“I-I think you’re mistaken. My name is Shane... Shane Vale.” I held the lie like a shield and planted my feet.
Darius’s smirk never left his face. “Cut the act, Sofia. I know exactly who you are.”
My throat closed for a second, but I kept my face neutral, letting the practiced calm settle over me like skin. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He lounged against the polished cabin wall, the late light sketching every angle of him in hard bronze. Up close, the man was more danger than idea, his scent a layered thing, tobacco and iron, and beneath that an animal trace that made my wolf stir. “You can drop the disguise. It’s useless. I own the agency that made you ‘vanish.’”
The room narrowed. My stomach dropped into a place my human had learned to tuck away. The inside of me wolf unclenched and sniffed. She recognized the touch of paper, the stamp of forgery, the certainties of men who thought they could make people disappear and call it mercy.
“So what?” I said, folding my arms across my chest. “Are you going to tell them I’m alive?”
Darius chuckled, low and easy. “Not yet.”
“Not yet?” The impatience in my voice surprised me. The wolf wanted to tear his throat out on principle. The woman measured her words.
“It means I have a condition,” he said, measured, clinical.
I tilted my head. “What condition?”
He smiled like a man offering a bargain with a blade behind his teeth. “I need a fake wife.”
For one, impossible, my brain refused to accept the thing as real. Then the wolf inside me barked a laugh that sounded almost like hunger. “A fake wife.”
“You heard me,” he said. “There are business ties, public alliances, and a Moon Court meeting coming up. Appearances matter. You’re already very good at pretending, so why not put those talents to use?”
Pretending. The word tasted like the five barren years I’d spent beside Alpha Alex, reeking of obligations and vows I hadn’t chosen. I thought of his hands that had learned to hide truths, of the ledger I’d found and the way secrets had become shackles. I thought of the river and the body they’d dragged from it. I thought of the pack’s ears pricking at every scandal, of how one scandal could topple an Alpha.
“No. Absolutely not.” I said it like a prayer. I had died to the world they knew; I would not step willingly into another gilded cage.
Darius shrugged as if I’d merely denied his invitation to tea. “Then I guess I’ll have to tell the world you’re alive.”
My wolf’s lips curled. Blackmail, even from a man who ought to be an ally by trade, was still blackmail. “Why are you doing this? What’s in it for you?”
He watched me with that predator’s patience. “Let’s say I have reasons. Old debts. Old wars. A marriage of convenience buys time, shields assets, and shifts attention.” He flicked his thumb toward the porthole, where the moon cast a cold path across the water. “For now, let’s focus on getting you where you need to go. I’ll pilot the yacht.”
“You’re kidding,” I said. The human part of me wanted to spit, to storm onto the deck and hurl myself at whatever waited down the channel. The wolf felt something else: a plan forming, teeth bared in a grin I couldn’t show on my face.
“Nope. This yacht is mine, and I’m the only one who knows how to run her.” Darius’s grin was smug and infuriating. “Fine,” I ground out at last. “But stay out of my way.”
He turned toward the door, voice drifting back like smoke. “Whatever you say, soon-to-be Mrs. Ironclaw.”
“As if.” I slammed the cabin door and leaned against it until the wood steadied me. My heart hammered a drum of anger and something colder, resolve. I ripped off the wig, peeled the staged scar from wax, and scrubbed at the makeup with clumsy fingers. The mirror returned something raw: not Emily, not quite Sofia. A wolf’s stare burned in those eyes.
On the television, the anchor’s face wore equal parts grief and calculation. Alpha Alex stood before a bank of microphones in a slate suit, the perfect grieving husband for cameras and pack elders. “I refuse to believe my wife would take her own life,” he intoned, voice steady as a blade.
“She was pregnant. We were building a family. Someone’s trying to ruin us. I will not rest until justice is served.”
The wolf in my chest laughed, a sound like breaking glass. The man could spin a lie with the ease some people breathed. But the pack listened, the Moon Court listened. If Alpha Alex made himself the martyr, he would rally allies, close ranks, and use the loss to strengthen his claim. If I wanted him undone, I could give him what he needed to fall, and then shove him over the cliff.
I opened my laptop. The files I’d stolen from Ashley’s private account, the hospital invoices for my mother’s surgery, the signed transfers with coded references to Thornclaw Enterprises, everything I had collected with trembling fingers over the last months were there. Evidence was a weapon that could be wielded without blood. Or, in the right hands, with blood.
I composed a message to Alpha Alex with the steady hand of someone who had learned to write threats like blessings. I know what you did. Blood will settle this. You will pay. I attached the files and hit send.
His reply came almost instantly: Who is this? What do you want?
My fingers hovered. The wolf wanted to howl, to fling betrayal into the sky. Then I typed with surgical calm.
Money. Enough to ruin you. Transfer first. Then I’ll tell the rest.
The yacht shuddered as the engines woke, a beast beneath my feet. I closed the laptop and watched the moon carve a cold line across the water. Darius hummed at the helm, steady, practiced, then glanced back once, expression folding into something I couldn’t read. There are always layers behind a man’s grin. His reasons wouldn’t be purely mercenary; wolves like him collect favors and blood debts as trophies. My wolf smelled old debts, rival packs, the faint whisper of the Moon Court. He’d put himself between me and the world for a reason more complex than cash.
Let him keep his reasons. I had mine.
Salt spray bit at my wrists as I gripped the rail. The horizon was a black promise. Sofia Black, the Luna they’d buried in the river, had surrendered. From now on, Shane Vale will take. The wolf inside me leaned forward, patient and hungry.
We eased away from the harbor, the pier shrank, the place of my death growing small. In the moon’s cold light, I tasted what came next: calculation, revenge, the slow reclaiming of everything they’d tried to erase.
Darius’s voice dropped, private. “Keep your head down. Let the market tremble. Let him spend himself proving innocence.”
“And when he transfers the money?”
“When he does,” he said, his eyes on the stars, “you decide which parts of him to burn first.”
My wolf bared her teeth. For the first time since the river, something like peace settled over me. The hunt had begun. Only this time, I set the rules.
--
My phone buzzed like a trapped animal all morning, insistent, stupid, human. Alpha Alex’s messages rolled in one after another, the same clawing need stitched into every line.
Who are you?
Why are you doing this to me?
Tell me who you are, or I will hunt you down!
Where did you get that? Did you work with Sofia?
Is she really dead? Sofia, is this you! Damn it!
