I pressed my fingers to the mark on my throat. The thing was this didn't have to be a weapon pointed at the Blackwoods at all. Elias had found something valuable. The silent partners were still out there, sitting on their secret, which meant the Blackwoods had leverage over them that they didn't know existed yet. Pack partners who could be brought to heel. Human businesses that would do almost anything to keep a Blackwood from making a phone call.
Handled correctly, this wasn't a problem. It was an asset.
"Is that her?"
From the other end of the phone, I heard a door slam and a familiar voice.
"Are we going to pick her up now?"
"Nell?"
A click, and then I heard the background of the room Elias was in. He'd put me on speakerphone.
"Addie, girl, who the fuck did you marry?"
"Elias, tell me you did not drag her into this?"
"She found me, actually." A shuffle, the phone shifting. "She had a tripwire in the Sterling system. I tripped it."
Nell's voice rang through the speakerphone. "If Sterling is acquired through a process I haven't consented to in writing, the client relationships I personally cultivated revert to me. Not the firm. Not the acquiring entity."
I had watched Nell build every one of those relationships from the ground up. They weren't Sterling's. They had never been Sterling's.
"Together," Elias said carefully, "the partner list and the poison pill give you two things the Blackwoods need and don't currently know are at risk."
I stood up. Walked back to the window. There was a version of this where nobody got hurt. Where I brought Elias's list to Vidar. Where Nell took over the company and they kicked the Sterlings out. It was a clean solution. I could see the whole shape of it.
"I can hear her brain thinking," said Nell. "She's trying to figure out a compromise. Before you start solving this, know that I'm not part of the restructure. Not exactly. They were never going to keep me here. They were going to use the acquisition to disappear me somewhere I couldn't cause problems. Somewhere in bum-fuck Alaska."
The mark on my throat pulsed. They had taken my freedom. They had taken my baby brother. And now they wanted to take my best friend too.
Well, fuck all that to hell.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
VIDAR
Itook the stairs two at a time. The meeting with my brothers had lasted forty minutes longer than it needed to. And it wasn't done yet, but I needed a break. I needed to talk to Addie.
I pushed open the bedroom door. The bed was empty, sheets pulled back, the indentation of her still visible in the pillow on the left side. My side, technically, but she'd migrated in the night and I had not seen any reason to correct her. From behind the closed bathroom door came the sound of running water, the low rush of the shower.
I sat on the edge of the bed and waited. The room smelled of her. Of us. The chemistry of last night was layered into the fabric of everything. My wolf settled in a way it hadn't all morning. The low, restless frequency that had followed me through the meeting went quiet. I hadn't realized how much of my attention had been cordoned off until it released.
The shower cut off. A few minutes later the bathroom door opened. She came out in a cloud of steam, wrapped in a white towel. It was too large for her because she'd tucked the end above her chest and was holding it there with one hand. Her dark hair was wet, slicked back from her face. The mark on her throat was vivid in the morning light; dark at the center, still slightly swollen at the edges, unmistakably mine.
She was mine.
"You came back up," she said.
"I did."
She moved toward the closet with the easy, unselfconscious efficiency of a woman who had found the place where she belonged, and the man to whom she belonged. She didn't hurry. She didn't linger. The mark disappeared behind the closet door, and something in my chest registered the absence with an irritation that was entirely irrational.
I could still smell her. But the specific scent that had been soaking into my skin since last night — jasmine and her honey-mush — had been scrubbed off her by the shower. Replaced by something clean and generic and not mine.
My wolf did not appreciate this.
I stood up, crossed to the closet doorway, and leaned against the frame. She was standing in front of the rack with one hand on a hanger, her back to me, still in the towel.
