The wolf stirred, uneasy, pacing in the back of my skull.
Tell her.His voice was insistent now, urgent.Tell her now.Before she finds out from strangers.Before the lie poisons everything.
I ignored him.
Instead, I opened the encrypted folder on my desktop.Layer Two, I’d labeled it.The files I hadn’t sent to the Tribune.The evidence that would finish the Senator completely, that would expose not just his investments but the bodies buried along the way.Richard Hughes’s role in all of it.The hotel’s involvement.The blackmail operation that had kept the whole rotten system running for thirty years.
If I sent this, the Senator would die in prison.The entire Prescott legacy would be salted earth, nothing left to grow back.Total destruction.The revenge I’d dreamed of since I was three years old, covered in my mother’s blood and screaming for someone to help.
But it would also destroy Lena.
The hotel wouldn’t survive the exposure.Five generations of Hughes family legacy, reduced to a crime scene.The investors would flee.The guests would cancel.The staff she was fighting so hard to protect would lose their jobs, their livelihoods, their trust in the woman who’d promised to save them.And she would be left with nothing but the knowledge that her father had been a monster, that the hotel she’d sacrificed everything for had been built on suffering, and that the man she’d trusted had known the truth and said nothing.
My hand hovered over the keyboard.One click.That’s all it would take.Years of planning, a lifetime of rage, distilled into a single motion.
The wolf snarled, low and threatening.Not at the Senator.Not at the enemies I’d spent my life preparing to destroy.
At me.
Don’t.The word ripped through my skull like claws.She is ours.You will not hurt what is ours.
I closed the folder.
The motion was automatic, instinctive, and it took me a moment to understand what I’d done.I’d pulled my punch.After fifteen years of planning, fifteen years of dreaming about this exact moment, I had chosen to leave my revenge incomplete.
Because of her.
Because the thought of hurting her, even indirectly, made my chest seize with a pain I didn’t know how to name.Because I’d rather let my grandfather’s legacy survive in some diminished form than watch her face when she learned the truth about her father.About me.
I poured another whiskey.Drank it too fast, let the burn distract me from the recognition crawling up my spine like cold fingers.
I was compromised.Fatally, irrevocably compromised.The woman sleeping in my bed had become more important than the revenge I’d built my entire life around, and I hadn’t even noticed it happening.Hadn’t noticed the way she’d slipped past every defense I’d built, every wall I’d constructed, every careful boundary between myself and anything that could make me weak.
The phone rang, shattering the silence.
Viktor.I answered before I could think better of it.
“The Senator’s finished.”His voice was flat, professional, the voice of a soldier reporting to his commander.“Andrew is already putting out statements distancing himself.Social media is in full meltdown.Phase one is complete.”
Andrew.My cousin.The Senator’s legitimate grandson, raised in the spotlight while I rotted in that school, groomed to carry on the Prescott political dynasty as Mayor of Paradise Peaks.Of course he was distancing himself.Rats and sinking ships.
“I know.”I kept my own voice neutral, controlled.The voice of the man I’d been before she’d walked into my life and burned it down around me.“I’m watching.”
A pause.Too long.Too knowing.
“You don’t sound like a man celebrating.”
“There’s still work to do.”
Another pause.When Viktor spoke again, his tone had shifted.Harder.Warning.
“Your woman.She’s becoming a problem.”
The wolf rose so fast I nearly choked on it.Fangs pressing at my gums, aching to descend.Claws threatening to split my fingertips.The urge to reach through the phone and tear out his throat for even mentioning her, for letting her name touch his lips.
I forced my voice flat.“She’s not your concern.”
“Max is concerned.”The Pakhan’s name landed like a threat, heavy with implication.“You know the rules about attachments.You know what happens when wolves get distracted.”
