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"I'm aware of the risk. I'm asking you to accept it."

"For what?"

There it was. I could practically hear the trap I'd walked into spring shut around my ankles. Rosalind Lobo wasn't here in body, but she was definitely here in spirit.

Sorsha let the silence sit for a moment, savoring it. This was the part the Lobo Alpha enjoyed; the moment when she had something a powerful man needed and he had to wait for her to decide whether to give it to him. I had watched my father manage men like this my entire life. You did not rush them. You showed no hint of impatience. You sat with the stillness of a man who had already accepted the cost and was simply waiting for the check.

"Of course I'll help you, Magnus. We're practically family. We could remove the practicality from the equation."

"When?"

"My daughter comes up from Columbia in two weeks."

I inhaled through my nose and nodded. So, I'd meet my future wife in two weeks rather than twelve months. I still had a year before we got married.

"I want the ceremony before the New Year."

Before the New Year. Four months.

I looked at the tablecloth. Then I looked back at Sorsha. There was a phantom ache in my ankle where I felt the claws of the trap spring closed.

"Agreed."

She reached into the leather portfolio beside her chair and produced a document. Had clearly been prepared before this meeting, which meant she had known what I was going to ask and had decided what she was going to charge before I sat down. I signed where she indicated, my handwriting clean, controlled, and slid the document back across the table.

Sorsha looked at my signature with the satisfaction of a woman crossing something off a list. She tucked the document away and picked up her menu. "I hear the branzino here is extraordinary."

"I have to get back." I stood.

She looked up at me with those amused eyes. "Magnus." A pause, weighted differently than the rest of the conversation. "My daughter is a good woman. She deserves a faithful, attentive husband who shows up." Another pause. "I trust you'll be that man."

It was not a pleasantry. It was the other half of the contract — the part that didn't go on paper. Fidelity.

"Of course," I said.

I walked out of the restaurant into the gray afternoon with a signed agreement hanging over my head and eight months shaved off the clock. It was done. The variable was gone. The path was the path it had always been going to be. The detour of the last week — the cabin, the garden, the taste of her — was exactly that. A detour. The road was the road.

I should have driven back to the estate. I drove to the city instead.

I told myself it was operational. I needed to check the transition of the Sterling infrastructure, review the security protocols for the new office, and ensure the Blackwood systems integration was running cleanly. These were legitimate reasons to be in the building. They were also the purview of my brother, Vidar. But I was the heir. I had oversight responsibilities. There was nothing unusual about showing up unannounced to a company that bore the Blackwood name.

The scaffolding was still up on the face of the building. Two workers in safety harnesses were making the final adjustments to the new signage. I watched as they aligned the last letters, then stepped back to check the level. One of them gave a thumbs up to the man on the ground with the sightline.

ODHIAMBO, BLACKWOOD & ASSOCIATES.

I looked at my name next to hers. I liked it in a way that had nothing to do with brand architecture or corporate positioning or the strategic value of the Blackwood name lending legitimacy to a restructured asset. The two names next to each other on the face of a building in the gray afternoon light, permanent and visible and entirely too satisfying for a man who had just signed his future to someone else over a restaurant table.

I should send her to Anchorage.

Put her on a plane, set her up somewhere clean and well-resourced and very far from Manhattan. Let the distance do what my discipline was failing to do. Because right now I wanted to rush back to the cabin in the woods, lock her inside, and rut her until we both passed out. Then wake up and do it again. Maybe even for the next four months.

Mated wolves did not cheat on their spouses. Blackwood wolves, especially, did not. My father had never looked at another woman in forty years of marriage. Neither had his father before him. The line went back further than recorded pack history with the same consistency. It was not a rule. It was simply who we were. What we were.

" — must've been something, landing that corner office straight out of the gate."

"She's been working here for almost a decade."

"You don't get that corner office without getting on your knees for some⁠—."