My wolf read the air on a separate channel. Nothing foreign. Nothing that didn’t belong.
The phone lit up. Ashe’s name, blue-white against black glass.
I answered on the first vibration.
“Multiple hostiles in the building.” His voice came through stripped to the bone. No preamble. No padding. The register he used when time was measured in seconds and every word cost something. “Service access on lower floors. Pack-trained, coordinated, moving up. Fifteen, maybe eighteen of them. Floor-by-floor sweep pattern. They’re not broadcasting. This is quiet work.”
I was off the stool before he finished the sentence. The wood creaked under my weight, the barstool rocking back on its base, and my feet hit the dark walnut floor with the kind of impact that should have made noise and didn’t, because I’d spent thirty-five years learning how to move a body this size without announcing it.
“ETA to forty?” I was already crossing the kitchen.
“Four minutes. Maybe less. They’re clearing each floor systematically. Slower than I’d expect from a team that size, which means they’re thorough, not rushed.”
I terminated the call without responding. My thumb hit the elevator panel on the wall, the private car already cycling from the ground level because Ashe had triggered it thirty seconds ago—I could feel the mechanism through the concrete, the low subsonic hum of the cables taking tension—and then I turned and walked to Jai’s door.
Not the security feed. Not the elevator panel. Not the weapons locker in the study that held the things I’d rather not use in a building full of civilians.
Jai first.
I didn’t knock. The door opened under my hand and the cherry blossom scent hit me full-force, warm and specific, layered with the milky sweetness that meant Grace was in there too.
Jai was at the dresser, one hand braced on the wood, the other folding a clean onesie with the kind of focused precision that suggested he’d been at it for longer than the task required.
Grace was in the bassinet. Awake, alert, tiny fists punching the air with the focused determination of someone conducting important research.
“They’re in the building,” I said. “Multiple hostiles, pack-trained, moving up floor by floor. We have under four minutes. Take Grace and everything she needs. Don’t argue.”
Jai turned. Not fast—deliberate, the kind of turn that came from a body that had learned to move without telegraphing. His eyes found mine and held. Hazel, wide, alert in the way that meant he was already running scenarios, already calculating, already three steps ahead of the words I’d just said.
He didn’t ask if I was sure. He didn’t ask how many. He didn’t ask anything that would waste the seconds we didn’t have. He nodded once. A small, downward tilt of his chin that settled something between us without requiring the words to do the work.
Then he moved.
I watched him for three seconds. The efficiency of it was its own kind of language—the way his hands found the diaper bag already packed and sitting by the door, the way he checked the contents with a single sweep of his eyes, the way he lifted Grace from the bassinet and tucked her against his chest in one fluid motion that left no room for error.
His body remembered things his mind didn’t need to recall. Army Ranger. Seven years. The kind of training that lived in muscle long after the uniform came off.
The fact that he didn’t argue, that he read my face and made the calculation and moved, landed in my chest with the weight of something I hadn’t prepared for.
Trust.
The word arrived fully formed, inconvenient, and I added it to the short list of things about this man that made him genuinely dangerous to my composure.
I turned and crossed the penthouse. The elevator feed was live on my phone, the private shaft still clean, the car rising through the floors with the steady, mechanical certainty of something that hadn’t been compromised yet. I knew it wouldn’t hold.
Declan wasn’t stupid.
The private elevator was the first vector any competent operative would target, which meant Ashe had already staged the secondary extraction in the parking garage, which meant the clock was running on two separate timers and neither of them had much slack.
The internal camera grid showed nothing yet. Empty hallways. Empty service stairs. The building’s eastern face catching morning light through floor-to-ceiling glass, turning the corporate interiors the color of honey.
My wolf read the recycled air through the vents —nothing foreign, nothing that didn’t belong, but the absence of threat-scent was its own kind of warning. They were still too far down. The ventilation system hadn’t cycled their presence upward yet.
Jai emerged from the guest suite with Grace tucked against his chest and the diaper bag slung over one shoulder. He’d grabbed the switchblade from the nightstand—the largest one, the one with the checkered grip—and slipped it into his back pocket without looking at it. The move was so casual, so automatic, that it would have been easy to miss unless you were watching for it.
I was always watching.
The east windows held Mt. Hood in perfect morning light. The half-drunk coffee sat abandoned on the counter, skin intact,a monument to a morning that had started three hours ago and was already over.
