I stood there long enough to hear it: Jai’s breathing, slow and even, the rhythm of deep sleep from a man who didn’t surrender to it easily. No rustle of sheets. No shift of weight. Just the steady in-and-out of someone who had finally, against considerable odds, found a few hours of something resembling peace.
The rut lived closer to the surface at this hour. It always did. The pre-dawn cold pressed against the windows, and my body responded the way it always did—heat building along the spine,pooling low in the gut, the particular restlessness that came with the territory of being what I was.
But what moved through my chest as I stood outside that door had nothing to do with want and everything to do with the oldest, coldest certainty a wolf like me carried: the knowledge of what belonged to me and what happened to anyone who reached for it.
Jai’s breathing didn’t change. Grace was silent. The suite held its quiet, and I stood in the hallway and let the certainty settle into something I could carry.
I did not open the door. Opening the door would wake him, and he needed the sleep more than I needed the sight of him. Instead, I turned and walked to the kitchen.
The coffee was where I kept it—the good beans, not the ones Jai had brought from his apartment, though those had their own merits. I measured by feel, grounds into the filter, water into the reservoir, and hit the brew cycle with a press of my thumb that was more habit than thought.
The machine hissed to life, the sound familiar and right, and the first rich notes of coffee cut through the pre-dawn quiet like an anchor finding bottom.
I braced my hands on the counter and watched the eastern horizon begin its slow bleed from black to grey. Mt. Hood held its pale outline, patient, and the city below was still mostly dark, the river a seam of deeper black against the grid.
Twelve minutes. Ashe would be punctual. The logs would be thorough. The problem would have edges I could grip, and I would grip them, and by the time Jai woke up, the perimeter would already be adjusting.
The coffee dripped. The machine hummed. The wrongness in the penthouse’s rhythm was still there, but I had a name for it now, and names were things I could work with.
I poured the first cup black and didn’t wait for it to cool.
Ashe arrived in eleven minutes and forty-three seconds. I didn’t need to check my watch. I’d been counting.
He came through the private elevator with the same quiet inevitability he brought to everything—dark clothing, tablet under one arm, expression set to the particular neutral that meant he’d already done the math and didn’t like the answer.
No greeting. No wasted motion.
He crossed to the twelve-seat dining table and spread the security logs across the dark walnut in a single fluid motion, printed feeds and time-stamped stills laid out in sequence like evidence at a trial nobody had scheduled.
I stood over the table with my first cup of coffee going lukewarm beside me and let my eyes move across the images. Two men. Dark clothing. Gliding along the eastern parapet with the kind of movement that didn’t happen by accident.
“Pack-trained,” Ashe said. Not a question. A classification. “Watch the spacing. Three meters between them, consistently. They’re holding sight lines at ninety-degree offsets. That’s not contractor behavior. That’s pack protocol.”
I’d seen it already. The way the lead man paused at each junction, the sweep of his gaze covering exactly the angles a trained wolf would cover, nothing wasted.
The second man hung back, positioned to watch the approach vector while the first studied the camera. Professional. Disciplined. The kind of movement that came from years of running together under someone who didn’t tolerate sloppiness.
“The camera they’re focused on.” Ashe tapped a still with one finger. The image showed the lead man’s face angled upward, his body oriented toward the eastern facade. “Covers the east terrace, your master suite window, and the guest suite. Nothing else in that sight line is worth the exposure.”
I picked up the coffee. Drank. Lukewarm, bitter, exactly what I needed. “An extraction approach for an adult target wouldn’tuse that vector. Too exposed. Too many sight lines from neighboring buildings.”
“Correct.” Ashe didn’t soften it. “This was reconnaissance for a pup-sized target in a room they’d already identified. Which means—”
“Floor plans.” I set the cup down. The sound it made against the walnut was sharper than I intended. “They have someone with access to the building’s architectural records.”
Ashe nodded once. The muscle below his jaw tightened—the only tell he ever showed, and he showed it now, which meant the implication had landed exactly as hard as it should have. “Resource problem. Significant one. The plans for this building aren’t public record. They’re held by the developer’s office under NDA, and the security protocols on that server are not trivial.”
I looked at the stills again. Two men on a roof, studying a camera angle with the focused attention of people who knew exactly what they were looking for. The time-stamp read 03:17. Forty-three minutes ago. Gone by 03:22, according to the feed time-stamps Ashe had annotated in red pen at the margin.
The coffee was cold now.
I didn’t care.
“Could they have made entry last night?” I asked.
The pause ran a quarter-second too long. I counted it. Ashe’s eyes stayed on the logs, his weight shifted fractionally to his left foot, and when he spoke, the word carried its own weight.
“Probably not.”
