Secretly Married to the Lycan Tycoon

Greyroot in Ashes

Greyroot. Burning.

Rhea’s text blinks on my screen the same moment a council runner whispers in Celes’s ear. The Stone Court holds its breath like the world is deciding whether to have a heartbeat.

Celes looks at me, then at Arden, then at my wrist, then at the onyx that remembers touch. “The Council convenes now,” he announces, voice clean as a blade. “There has been an incident.”

“Define convenes,” Ashford says, already reaching for a legal word to cork whatever this is. “On-site review? Or theater?”

“Safety review,” Celes says. “At Greyroot Herbarium.”

Veronica’s coat glows like mercury. “Tragic,” she breathes, just loud enough for cameras.

Arden’s phone buzzes; Noah’s radio murmurs; my screen shows a pin and smoke.

“We go,” I say.

“We go,” Arden echoes, already turning.

“Not without terms,” Ashford adds, stepping into Celes’s shadow with pleasant finality. “Public site, city responders in command, no ritual jurisdiction. Any evidence chain follows municipal law. Our notary rides with us.”

Celes’s eyes cool three degrees. “Efficient,” he murmurs. “Very well.”

⸻

The SUV cuts the dusk like a scalpel. Rain spits against the windshield and forgets to commit. Noah drives like the city is a problem he knows the answer to. Ashford finishes typing and thumbs a filing off into the ether.

“Emergency injunction, prepped,” he says. “Judge Alvarez. Allergic to theatrics.”

“Bless her,” I say.

I text Rhea: We’re en route. Two asks—mirror CCTV to Noah; scrape purchase orders. Don’t get spicy near uniforms.

pls she replies. i’m a mild curry today. also: Greyroot used the shell “Serene Wellness” for 3 aconitum buys. investor: HV.

HV. Hale Ventures. Veronica’s portfolio wears a new stain the rain can’t wash.

We pull into a cordon of engines, flashing light, and steam. Greyroot is a rectangle of frosted glass and botanical pretense; now it is a blackened mouth blowing out bitter smoke. Firefighters move like practiced arms on one body. The air tastes wrong—herb oils, hot plastic, and an undertone that makes the wolf inside me flatten her ears.

“Aconitum in the smoke?” Noah asks.

“Trace,” I say. “Wet a cloth. Cover your mouth.” I tie a strip of gauze for myself; Arden does the same without asking, and the part of me that notices competence files it under attraction and tries not to make eye contact with that drawer.

A captain peels away from her crew when she spots us. “Stay behind the tape,” she says, authority first, questions later. “If you’re press—”

“Not press,” Ashford answers, showing her a badge that is not a badge but might as well be. “Walcott legal. We’ll keep out of your way. Can we set up a perimeter inside with our notary? Evidence is delicate here.”

“I don’t care whose lawyers you are,” she says, kind without being soft. “No one goes in till my team says so. We’ve got one employee out—minor burns, smoke hit. Ambulance en route.”

“Where?” I ask.

She points. A young man sits on the curb hugging himself, gray with shock, a blister rising under soot on his forearm. There’s fear on his face that doesn’t belong to a simple workplace fire.

“I’m a doctor,” I say, and she nods the way professionals nod at other professionals—show me, don’t tell me.

I kneel in the wet beside him. “Hey. I’m Lynn.”

He wets his lips. “Milo,” he croaks. “I just… I knocked a tray. It wasn’t—this wasn’t supposed to—”

“Breathe,” I say. “Slow. Through this.” I hold the wet cloth to his mouth. “Look at me.”

He does, painfully obedient. His pulse flutters too fast; his pupils are pinpricks. “Was there… a smell?” I ask. “Like bitter almonds—not almonds, like old roots. Did it burn your throat?”

He nods, flinches. “Basement,” he whispers. “The freezer room. A guy—tall, gloves—said inventory check. Then the back door popped, whoosh, and—” His hands try to draw an explosion and decide to shake instead.

“Okay,” I murmur. “Okay. You’re going to feel lousy for a day. We’ll tell the medics to check your blood gases and run basic tox. No heroics.”

His eyes flood. “I’m not—”

“I know,” I say. “Being alive is the only heroism I’m collecting tonight.”

Behind me, Noah speaks low into his radio; Ashford bridges to the captain; Arden stands where the heat doesn’t reach and reads the chaos like a ledger.

