The Full Moon Gambit
The travel from Stage 9, Covington Holdings Lot to Rooftop Helipad, Waverly Studios Tower consumed the next hour. Headlights cut cold through the gathering dusk.
The rooftop helipad of Waverly Studios glittered under the full moon, its surface a black mirror reflecting distant city lights. Caden stood between Toby and the edge, his body a shield of muscle and bone as Jasper Covington stepped out of the elevator with four armed enforcers fanning behind him.
“You think hiding up here changes anything?” Jasper’s voice carried across the open space, polished and cruel. He adjusted his cufflinks—solid silver, Caden noted. Rich man’s affectation. Rich man’s weapon.
Toby pressed against Caden’s leg, small fingers digging into denim. “Daddy, his eyes—”
“Don’t look at him.” Caden’s hand found the back of Toby’s neck, steadying. “Look at the moon. Count the stars. Pick a constellation.”
“But he’s got guns.”
“He’s got guns. I’ve got teeth.”
Jasper laughed, the sound swallowed by helicopter blades approaching from the east. A second threat vector. Caden’s wolf turned, calculated, filed it away. Three minutes until that bird landed. Two minutes thirty if it was hostile.
“The boy comes with me,” Jasper said, walking forward with the casual arrogance of someone who had never been told no. “My father wants a word. Something about blood debts and broken contracts.”
“Toby stays.”
“You’re not in a position to negotiate, Harlow. You’re one man. I’ve got four shooters and an incoming gunship.” Jasper spread his hands, a gesture of mock reasonableness. “This ends clean or it ends messy. Your choice.”
Caden counted the enforcers again. Four. All human. All carrying SIG Sauers with suppressors. Professional. Covington spared no expense on intimidation.
Behind him, Toby’s voice came small but steady. “He said, ‘You think a child’s tantrum saves you? I’ll skin that pup myself!’”
The words hit Caden like cold water. Not Jasper. Cole Covington. The patriarch himself had threatened his son with a knife.
The wolf inside him stopped pacing. It turned. It looked through Caden’s eyes at Jasper Covington with absolute, crystalline clarity.
“Four shooters,” Caden repeated quietly. “And an inbound helo. That’s your hand?”
“That’s my hand.”
“You forgot something.”
Jasper’s smile thinned. “What’s that?”
Caden pulled Toby behind him, farther from the enforcers, closer to the helipad’s edge. The boy’s back hit the safety rail. One floor below, the studio’s main security hub. Three floors below that, the lobby where Victor was supposed to be rerouting power.
Where was Victor?
The elevator chimed behind Jasper.
Petra stepped out.
She wore a janitor’s uniform—gray coveralls, a mop bucket in one hand, a badge that definitely wasn’t hers clipped to her collar. Her face was pale, her hands shaking, but she walked straight past four armed men and three million dollars’ worth of corporate heir without breaking stride.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said, voice pitched low. “The cleaning crew left their cart on the thirty-second floor. Had to take the stairs.”
Jasper stared at her. “Who the hell are you?”
“Janitorial.” Petra lifted her mop bucket. “You’d be surprised what people track onto helipads. Blood, mostly. I’d recommend a deep clean after this.”
One of the enforcers moved to intercept her. Caden saw the shift in his weight, the shoulder dropping, the hand tightening on the grip—
“Don’t,” Caden said.
The enforcer froze.
Petra kept walking. She passed Jasper without looking at him, her mop bucket sloshing faintly. When she reached Caden, she pressed something small and cold into his palm—a key card. Not his.
“Forty-second floor,” she murmured. “Studio Seven. They’re filming the midnight talk show live. Security feed routes through the production booth.”
Caden closed his fist around the card. “Victor?”
“Containment breach on the ground floor. Covington sent a cleanup crew. He’s holding them off in the parking garage but he said to tell you—” She swallowed. “He said to tell you the moon’s full and he’s out of silver bullets.”
Jasper’s patience snapped. “Enough.”
He snapped his fingers. Two enforcers raised their weapons.
Caden moved.
He didn’t think. He didn’t plan. He let the wolf take the wheel and the wolf knew exactly how fast a human could cross twenty feet of open helipad when his son was on the line.
The first enforcer fired. The bullet caught Caden in the shoulder—a punch of heat and pressure that spun him sideways but didn’t stop his momentum. He hit the second enforcer chest-first, driving them both into the helipad’s concrete surface. The gun skittered away, spinning into the dark.
Three rounds. Caden counted them by the impacts. One in the shoulder. One grazing his ribs. One missing wide as he rolled, came up, and threw the key card at Jasper’s face.
It hit him in the mouth.
Not lethal. Not even damaging. But Jasper Covington had never been hit in the face by anything in his privileged life, and the shock of it bought Caden three seconds.
Three seconds was all Victor needed.
The studio’s fire alarm erupted—a shrieking, building-wide wail that cut through the rotor noise of the approaching helicopter. Lights flickered across the tower’s face as emergency systems engaged. Sprinklers activated on every floor below the fortieth, dumping water onto sound stages, dressing rooms, and the live broadcast of *Midnight with Marcia Kane*.
Petra had Toby by the hand, pulling her toward the elevator. “Go, go, go—”
“Not yet.” Caden grabbed her arm. “The feed. You said the security feed routes through production.”
“It does. But the alarm—everyone’s evacuating. The broadcast is going dark.”
“No.” Caden’s eyes found Toby’s. The boy’s pupils had gone gold around the edges, flickering like struck matches. “Toby. You said Cole Covington threatened to skin you. Did he say it in front of anyone?”
Toby nodded, mute.
