The Basement Wolf

Chapter 4: Two Million, Tomorrow

The lead isn’t much—just a surname whispered through a burner phone and a route that repeats three nights a week. But I’ve learned to build bonfires from splinters.

Malcolm Duvall leaves the glass tower at dusk with the same careless arrogance money buys. Navy suit. Watch that could pay rent for a year. Smile that never reaches his eyes. He walks like the city belongs to him.

I keep ten paces behind, coat black as wet asphalt, head down. Traffic hisses. Neon bleeds in the puddles. He cuts across to the river district and slides under a crooked sign that reads THE LATCHKEY.

Old brass. Sticky floors. Red lamps. A jukebox breathing ghosts. Duvall doesn’t sit at the bar—he sinks, like he owns the stool. Scotch, no ice. He taps his glass with one manicured nail every twelve seconds as if the room should obey his tempo.

I take a booth in shadow. My knife rides the seam of my thigh, familiar as a prayer. My wolf presses against my teeth, restless.

He’s not the jailer. He’s what the jailer uses—clean hands for dirty money. Paper doesn’t stain. I watch him laugh, flash veneers, pretend to like people he wouldn’t spit on if they were burning.

A shadow moves. Not Duvall.

“Careful with that one,” a low voice says, close enough to raise the hairs at my nape. “He slithers for a living.”

Bradley Gray stands just outside the circle of red light. Tall. Killing quiet. Green eyes that see too much. His holster prints only if you know where to look.

“Then he picked the right bar,” I murmur. “Plenty of places to shed.”

He doesn’t smile. “Duvall chairs half a dozen charities no one audits. One of them funnels ‘merit scholarships’ to Northbridge Academy.” He lets that land. “Your eldest’s school.”

The world tilts. The glass in my hand stays steady. Only my pulse betrays me—a tell-tale bird in a ribcage.

“I don’t have a child at Northbridge,” I say, because my lies have to be better than my truths.

Bradley’s eyes flicker. He heard the flinch I didn’t make. “Duvall isn’t a jailer. But he launders for one of them. Name shows up in the same filings. Halden.”

Halden. The warden with the soft hands. The one who whistled hymns while he turned the key.

“How do you know any of that?” I ask.

“Because you hired me to find your kids.” His gaze holds mine, steady as rain. “Because I keep my promises.”

Because he’s my mate, my wolf whispers like a sin. I ignore her.

At the bar, Duvall swivels. He clocks me like a man choosing which wine to buy. The look is a smear. He leaves a twenty, checks his hair in the backbar mirror, and saunters as if the floor applauds.

Bradley doesn’t move. “Cameras cover both alleys,” he says evenly. “If you’re going to do something, don’t kill him in frame.”

“I wasn’t going to,” I say.

He c***s his head. “You were.”

He’s not wrong.

Duvall arrives with a cologne cloud and a grin he thinks is devastating.

“You look like trouble,” he says, appreciative. “Lucky me.”

“Sit,” I say, and he does, because he’s used to women making it easy for him. He leans in. He talks money like it’s foreplay. He lets his knee drift. Fingers brush the hem of my coat, testing boundary and nerve.

“Back door,” I whisper against his ear, letting my mouth almost touch his skin. “If you’re buying, we should talk somewhere quieter.”

Greed is a gravity. He stands too fast.

We pass Bradley like he’s a coat hung well. But I feel him turn with us, melting into the dark, the way hunters do when they refuse to look away.

The alley yawns—wet brick, humming neon, a dumpster that has seen things. Duvall tries to pin me to the wall because he has never been taught fear. One hand on my hip. The other maps the seam of my coat like he earned it.

“I like a woman who knows what she wants,” he purrs.

“I do,” I say.

The knife kisses his throat before he breathes in again.

He goes very still. It’s amazing how quickly men learn holy words when steel invites them to pray.

“Listen,” he starts, but I tilt the blade, and the word dies a quick, wet death in his mouth.

“Unlock your phone,” I say. “Face ID. Now.”

He hesitates. I nick him. A single bead of red blooms like a ruby under the lamp. He obeys.

“Passcode,” I add. He gives it up like a coward, because he is one.

I scroll without looking like I’m looking, past a wife he doesn’t respect and a calendar color-coded for sin. Apps like doors. Bank after bank after bank. Numbers with too many zeros. A folder clearly named for the stupid: FOUNDATION. I open registered entities, recognized one—Northbridge Futures Fund—and feel heat climb my throat.

“You’re going to move two million dollars to an account I’m about to add,” I say. “Tomorrow. 8:00 p.m.”

He laughs, nerves showing. “Do you know who I am?”

