“You’ve been reviewing it for twenty-two minutes. That’s not review. That’s immersion.” Kael tossed the cup into the trash with the accuracy of a man who treated recycling as a competitive sport. “I’ll tell her agent to expect a call.”
“I didn’t say?—”
“You touched page forty-seven, Z. You don’t touch pages. You once made a colorist cry for brushing a proof with his sleeve. I’m calling the agent.”
He was gone before Zeir could form a rebuttal that wasn’t an admission.
The quiet lasted twelve minutes.
His phone buzzed. Elder Brenn. The text was brief, formal, and had the energy of a passive-aggressive sticky note left by someone who owned a gavel: Pack meeting. Tuesday. Resource allocation discussion.
Resource allocation discussion. Brenn’s code for questioning how the alpha spent money. The last three of these meetings had been dissections of the company’s creative investments—each one a referendum on whether Axan Dark’s artistic ambitions justified the pack’s financial backing. Villains that had built an empire, reduced to line items. Revenue that funded the entire pack infrastructure, reduced to columns on a spreadsheet Brenn squinted at with deliberate skepticism.
Zeir set the phone down. His shoulders drew tight. His wolf’s restlessness shifted—no longer aimless but coiled, the instinctive bristle of an alpha whose territory had been questioned.
He turned back to the portfolio. Sable stared up from the open cover.
The drawer was a small thing. Brass hardware, a key he kept on a chain in the desk. The lock was unnecessary—no one touched his workspace.
His fingers traced the brass pull.
He didn’t open it.
SIX
ZEIR
His mother called at noon. Revka Axan timed her calls the way generals timed flanking maneuvers—for maximum strategic impact disguised as casual affection.
“Zeir, darling. How’s the company?”
“Fine.”
“And you?”
“Fine.”
“Two fines and a silence. You sound like your father. That’s the Axan men’s entire emotional vocabulary.” She took in a slow breath. His mother did not pause accidentally. She paused the way a chess player paused before advancing a queen. “I spoke with a fascinating woman at the Book Club last night. An art consultant named Ozara Stone.”
The name landed with a soft click. Like a lock finding its tumbler.
“Mother. I have a Stone portfolio on my desk.”
“What a coincidence.”
“It’s not a coincidence.”
“The universe works in mysterious ways, darling.”
“The universe didn’t coordinate this. You did.”
Silence. The specific, unrepentant silence of a mother who had been caught orchestrating and did not consider this a problem.
“Her daughter sounds lovely.”
Zeir pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose. His mother had the strategic subtlety of a cruise missile wrapped in cashmere. The Matchmaker’s Book Club—his mother’s society circle, the one that called itself a book club and had discussed exactly zero books—had produced at least three marriages in the past year. All of them bore Gerri Wilder’s fingerprints, and all of them had involved mothers who claimed, with the wide-eyed innocence of career operatives, that the introductions were “pure chance.”
“This is about the work, Mother. Not about?—”