“Witnesses?”
“His men. Three of them. In the parking garage when they grabbed me.”
Caden turned to Petra. “Can you access the parking garage security feed from the production booth?”
“If I don’t get caught.”
“Don’t get caught.”
She was already running for the elevator, coveralls splashing through pooling water. The doors closed on her just as the helicopter descended into view—a black MH-6 Little Bird, skids down, cabin door sliding open to reveal two more shooters in tactical gear.
Jasper wiped blood from his split lip, grinning. “Impressive. Really. You’re faster than you look. But you’re still just one wolf against an army.”
“I’m not an army.” Caden stepped forward, away from Toby, drawing Jasper’s attention. “I’m worse.”
“What, a father protecting his cub? I’ve seen that movie. It ends the same way every time.”
“You haven’t seen this one.”
Caden’s hand found the fire extinguisher mounted on the helipad’s wall. He wrenched it free, spun, and fired a stream of CO2 directly into the Little Bird’s open cabin door.
The pilot swore. The shooters recoiled, blinded, coughing. One of them fired blind—three rounds that punched through the helipad’s surface and ricocheted off the elevator shaft.
Toby flinched. His eyes went fully gold.
“Stay with me, pup,” Caden said, low, urgent. “You’re seven. You don’t shift until you’re twelve. Eyes only. Eyes only.”
“I’m trying, Daddy—”
“I know. You’re doing perfect.” Caden tossed the extinguisher aside and grabbed Toby, hauling him toward the service ladder on the helipad’s west edge. “We’re going down one floor. Into Studio Seven. We stay in the crowd until the police arrive.”
“There’s no crowd. Everyone’s evacuating.”
“Then we find Petra. We find the feed. And we make sure every camera in this building recorded Jasper Covington threatening a child.”
Below them, the tower’s fire evacuation spilled onto the street—hundreds of studio employees, actors, crew, and audience members streaming through the exits. Sirens wailed in the distance. Two minutes out, maybe three.
Jasper’s voice rang across the helipad. “You can’t run forever, Harlow. My father owns this city. The police answer to him. The courts answer to him. I’ll find you, I’ll find your son, and I will personally deliver that pup’s pelt to Cole’s dinner table.”
Caden stopped.
He stood on the top rung of the service ladder, Toby tucked under one arm, the full moon burning overhead. The wolf was close now—so close he could taste silver in the back of his throat.
“You’re right,” Caden said quietly. “You will find us. But not tonight.”
He dropped.
The fall was one floor—twenty feet, maybe less. He landed in a roll, absorbing the impact with his wounded shoulder, biting back a snarl of pain. Toby scrambled out of his arms, unharmed, eyes wide and golden.
The fire alarm still screamed. The sprinklers still rained. And in the production booth on the forty-second floor, Petra was pulling up the parking garage security feed on a monitor the size of a refrigerator.
“Got it,” she breathed. “I got it.”
The feed was clear. Parking garage level B2, timestamped three hours ago. Cole Covington, patriarch of the Covington family, standing over a seven-year-old boy cuffed to a concrete pillar. His voice, captured by a nearby camera with surprising clarity:
“You think a child’s tantrum saves you? I’ll skin that pup myself.”
Petra hit export. She routed the file to every screen in the building—the lobby monitors, the sound stage displays, the live feed that was still broadcasting to three million households despite the fire alarm.
Marcia Kane’s voice came through her earpiece, confused but professional: “Uh, we’re seeing some technical difficulties, folks. It appears our security feed has been—oh. Oh my.”
The image of Cole Covington threatening a child flickered across every television in the tri-state area.
Jasper’s helicopter touched down on the helipad above. His men piled out, weapons raised, scanning for targets that were already gone.
Caden pulled Toby through the service corridor, past the control room where Petra was already deleting her access logs, down the stairs toward the lobby where the first police cruisers were skidding to a halt.
The Covingtons had money. The Covingtons had power. But they didn’t have three million witnesses who had just watched a patriarch threaten to skin a seven-year-old boy alive.
Victor met them in the stairwell, his jacket torn, a bruise blooming across his jaw. “Parking garage is clear. Two down, the rest scattered. You good?”
“Good enough.” Caden handed Toby to Victor. “Get him out. Back entrance, through craft services, into the film archives. There’s a panic room behind the costume rack in section D.”
“You’re not coming?”
“I need to make sure Jasper understands the new rules.”
Victor’s eyes searched Caden’s face. Then he nodded, took Toby’s hand, and disappeared down the stairs.
Caden turned and walked back up.
The helipad was chaos when he emerged. Jasper’s men were shouting into radios, trying to coordinate a response to a disaster that had already metastasized beyond their control. The Little Bird was powering down, its pilot gesturing frantically at a phone.
Jasper stood at the center of it all, his perfect suit soaked, his perfect face twisted with rage.
He saw Caden.
“This isn’t over.”
“No,” Caden agreed. “It’s not. But now everyone knows what you are.”
He walked past Jasper, down the elevator, into the lobby where the police were already taking statements. An officer stopped him, asked for his name. Caden gave it—his real name, his full name, the name that would now be attached to a nationwide broadcast of the Covingtons’ crimes.
The officer’s partner looked up from a tablet. “The victim—the boy in the video—that’s your son?”
“Yes.”
“We’re going to need a statement.”
“You’ll get one.” Caden looked up at the helipad, where Jasper was being restrained by two officers who didn’t seem to care about his threats or his money or his father’s name. “But first, I need to make sure my son is safe.”
As cops swarm the building, Jasper snarls at Caden, “This isn’t over. I know what you are.”