’d report to her, not directly to Valerio.
That was supposed to buy me time to map out every detail of this floor and draw up an exit plan before meeting the fucker face-to-face.
But with security this tight, shooting him now would be suicide. And I’m not ready for that.
Yet.
“Of course,” I hear myself say. “I understand the need for caution.”
She takes me through another corridor and finally stops in front of a heavy wooden door, a guard flanking either side. She knocks twice before opening it.
“Mr. Valerio? David DaCosta is here.”
“Send him in.” The voice rolls through me like distant thunder, and my suppressants choose that exact moment to falter. In that brief slip, I catch a scent that makes my whole body go still.
Alpha. Pure, potent alpha, strong enough for his scent to coat the back of my throat.
Fuck.
