Her scent surrounded me, thick and sweet and impossible to escape.That innocent sweetness that had haunted me since the first night she’d walked into the hotel lobby and stopped my heart.But now it was layered with something else.Salt and musk and the unmistakable evidence of what we’d done.My scent on her skin.My taste on her tongue.My wolf purred with smug satisfaction at the invisible marks we’d left, undeniable to anyone with the senses to detect them.
She was ours now.In every way that mattered except one.
My phone vibrated on the nightstand.
I grabbed it before the sound could wake her, turning the screen away so the glow wouldn’t reach her face.A text from my contact at the Tribune, the message brief and final.
Story goes live in 30 minutes.As agreed.
I read the words three times before they fully registered.
Thirty minutes.
After fifteen years of planning, of waiting, of building an empire specifically designed to destroy the man who had abandoned me to hell, it was finally happening.In thirty minutes, Senator William Prescott would wake up to find his legacy in flames.His decades of investment in boarding school abuse networks splashed across every news outlet in the country.The files Richard Hughes had kept, the insurance he’d gathered against his master for thirty years, finally serving their true purpose.
I should have felt triumph.I’d earned this moment with blood and patience and a ruthlessness that had made even the Bratva respect me.This was everything I’d worked for.
Instead, I looked at the woman sleeping in my bed, and felt nothing but dread.
I slid out from under the covers carefully, moving with the silent precision years of training had ingrained.She stirred slightly, her hand reaching toward the warm space I’d left behind, fingers curling around empty sheets.But she didn’t wake.I stood there for a long moment, watching her settle back into sleep, her face soft and unguarded in a way I’d never seen when she was awake.No wariness.No calculation.No defenses.
Just Lena.
She didn’t know what I was.What I’d done.What I was about to do.
And she couldn’t find out.Not yet.Not until I’d finished what I started.
I pulled on pants and a shirt without bothering with the buttons, then padded barefoot down the cold hallway to my study.The room was always cold, the heating turned low to preserve the documents I kept here.Newspaper clippings lined one wall, yellowed with age, each one a piece of the puzzle I’d spent half my life assembling.Crime scene photos from the night my parents died.Financial records tracking the Senator’s shell companies.Boarding school inspection reports that had been buried, silenced, made to disappear by money and threats and the particular kind of evil that wore a public servant’s smile.
And in the center of it all, a single photograph of my mother.Young.Beautiful.Smiling at something beyond the camera’s frame.She’d been dead for thirty years, and I still couldn’t look at her face without feeling the rage that had fueled every choice I’d made since the night my father’s wolf had torn her apart.
The room smelled like dust and old paper and secrets kept too long.Nothing like the warm bedroom I’d left behind.Nothing like apples and cream and the woman who’d looked at me tonight like I might be worth saving.
I poured three fingers of whiskey and sat down at my desk, positioning the monitor where I could see the door.The Tribune’s website was already loaded, the page refreshing every thirty seconds.The current headline was some political scandal I didn’t care about.In twenty minutes, it would be replaced with something that mattered.
In twenty minutes, William Prescott’s world would end.
I waited.Drank.Watched the clock in the corner of the screen tick away the seconds with mechanical patience I couldn’t feel.
When the page refreshed and the new headline appeared, I felt nothing at all.
SENATOR’S HIDDEN SHAME: Decades of Investment in Boarding School Abuse Network Exposed
There it was.Everything I’d worked for, reduced to a headline and the beginning of a feeding frenzy.I clicked through to the full article, reading the words I’d helped craft through anonymous tips and carefully leaked documents.The Senator’s shell companies.The schools they’d funded.The decades of abuse that had been covered up, paid off, swept under rugs that cost more than most families earned in a year.
My name wasn’t mentioned.Neither was Lena’s father’s.I’d been careful about that, surgical.The first wave was about the Senator alone, establishing his guilt in the public’s mind before widening the net.
Phase one complete.
I opened a new tab, navigated to the social media platforms I rarely used.The reaction was already building.Outrage.Disgust.The particular viciousness that emerged when the public discovered their leaders were monsters.Someone had already found an old photo of the Senator shaking hands with a school superintendent who’d later been convicted of assault.The image was spreading like wildfire, each share adding fuel to the flames I’d lit.
This is what you wanted.This is victory.The words felt hollow.
The whiskey tasted like ash in my mouth.
I kept glancing toward the door.Toward the hallway that led back to the bedroom where she slept, still wrapped in my sheets, still warm from my body heat, still smelling like sex and satisfaction and everything I didn’t deserve.
She would find out eventually.Not tomorrow.Not from the news.I’d made sure of that, buried the evidence that would have linked the Senator to her father.But secrets had a way of surfacing.And when this one did, she would learn that I had known all along.That I had orchestrated her family’s destruction while pretending to save them.That I owned Apex Lending, owned her debt, owned her.That every touch, every kiss, every moment of tenderness had been built on a foundation of lies and manipulation and the kind of calculated cruelty she’d never forgive.
