Paperwork and Warnings
The travel from public coffee shop to office desk consumed the next hour. Headlights cut cold through the gathering dusk.
The office air conditioning clicked on, a low hum that did nothing to erase the silence left behind by the shattered window. Cassidy’s hands were still shaking as she pressed the heels of her palms against her desk, forcing them flat against the laminated wood grain. The commute back to Silverline Investments had been a blur of white-knuckled steering and rearview mirror checks. No one had followed her. She’d taken three wrong turns, doubled back through a gas station parking lot, and waited a full four minutes before pulling back onto the main road.
Paranoid. That’s what she was. Paranoid and jumpy and seeing things that couldn’t be real.
Jace’s eyes. Gold. Like molten coins dropped into warm honey.
She closed her own eyes now, counting the seconds on the wall clock. Thirty-seven seconds until the minute hand clicked over. Thirty-seven seconds of steady, mechanical sound, the tick-tick-tick cutting through the open-plan office like a surgeon’s blade. People were typing. Phones were ringing. Life was moving on.
Cassidy opened a drawer and pulled out a file folder. Payroll adjustments for Q3. Vendor contract renewals. A sticky note from Miriam reminding her about the office potluck next Friday. Normal things. Human things. She could hold onto these.
She clicked her pen twice and began to write.
The bullet hadn’t hit her. That was the part that mattered. The glass had exploded inward, and Dante Davenport had shoved her behind him like a human shield, and then—then he’d looked at Jace with something that wasn’t surprise. Recognition. *Fear.*
She’d wanted to ask. She’d wanted to scream. But the sirens were already wailing in the distance, and Dante had pulled her out through the fire exit, down three flights of stairs, into the parking garage where his black sedan sat waiting like a patient predator. He’d given her one instruction: *Go to work. Act normal. I’ll find you.*
She should have called the police. She should have filed a report. Instead, she’d driven here, to her desk, to the familiar weight of paperwork and fluorescent lighting, because the alternative was admitting that her six-year-old son had done something that wasn’t possible.
The clock ticked. Forty-one seconds now.
The elevator chimed.
Cassidy’s pen stopped moving. She didn’t look up. She forced her hand to continue the stroke, finishing the loop on a signature that didn’t belong to any document she was actually seeing. Her peripheral vision caught the reflection in her monitor—two figures crossing the reception area. One broad-shouldered, moving with the economy of a man who knew exactly where every exit was. The other leaner, darker, dressed in a charcoal suit that cost more than her monthly rent.
Dante Davenport walked through the cubicle aisle like he owned the building. Which, technically, he did. Silverline Investments was one of his shell companies, a minor asset in a portfolio that spanned three continents. Cassidy had known that when she took the job. She’d signed the non-disclosure agreement, accepted the above-market salary, and told herself it was just a coincidence that her employer had the same last name as the man who’d saved her from a rogue wolf attack six years ago.
She’d been very good at lying to herself.
“Miss Holloway.” His voice was calm, measured, the kind of voice that belonged in boardrooms and negotiation tables. Not in the middle of a weekday, standing over her desk while his security chief began a silent circuit of the floor.
Cassidy set down her pen. “Mr. Davenport. I wasn’t expecting visitors.”
“I’m sure you weren’t.” He pulled the visitor chair from the neighboring desk and sat, crossing one leg over the other. The movement was deliberate, controlled. He was giving her time to adjust, to acclimate to his presence. She hated him for the courtesy.
Grant appeared at her cubicle entrance, a tablet in his hand. He didn’t speak. He simply held up the screen, and Dante glanced at it, nodded once.
“Clean,” Grant said. “Two listening devices in the break room. One in the supply closet. Standard corporate espionage kit. Nothing military grade.”
Cassidy’s stomach dropped. “Listening devices?”
“Sterling family signature,” Dante said, as if that explained anything. “They’ve been tracking you for the past three weeks. The sniper today was their confirmation shot. They wanted to see if you’d run, if you’d break. You didn’t. That changes the equation.”
“The equation?” Cassidy heard her voice rise, felt the edge of hysteria creeping in. “There’s a man with a gun shooting at my son, and you’re talking about equations?”
Dante’s eyes met hers. They were dark, almost black in the fluorescent light, but she remembered them from that night six years ago—burning amber, wild and furious, as he’d pulled her bleeding body out of the wreckage of her car. She’d never asked how he’d found her. She’d never asked why he’d been there, miles from any road, in the middle of a storm that should have kept anyone inside.
She’d never asked about the blood on his hands. The blood that wasn’t hers.
“Jace is not your average child,” Dante said. The words came out flat, clinical, like he was reading from a file. “You know this. You’ve seen the signs—the heightened senses, the night terrors, the way he can track a scent across the playground like a bloodhound. You’ve taken him to three pediatricians and two child psychologists. They all told you the same thing: there’s nothing wrong with him. He’s just… different.”
Cassidy’s hands had gone still. The clock ticked. Fifty-eight seconds.
“You need to tell me what he is,” she said. “You need to tell me right now.”
Dante leaned forward. The movement brought him closer, and she caught the faint scent of cedar and ozone, the same smell that had clung to him the night of the attack. “He’s my son, Cassidy. Our son.”
