Magnus ended up in the basement holding room—the one Sal whispered was for “business disputes that need extended conversation.” I didn’t ask what that meant.
Didn’t want to, honestly.
Upstairs, the main hall looked wrecked.
Glass everywhere, floorboards split open, and a dark stain on the marble near the window.
I tried not to stare at it.
Two of Adrian’s guys were down—not dead, thank god, but hurt.
Dr.
Voss was already there, moving from one to the other the same quick, no-nonsense way she’d patched me up a few days back.
I sat on the bottom stair, hands still shaking from whatever the hell had just come out of me during the fight.
I was trying to process that I’d held off a fully shifted enforcer with nothing except instinct—and a kind of strength I wasn’t supposed to have.
For more than ten years, everyone called me wolfless.
“You should’ve stayed in the records room.” I looked up.
Enzo stood over me, arms crossed, and his face was an odd twist of anger and—maybe—something like respect.
“I did for a while,” I said.
“But then people started shooting at your house because of me, and hiding stopped making sense.” “This wasn’t your fight.” I met his eyes.
I was just too tired to sugarcoat anything.
“Wasn’t it?
There’s a bounty on me now running up and down half the mercenary network on the coast.
Pretty sure that makes it my fight, hiding or not.” Enzo’s expression shifted—the anger settling into something quieter.
He stood there, thinking, before he finally spoke.
“I was wrong,” he said, each word sounding like it cost him.
“Three days ago, I told Adrian he was starting a war over a woman with no wolf worth talking about.” He glanced at the ruined hall, the blood, the basement where Magnus waited.
“That’s not true anymore.” “No,” I said, quieter now.
“It’s not.” He studied me a second longer, then held out a hand.
I remembered the first time we’d met—how wary he’d been.
This time, it actually looked like the real thing—a gesture, not a test.
“For what it’s worth,” he said, “if you’re about to drag my brother’s whole family into a war neither of us understands yet, I’d rather be standing next to you than arguing with him about it.” I took his hand.
My grip surprised me—it didn’t shake at all.
“For what it’s worth, I never wanted any of this.” “I know.” His mouth twitched in something almost like a smile.
“That’s usually how the worst wars start.” Twenty minutes later, I found Adrian—or he found me—outside in the garden.
I sat on the edge of the same fountain where the gold had first flashed behind my eyes.
Adrian had ditched his bloody shirt from earlier, but not the tension in his shoulders.
He sat down beside me without asking.
“Magnus talked,” he said.
Straight to the point.
“Broker’s a middleman, impossible to trace, works with fake names and encrypted contracts.
But we got something useful out of him before Sal stepped in.” “What?” “The bounty didn’t start with Rocco,” Adrian said, his jaw tightening.
“Someone fed him details—your appearance, the gold in your eyes, even your last name.
Stuff he shouldn’t have known this soon.” I felt my stomach clench.
“The leak in the house.” “Maybe,” Adrian said.
“Or something worse.” His eyes fixed on mine, careful, like he was measuring how much I could handle after everything else tonight.
“Magnus mentioned a name.
The broker said a man’s been feeding them info about you for years—someone who knew the Calloway bloodline before Redthorn ever rejected you.” “Adrian.” My voice went shaky.
“What name?” He hesitated, just long enough for me to know I was right to be scared.
“Lucian,” he said softly.
“Lucian Hart.” The world went a little sideways.
“That’s not possible.” My voice sounded small, all the steadiness I’d earned tonight bleeding away.
“Lucian Hart is my father.
He died before I was born.
My mother told me—” “She told you what she believed.
Or what someone wanted her to believe.” Adrian’s voice was gentler than I’d ever heard before—like he knew he’d just hit something raw.
“Magnus didn’t have every detail.
Just a name, mentioned once…but it sounds like this man’s alive, and he’s been selling out details on your bloodline for longer than any of us realized.” I pressed my hands flat against the fountain, trying to line up eighteen years of missing a father I never met with the nightmare possibility he’d been alive all along—and might have helped set all this in motion.
“Why,” I whispered, “would my own father sell information about me?” Adrian didn’t answer.
Neither of us could.
The not knowing hung there between us in the cool air—heavier than the bounty, heavier than the bloodline secrets, heavier than anything these last days had already dumped on me.
“We’ll find him,” Adrian said at last, quiet but certain.
A tone I’d learned meant he wouldn’t be moved.
“We’ll find him before Rocco does.
Or before anyone else does.” “And if he’s not a victim?” I made myself ask what I was most afraid of.
“If he really is the kind of man who’s been selling out his own daughter?” Adrian met my eyes.
“Then we deal with that,” he said.
“Same way we’ve dealt with everyone else who’s decided you’re worth less than what they can get for you.” Maybe I should’ve been scared by how absolute he sounded—cold, even.
But sitting there, after this night, I felt a fierce sort of gratitude for that ruthlessness, for once working in my favor instead of against me.
“Adrian.” I said his name quietly, still not sure how this trust thing was supposed to work.
“Why is it always you?
Every time my life falls apart, you’re still here.
You don’t walk away.” He was silent a long minute, his face unreadable in the moonlight.
When he finally answered, his voice was so low it felt more like a shiver against my skin.
“Because,” he said, “I told you three nights ago I wanted to find out what you were worth.
I didn’t expect that answer to become the only thing I actually care about protecting.” That truth just landed between us, raw and bare.
I let myself feel it for a second—the crazy warmth of being wanted, not despite the chaos I brought, but because of the fight inside me that chaos revealed.
Then, from somewhere inside, a phone started ringing hard—a sharp, relentless sound.
Adrian’s attention snapped back, the moment breaking in half.
“That’s Sal’s line,” he said, standing up fast.
“He only calls that number for emergencies.” We were both moving before the next ring, the short hush of the garden already gone, replaced by whatever the night was going to throw at us next.
Beneath the panic, the exhaustion, and the new crack in my life, I realized something clear and cold: this new world I’d crashed into four days ago?
It has no intention of letting me catch my breath.