The Basement Wolf

Chapter 24. Terms of the Hunt

Clyde ended the call with a click soft as a trigger reset. Silence seeped back into the room like expensive smoke—rich, slow, deliberate. Only the French clock dared speak, ticking behind his shoulder in neat, venomous seconds. He let it. Time was a dog too, and he liked reminding it who held the leash.

At his feet, Freyja lifted her great head. The Rottweiler’s eyes burned amber in the lamplight, calm as coals waiting for wind. She didn’t whine, didn’t shuffle—just looked, like she already knew someone’s name had been folded into a death sentence.

“Ah, there you are,” Clyde murmured, stroking her muzzle with the back of his knuckles. “Did you hear that, my queen? They’ve remembered how to sweat.”

Her tail thumped once—slow, imperial.

He smiled—real, small, a curve that didn’t touch the cold geometry of his eyes. He rose from the desk, his cufflinks catching a shard of lamplight like a wink from something sharp. Outside, the city sprawled through the window in a net of fire and fog, jeweled towers piercing clouds like teeth.

“She burned him,” Clyde said to the glass, voice soft enough for ghosts. “Stefan, the peacock with his emerald sneer. She walked right into his stage, stole the heir, and rewrote the script with blood and nerve.” His smile lengthened by millimeters. “Tell me, Freyja—what’s rarer than a wolf who learns the human word for vengeance?”

The dog shifted, nails ticking faintly on the parquet. Approval, or hunger. Maybe both.

Clyde reached for his glass of Shiraz, rolling the stem between fingers as pale as secrets. He didn’t drink yet. He wanted the anticipation, the way some men want prayer. “She’s grown,” he went on, tone a connoisseur’s caress. “Sharper. Not a fury in flames—oh no. A furnace banked, waiting for the hour when heat matters more than light.”

He thought of the last time he’d seen her—eyes bright as broken glass, hands clenched like an oath she didn’t know how to pronounce. The men who’d held her thought they’d broken her. Clyde knew better. You don’t break fire. You box it. And pray the box doesn’t learn hinges.

The knock came, polite as etiquette.

“Enter,” Clyde said.

Bernard moved through the door with the elegance of a verdict. His suit was storm-grey, his tie the muted blue of bruises fading. The kind of man who made silence look expensive.

“Sir.” His voice was the same: level, polished, cold at the edges like water in a glass too thin.

“Bernard,” Clyde murmured, reclaiming his chair—a throne disguised as leather. He gestured toward the opposite seat with two fingers and the suggestion of a smile. “Three things tonight. All simple. All sharp.”

Bernard sat without rustle or fuss, long frame folding like a blade sheathed in ritual. “I’m listening.”

“First,” Clyde said, unhurried, like a pianist laying out the opening chords, “you will find her.”

Bernard’s brow twitched—the smallest fracture of composure, gone in a blink. “Her…current position?”

Clyde’s teeth showed—white, precise, without warmth. “Not the address she wrote last month and burned. Not the safe house she wants us to believe in. The real refuge. The one with stale curtains and a boy curled in a bed too small for all that terror. The one her breath fogs tonight.”

Bernard nodded once, slow and deep, like a hinge settling. “Clean?”

“As though the world never tilted,” Clyde said. “No crumbs. No shadows. Gravity, not footprints.”

Another nod. “Second?”

“Cassian,” Clyde said, and the name throbbed like a vein between them.

Even Bernard’s pulse skipped. “Your…contractor.”

Clyde savored the pause. “The artisan of subtractions. Yes. Give him a list.”

Bernard waited, still as a saint in glass.

“Not her,” Clyde murmured. “Not yet. Remove the scaffolding. Every rib that keeps her lungs from collapsing. The detective with the copper band, playing knight on a rotting board. The old wolf pretending to be a wall. The little anarchist with a scalp like a manifesto. Quietly, Bernard. Minimal noise, maximal message. When she exhales, I want her to feel the air pull teeth.”

Bernard tilted his head a fraction. “Collateral allowances?”

“Prefer neat,” Clyde said, smoothing an invisible crease from his cuff. “Accept necessity. Remind Cassian this is choreography, not slaughter.”

