Office of Fangs and Files
The travel from The Moonshine Bean coffee shop, public park bench nearby to Caden’s corner office, 14th floor, Silvermoon Tower consumed the next hour. Headlights cut cold through the gathering dusk.
The elevator doors slid open onto the fourteenth floor of Silvermoon Tower, and Nova Holloway stepped into a world she had never been meant to see.
The corner office sprawled before her, all floor-to-ceiling glass and brushed steel, the late afternoon sun casting long amber rectangles across a desk that cost more than her monthly rent. Caden Blackwood stood at the window with his back to her, one hand pressed flat against the glass, the other gripping his phone so hard the screen had begun to crack along one edge.
Milo pressed against her side, his small fingers twisting into the fabric of her coat. She felt the tremor run through him—not fear, not yet. The hyper-vigilant stillness of a child who had learned to read adult silences before he could read books.
“It’s okay,” she whispered, though the words tasted like ash.
Caden turned. His eyes were the color of winter storms, and right now they were fixed on her with an intensity that made her want to check behind her own shoulder.
“You came.” His voice was rough, scraped raw by something she couldn’t name.
“You sent a car with three armed men to pick me up from work.” Nova guided Milo to the leather sofa against the wall, keeping her body between her son and the window. “I didn’t realize I had a choice.”
Something flickered across Caden’s face—regret, maybe. Or the ghost of a smile that died before it could form. “You always have a choice, Nova. I just needed you to have all the information first.”
The office hummed with the quiet thrum of climate control and the distant drone of city traffic twelve stories below. Silvermoon Tower stood in the financial district of Raven’s Peak, a glass-and-steel monument to the pack’s legitimate holdings. Real estate holdings. Investment portfolios. A chain of luxury hotels that stretched across three states. On paper, Caden Blackwood was just another billionaire with good cheekbones and a reputation for being difficult with reporters.
Off paper, he was something else entirely.
“I need you to understand what’s happening,” he said, crossing to his desk and pulling open a drawer. “What’s been happening. What I should have told you eight years ago.”
Milo shifted on the sofa, his mismatched eyes—one the color of his mother’s, the other a shade too bright—tracking Caden’s every movement. “Mom says you’re my father.”
The words landed like stones in still water.
Caden’s hand froze halfway into the drawer. He looked at Milo—really looked at him—and Nova saw something break open behind his eyes. A door she hadn’t realized was locked.
“Yeah,” he said, and his voice cracked on the single syllable. “Yeah, Milo. I am.”
“How come you never came to see us?”
Nova’s throat closed. She had prepared for this conversation a thousand times, rehearsed it in shower steam and sleepless nights, but Milo had never asked before. He had accepted her explanations with the unquestioning faith of a child who had never known anything different.
Caden set his phone down. He pulled a leather-bound folder from the drawer and crossed to kneel in front of the sofa, bringing himself to Milo’s eye level.
“Because I was a coward,” he said. “And because there are people who would use you to hurt me. People who already tried.”
The confession hung in the air, raw and unpolished. No careful PR spin. No alpha posturing. Just a man telling his son the truth.
Nova’s chest ached.
“Ravenwood,” she said.
Caden’s jaw worked. He stood, his joints audibly cracking—a sound that reminded her, jarringly, of just how tightly wound he was beneath the thousand-dollar suit. “The Ravenwood family. Owen Ravenwood and his son Victor. They’re industrialists. Oil, shipping, logistics. They’ve been trying to dismantle the pack for fifteen years through hostile takeovers, shell companies, and private military contractors disguised as security consultants.”
“People,” Nova said flatly. “They’re people. Not monsters.”
“Worse.” Caden’s eyes met hers. “Monsters have rules. The Ravenwoods have a board of directors and a legal team that costs more than most countries’ defense budgets. They can’t challenge me in the old ways, so they’ve found new ones. Corporate raids. Political pressure. Leverage.”
He opened the folder and laid it on the coffee table in front of them. Nova leaned forward, her breath catching as she took in the contents. Financial statements. Property deeds. A photograph of a child—blond, blue-eyed, maybe seven years old—standing in front of a chain-link fence.
“What is this?”
“The ledger of everything they’ve taken from the pack over the last decade.” Caden traced a finger across a column of numbers that made Nova’s head spin. “And what they owe us.”
Milo picked up the photograph. “Who’s this?”
“A boy named Liam. His father worked for the Ravenwoods. When Liam started showing signs of the shift—his eyes, same as yours—they tried to take him. To study him. To find a way to weaponize what we are.” Caden’s voice dropped to something barely audible. “His father got him out. They’re in protective custody in a state I won’t name out loud.”
Nova felt the blood drain from her face. She pulled Milo closer, her hand cupping the back of his head, holding him against her shoulder. “They want Milo.”