The words didn’t register at first. They hung in the air, foreign objects she couldn’t process. Her mind reached for the logical interpretation, the reasonable explanation—a metaphorical claim, a legal designation, a twist of language that meant something other than what it sounded like.
But Dante’s face was still. There was no lie in his eyes.
“That’s impossible,” she said. “I don’t—I’ve never—we never—”
“The night of the car accident.” His voice dropped lower, intimate, meant only for her. “You were attacked by a rogue werewolf on the mountain pass. You don’t remember the details because your brain blocked them out. The trauma was too severe. But I was there. I found you. I carried you to safety.”
Cassidy’s breath caught in her throat. She remembered the rain. The headlights cutting through the dark. The shape—massive, moving too fast—slamming into her driver’s side door. Then nothing. Three days of nothing, waking up in a hospital with a concussion, a broken arm, and no memory of how she’d gotten there.
“You were bleeding out,” Dante continued. “The wolf’s claws had opened your femoral artery. You had ninety seconds, maybe two minutes, before you’d bleed into the dirt. I made a choice. I used my blood to close the wound, to pull you back from the edge. But the process was incomplete. The transfer didn’t take fully. You remained human.”
He paused. The clock ticked. Seventy-three seconds.
“But something else happened that night. Something I didn’t anticipate. You were already pregnant, Cassidy. Three weeks along. When my blood entered your system, it reached the embryo. It changed the child at the cellular level. Jace carries my bloodline. He is my biological son.”
Cassidy wanted to laugh. She wanted to stand up, call security, have this man escorted out of her office for the most elaborate, unhinged harassment campaign she’d ever witnessed. But her body wouldn’t move. Her lungs wouldn’t fill. She was frozen in place, pinned by the weight of something she couldn’t accept.
“You’re telling me,” she said slowly, “that my son is a werewolf.”
“He will be.” Dante’s jaw didn’t tighten. He didn’t exhale slowly. He simply watched her, his eyes tracking the micro-movements of her face the way Grant had tracked the office floor. “His first full shift will occur between ages twelve and fourteen, when puberty triggers the transformation. Until then, he’s what we call a latent carrier. The power is there, but dormant. Except for one thing.”
“His eyes.”
“Yes. The gold flicker is a sign of activation. It means he’s already connected to the lunar cycle, already aware of the predator inside him. Most children don’t show this until they’re nine or ten. Jace is six. That means his potential is extraordinary. And the Sterlings know it.”
Grant stepped forward, placing a manila folder on her desk. Cassidy didn’t open it. She could see the edge of a photograph protruding from the top—a man in a suit, standing in front of a glass tower, his smile calculated and cold.
“Reid Sterling runs the most powerful pack on the East Coast,” Dante said. “His son, Cole, is the heir. For the past twenty years, the Sterlings have been trying to build a bloodline capable of holding the alpha position for another three generations. They’ve intermarried, bribed, blackmailed, and killed to secure genetic lines that carry strong wolf heritage.”
He tapped the folder. “Jace is the strongest latent carrier anyone has seen in a century. The Sterlings want him. They want his blood, his DNA, his future children. They will use you to get to him. They will threaten you, leverage you, and if you resist, they will remove you from the equation entirely.”
Cassidy’s thumb moved across the folder’s edge. The paper was warm, slick with her own sweat. “The sniper today.”
“A warning shot. They wanted to see how you’d react. If you’d run to the police, if you’d call for help, if you’d break. You didn’t. That means you’re worth a conversation.” Dante’s voice hardened. “The next bullet won’t miss. It will be aimed at Jace. And it will be silver.”
The word hit her like a physical blow. *Silver.* She’d read the books. She’d seen the movies. But hearing it spoken aloud, in the context of her son’s life, made the absurdity of the situation crystallize into something sharp and real.
“What do you want from me?” she whispered.
“I want you to survive. I want my son to survive.” Dante stood, straightening his suit jacket. “Grant will sweep your apartment tonight. I’ll have a car outside your building starting tomorrow morning. You will not tell anyone about this conversation. You will not involve law enforcement—the Sterlings have people in every major city precinct. And you will keep Jace close. No school, no playdates, no public parks.”
“I can’t just hide him forever.”
“You won’t have to. I’m going to end this.” Dante’s eyes flickered—just for a moment, a flash of gold that mirrored what she’d seen in Jace. “But I need time. And I need you to stay alive long enough for me to buy it.”
He turned to leave, and Grant fell into step beside him. The folder sat on Cassidy’s desk, thick with intelligence reports, financial records, and photographs of men who smiled like predators. She didn’t want to open it. She didn’t want to know how deep this went.
But the clock kept ticking. Eighty-nine seconds. Ninety. A full minute and a half since he’d sat down, and her entire world had rearranged itself into something unrecognizable.
“Dante.” His name escaped before she could stop it. He paused, not turning around. “Why didn’t you tell me? Six years. You had six years to say something.”
He was silent for a long moment. The office hummed around them, oblivious.
“Because I was hoping you’d never have to know.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small black device. A burner phone, sleek and anonymous. He set it down on her keyboard with a soft click.
“When they find you, don’t call the police. Call me. Because they aren’t human, Cassidy.”