None of that seemed particularly urgent.
I leaned against the counter and watched the afternoon light catch the edge of Braham’s jaw, and decided that for once, for this one perfect stretch of quiet, I could afford to let the work wait.
Chapter Thirteen
~ Braham ~
I was awake before the phone lit up. Not the slow, gradual surfacing from sleep—one moment dark, the next sitting upright, hand already reaching for the nightstand before my eyes had adjusted to the pre-dawn gray beyond the glass.
The penthouse hummed wrong.
Not loud. Not quiet. The wrongness lived in the texture—a gap in the ambient mechanical undertone, the silence where something familiar should have been and wasn’t.
My wolf caught it before my mind did. The building’s systems had their own rhythm, their own breath, and something in that rhythm had skipped a beat.
I sat there with my hand on the bedspread, palm flat against the charcoal cotton, and listened to the quiet. The city forty floors below was still mostly dark, the Willamette a black ribbon cutting through gridlines of orange and white.
Mt. Hood floated in the eastern distance, a pale ghost-shape against the not-yet-light, snow-capped and indifferent. My bedroom held its usual pre-dawn chill—the HVAC system dialed back overnight to conserve energy I didn’t need to conserve, a habit from a life that predated penthouse living.
The phone lit up. Blue-white glow hitting the dark walnut of the nightstand, illuminating Ashe’s name. I picked it up on the first vibration.
“Wilson.”
His voice came through stripped. Flat. No inflection, no color, the register he reserved for situations where control was the only currency that mattered. I’d heard it three times in seven years. Each time, something burned.
“Two of Declan’s men on the rooftop perimeter feeds across the street. East quadrant.” Ashe’s cadence was surgical, each word placed with the precision of a man delivering a diagnosis he’d already verified twice. “Spotted on the high-angle cameras, not the street-level array. They were there forty minutes ago. They’re gone now.”
I absorbed this without speaking. My hand stayed flat on the bedspread. The quiet stretched between us, Ashe giving me the room to process because he knew exactly what he’d just handed me.
Gone now was worse than if they’d stayed. Gone meant they’d gotten what they came for. Gone meant this wasn’t an approach. It was reconnaissance.
“They were mapping,” Ashe said. Unnecessary. We both knew. “The camera they were studying covers the east terrace, your master suite window, and the guest suite.”
The guest suite.
The dark walnut floor was cool under my bare feet as I stood, the temperature difference sharp enough to register as information. My body was already moving through the calculus—timing, angles, exposure—while the part of me that wasn’t a Prime Alpha stood very still in a dark bedroom and listened to the word guest suite echo.
“Come up,” I said. “Quiet. Bring the overnight security logs from the past seventy-two hours.”
“Already pulled. Twelve minutes.”
I ended the call. Set the phone down. Stood in the dark and let the wrongness settle into something I could use.
The shirt came first. Crisp white cotton from the chair by the window, still folded from yesterday. I shook it out by feel, slipped it over my shoulders, and worked the buttons one-handed while my other hand found the trousers draped over thesame chair. Belt next, leather sliding through loops with a soft hiss that the room absorbed. No socks. Not yet.
I moved through the space by memory and the faint ambient glow of the city through twelve feet of floor-to-ceiling glass. The room was laid out the way I’d built it—efficient, uncluttered, every surface serving a purpose or removed. I could have navigated it blindfolded.
I nearly was.
My watch—the Patek, heavy on my left wrist—caught a sliver of pre-dawn light and threw it back as a thin gold line across the ceiling. I didn’t look at the time. It didn’t matter.
What mattered was the gap in the rhythm, the two men on a roof studying a camera angle that covered the east terrace and the guest suite window, and the fact that Ashe’s team—Ashe’s team—had missed it in real time.
That last piece sat coldest. Ashe didn’t miss things. Ashe built systems that didn’t allow for missing things. The fact that he had meant the men were better than we’d credited, or the system had a blind spot we hadn’t mapped, or both, and both were problems I would address before the sun cleared the eastern ridge.
I stopped outside the guest suite door.
The cherry-blossom scent reached me through the gap under the door—warm, specific, layered with the faint milky sweetness that meant Grace was in there too.