“They want any child with the bloodline. But Milo is special. He’s—” Caden stopped. His hands curled into fists at his sides. “He’s mine. He’s the heir to the Blackwood line. And Victor Ravenwood has spent the last three years trying to prove that our kind are a biological resource to be harvested, not people to be protected.”
The phone on his desk buzzed. Then again. Then a third time in rapid succession.
Caden moved to answer it, but before he could, the office door swung open.
Petra swept in like a force of nature, her arms laden with two paper bags that smelled distinctly of hot pretzels and cheese dip. She froze at the threshold, taking in the scene: the tense tableau of billionaire alpha kneeling before her best friend and her godson, the classified documents spread across a table worth more than her car, the heavy silence that screamed of secrets and danger.
“Okay,” Petra said, setting the bags down on the nearest chair. “I brought snacks and I’m not leaving. Nova, don’t even try to argue with me. You called me, remember?”
Nova let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. “I remember.”
Petra crossed to the sofa and sat down heavily, pulling Milo into her side with an ease born of years of sleepovers and movie nights and emergency babysitting. She was, in every way that mattered, family. A civilian with no combat skills and no knowledge of the supernatural world beyond what she’d been told, but with a loyalty that ran deeper than blood.
“Okay, tall, dark, and brooding,” Petra said, pointing at Caden. “Explain it to me like I’m a civilian who still thinks werewolves are just guys with excessive body hair. What’s our play?”
Caden’s phone buzzed again. He picked it up, scanned the screen, and his face went still in a way that made Nova’s stomach drop.
“We need to move. Now.”
“Where?” Nova was already on her feet, her hand locked around Milo’s.
“Floor three. The secure parking garage has an armored transport waiting.” Caden was grabbing the folder, sweeping his laptop into a bag, moving with the precision of a man who had done this before. “Grant has a team sweeping the building for trackers. The Ravenwood drones locked onto my office signal two minutes ago.”
“How did they find us?”
“Their technology is better than ours. They’ve been investing in private surveillance for years—satellite imaging, facial recognition, drone swarms that can read license plates from three thousand feet.” Caden’s voice was clipped, professional, but Nova caught the tremor underneath. “I made a mistake. I used my personal credit card to book the car that picked you up. They must have flagged it.”
Petra grabbed the pretzel bags. “I’m not leaving without these. We’re going to need carbs.”
They moved into the hallway, Milo pressed between Nova and Petra, Caden leading with she phone pressed to she ear. The fourteenth floor was a maze of glass-walled conference rooms and open-plan workstations, empty now except for the security team that materialized from side corridors—Grant at the front, a compact man with a shaved head and a sidearm holstered beneath his jacket.
“Service elevator,” Grant said, steering them left. “We’ve got a window of about four minutes before they triangulate the garage exit.”
“Victor called me,” Caden said, his voice low enough that only Nova could hear. “While you were on your way up. He told me to give up the boy or lose everything.”
Nova’s blood turned to ice. “You didn’t mention that.”
“I wasn’t going to.” Caden’s hand found her elbow, a brief touch, urgent and grounding. “But he’s going to call again. And when he does, I need you to know that I’m not going to trade Milo for anything. Not the company. Not the pack lands. Not my life.”
“Good,” Nova said, and she meant it.
The service elevator arrived with a soft chime. They piled in—Nova, Milo, Petra, Caden, and two of Grant’s people—and the doors slid shut on the fourteenth floor just as the lights flickered and died.
“Power cut,” Grant said, already pulling a tactical flashlight from his belt. “They’re locking the building down.”
The elevator descended in darkness, the only light the dim emergency strip along the floor and the glow of Caden’s phone. Milo pressed his face into Nova’s coat, his breathing fast but steady. She felt his little hands gripping her waist, and she held him tighter.
“Mom,” he whispered. “Are we going to be okay?”
Nova looked at Caden. In the half-light, his face was all hard angles and shadows, a man carved from grief and resolve. He was watching her with an expression she couldn’t read—hope, maybe. Or prayer.
“Yes,” she said, and she made herself believe it. “We’re going to be fine.”
The elevator stopped. The doors opened onto a concrete garage filled with the hum of fluorescent lights and the smell of exhaust fumes. An armored SUV sat idling twenty feet away, its engine a low growl in the enclosed space.
They were halfway to the vehicle when Caden’s phone rang.
He looked at the screen. His hand tightened around the device until his knuckles went white.
“Victor.”
Nova watched him answer the call, watched the careful mask of control slide into place. She couldn’t hear what was said on the other end, but she could see the effect it had on Caden—the way his pupils dilated, the way his breathing shifted, the way every muscle in his body went rigid.
Then he spoke, and his voice was a blade drawn in anger.
“You can’t protect him forever, wolf. We’ll take what’s ours.”