Bernard let silence fall, then placed it gently aside. “And the third?”

“When she’s alone,” Clyde said, leaning forward, the lamplight licking the planes of his face, “bring her to me.”

Bernard didn’t blink. “Alive.”

“Alive,” Clyde echoed, savoring it like a mouthful of rare fruit. “Unbruised enough to tell herself stories. Unbroken enough to believe they’re true.”

Freyja rose, padded to Clyde’s side, and pressed her skull against his thigh. He stroked her absently, fingers sinking into muscle built for war. His eyes never left Bernard. “You’re wondering why,” he said softly.

“I am,” Bernard said, because good men in bad suits ask only the questions that sharpen power.

Clyde’s smile unfurled like smoke curling from a lit fuse. “The client expects a corpse, yes. But the client—” He turned his palm up in an elegant shrug. “—is an i***t. He mistakes fear for a leash. Thinks crowns are iron, not bone. He hires death when what he needs is grammar.”

Bernard’s tone was glass, holding steady under heat. “And you see her as…?”

“Leverage,” Clyde said. “Language. A mint you do not throw away because some fool refuses to fight for the coin.” He rose, moving toward the window, his reflection stitching itself into the night beyond. “Do you know what I told her once? That she was the stage. Cruel, yes—but truer than prayer. Men like Stefan believe owning the theater means owning the play.” He let the Shiraz wet his mouth now, red as an unsealed vein. “They forget the stage bites. They forget it keeps score.”

Bernard’s eyes flickered, just enough for interest to escape its cage. “So you plan to…keep her.”

Clyde laughed—low, clean, almost tender. “Plan? No, Bernard. I intend to curate her.”

He turned. The lamplight slid along his jaw like oil on steel. “A daughter of the werewolf king is not refuse. She is a currency. A future you can mortgage empires on. Blood like that is an alphabet men kill to read.”

Bernard absorbed it without so much as a flinch. “And if she resists?”

“Oh,” Clyde said, smile slicing clean. “She will. That is the marrow of her worth. People who do not bend become architecture—if you learn where to lean.”

The clock chimed a single note, a wound of sound through the hush.

Bernard rose, precise as a blade standing upright. “Orders?”

“Find her,” Clyde said. “Feed Cassian his list. Make the ground under her soft enough to swallow the bones she trusts.” His gaze tilted, a glint like frost. “And, Bernard—”

“Yes?”

“When you bring her to me,” Clyde murmured, stroking Freyja’s ears as the dog rumbled low in her throat, “bring her breathing. The rest? Scenery.”

Bernard hesitated, the smallest fracture of curiosity finally allowed. “For what purpose?”

Clyde crossed the room in three measured steps. Stopped close enough that Bernard could smell the cologne—citrus tempered with smoke, civility disguised as sin. His voice dropped to a thread of velvet barbed with glass.

“Because,” he whispered, “you do not waste a mint because one i***t lost the stomach to fight for the coin he wanted. And because—” his smile was a ghost sliding over razors “—daughters of kings make empires bleed. Or bloom.”

Bernard held his gaze for one beat longer than protocol, then inclined his head. “Understood.”

“Good man,” Clyde said, dismissing him with a flick that felt like absolution.

Bernard turned. Freyja padded after him, nails whispering across marble. At the threshold, Clyde’s voice floated like smoke.

“Bernard.”

He paused. “Sir?”

“Politeness,” Clyde said, pouring the last of the Shiraz, “is the perfume that hides blood. Wear it thick.”

The door closed with the hush of silk drawn across a throat. Clyde stood alone again, palm on the glass, the city sprawled beneath like an animal tamed only in daylight.

He could almost see her there—Sandra—somewhere in that snarl of neon and night, her breath fogging the cold, her rage teaching walls the price of standing. The thought plucked a string in him he rarely let hum: delight.

“My clever girl,” he whispered, watching his reflection smile back like a secret in the dark. “Let’s see how high your fire climbs when the wind turns.”

The clock ticked like a metronome for murder. Freyja’s absence left the room heavier, hungrier. Clyde set his glass down, uncapped his fountain pen, and wrote a single name on the ledger in a hand so neat it looked like a prayer—except prayers, in his world, always ended in teeth.