“Yes,” I say, and tap New Payee. “You’re a ledger with shoes.”

I hold up the camera. A QR code glows on my burner screen; his app drinks it like honey. I let him watch me add the alias—A. Black—because fear tastes better when a man can spell it later.

“You’ll trip every flag doing that,” he hisses, sweat beading despite the cold.

“You’ll be dead if you don’t,” I say mildly. “Your pick.”

He tries on outrage. “You’re making a very big mistake.”

“I’ve already made bigger,” I say, and step him backward into shadow. “Two million, tomorrow, or I come see you at the office with every file you think you hid. And Malcolm—” I press the blade just enough to remind him he’s mortal. “Withdraw from Northbridge. Quietly. The ‘Futures Fund’ ends now. If a single penny touches that campus again, I turn your insides into headlines.”

He swallows. The cut on his throat leaks a thin red exclamation mark.

“Who sent you?” he asks.

“Your conscience,” I say. “It wants a refund.”

His phone vibrates in my hand. The lockscreen flashes HALDEN. The name hits me like a winter river.

Duvall’s eyes widen. “Don’t—”

I answer and say nothing.

Breathing. Male. Confident. “Status?”

I let him listen to the alley breathe. I picture his face when his silence answers him.

“Malcolm?” the voice says, sharper. “You’re on camera. Nod if—”

I hang up and power down the device.

“You’re insane,” Duvall whispers.

“Tomorrow,” I remind him, and slide the knife away. I pivot him, feed his own silk tie around his wrists, cinch tight. He’s too shocked to resist. I pocket the phone. “And Malcolm? If anyone touches a single hair on a child at Northbridge in retaliation, I won’t kill you first. I’ll make you watch.”

He believes me. Men who handle numbers understand math. They know what “first” means.

I step back. He sags against the bricks, bound, bleeding, humiliated in a suit that costs more than my future. He starts to say something ugly. I leave before he remembers the word.

Back in the bar, red lamps blink like devil eyes. The room doesn’t look at me; it never does. Predators don’t advertise.

Bradley is gone.

I don’t see him at the door. I don’t see him on the sidewalk. But I feel him—out there in the dark, watching to make sure I don’t drown on land the way I did in that river.

---

Bradley

She moves like a blade that learned to walk.

From the booth I watched her measure Duvall’s tells the way I would read a crime scene—angles, habits, blind spots. She never once looked at the cameras, but she knew exactly where they were. She never once touched the knife, but I saw the moment she decided to use it.

On paper, Malcolm Duvall is a philanthropist. In the accounts I pulled, he’s a sluice gate. Money in from companies that don’t exist; money out to places that do too well to be clean. His Northbridge Futures Fund pays for three scholarships a year. Every time, the application packet travels through the same headmaster and the same “anonymous committee.”

I followed it as far as privacy law let me. It hit a wall. Then the wall blinked—Halden. A name I recognized from a ruin no one prosecutes.

So I told her. Because she hired me. Because I don’t like men who make cages their business model. Because—damn me—I wanted to see what she’d do.

The alley gives me what I need. Not the sound of pain, but the absence of it. She doesn’t break his nose. She breaks his certainty. I catch the gleam of a knife, the quick lift of her chin, the way he surrenders like a building code—unwillingly, but inevitably. When she binds him with his own tie, I let a breath go I didn’t know I was holding.

Then she pockets his phone.

Interesting.

Two million by eight p.m. Most people who threaten numbers don’t understand them. She does. She added a payee, not demanded a suitcase. She didn’t just want money. She wanted a wire that leaves fingerprints other men can’t wash off. Smart. Dangerous.

For a woman who lied to me about social services, she’s surprisingly honest in the way that counts: she is willing to do harm to prevent harm. It scares me how much I respect that.

She comes out the front, coat buttoned, face neutral. She doesn’t see me in the dark across the street. I let her go and turn my attention back to the alley where Duvall struggles against his silk. He won’t call the police. Men like him never volunteer their own dirt.

I step out just far enough to see his face when he finally frees a hand and clutches his throat as if the nick is mortal. It isn’t. It’s just the first thing in years that’s told him the truth.

Before I leave, I text a single sentence to a number that will reach the only headmaster who ever did me a favor:

Pull every Northbridge camera from 7–9 p.m. and go home sick tomorrow.

On my way to the car, I check my own phone. A new message from an unlisted number waits like a wolf at the treeline.

Two million. Tomorrow. 8:00. If he moves early, I move earlier. —A.B.

Aria Black. Or a woman who learned to wear the name.

I don’t smile. I don’t swear.

I start a clock.