“Clear!” a firefighter shouts. “South stair!” The captain waves us toward an opening in the tape.

Inside, the lobby is a vandalized greenhouse. Char smears the frosted logo. Water slicks the floor. A wall monitor cycles through serene leaves and a brand font that should be a warning label.

“Basement freezer,” Noah says. “If they kept aconitum in bulk, cold storage makes sense.”

“Also makes murder tidy,” Ashford says.

We reach a stairwell that smells like iron and old rain. At the bottom, a rolling fire door has half-melted; smoke blooms from a seam like a mouth learning to spout lies. A firefighter with a thermal camera gives us a thumb—no active flame beyond.

“Two minutes,” the captain warns. “Keep your lungs in your chest.”

The freezer room is a study in selective ruin. Racks of labeled jars have exploded into glass teeth. A steel table gapes with heat. On the far wall, a bank of industrial fridges stands like unrepentant gods—one door crooked, one door ajar, one humming as if nothing ever happens to it.

The smell hits harder—aconitum’s bitter ghost riding the wet air.

“Don’t touch,” Noah says, already snapping photos, mapping angles.

On the floor, a glittering skein threads the doorway to a back hall—so fine I wouldn’t see it if my skin didn’t know it first. The hair on my wrist lifts. The scar warms like a warning.

“Wire,” I say. “Silver-etched. Across the threshold.”

Noah stops mid-step. “Saw it. Would have seen it,” he adds, mostly to his pride.

“It’s meant to catch lycan energy, not human eyes,” I say gently. “May I?”

Arden’s gaze touches my face, my wrist, the bright seam that connects the trouble I am to the trouble he chooses. “Your call,” he says. “We have two minutes.”

I kneel. The wire hums against the stone, tuned to a pitch my bones dislike. I don’t pull. I invite. The metal glows a whisper and loosens, a snare deciding it doesn’t want to be shame anymore. My palm burns; a tremor threatens; I file the cost in the drawer labeled later.

When the doorway is bare, Noah exhales. “Thank you.”

Beyond, an office that pretends to be clean. A printer guts out its last page in black lace. A cabinet hangs open, half its paper spine gone. In the crooked fridge: three unlabeled amber bottles wrapped in wet towels, unburned.

Ashford doesn’t reach for them. He raises his phone and films long, slow pans; calls the notary into the frame; narrates date, time, coordinates. “Chain-of-custody,” he murmurs. “No hands, no doubt.”

“Labels,” I say, pointing to a scrap of soggy paper fused to the inner shelf. Printing bleeds; one line survives—Serene Wellness / HV-PO-77 / Dock 7—before it dissolves under my breath.

“Dock 7,” Noah repeats. “River.”

“Tonight?” Arden asks.

“Someone meant to cancel tonight,” Ashford says, eyes flinty. “They may have moved it. Or they think the fire bought them a blind.”

The captain yells that our time is up. We back out, stomachs tight with smoke and a word that tastes like a clock.

On our way up, a sound threads through the noise—too thin to be a shout, too regular to be building grief. A whimper. Not human-only. Not wolf-only. In-between.

Noah’s head tilts. He hears it too. We trade a look and break left.

The door is locked. Arden doesn’t knock; he removes it. The hinge buckles under calm, precise violence. Inside: a room that thinks it’s a kennel but is human enough to make the bile rise—padded walls, a drain, a camera eye hanging melted from its socket.

In the corner, a shape huddles. Small. Muzzle half-formed around a child’s mouth, claws where nails should be. Wolfsbane dust sits on the edges of everything like a bad idea that learned to walk.

“Hey,” I say, kneeling in the doorway so my body fills it. “I’m Lynn. I fix broken things.”

The child lifts his face. Not Pip. Another. Eyes too big for the light. A tag bites his wrist—PROPERTY OF SERENE—before the plastic cracks and falls as if it never meant it.

“I’m going to touch you,” I tell him. “Then we’re going outside.”

He nods, a movement that tries to be a nod and a flinch at once.

I slide an arm under him, avoiding the places where poison wants to get loud. His breath hitches; my scar heats; the wire in my pocket hums like a memory. Noah clears our path with the kind of gentleness that makes men like him more dangerous than anyone expects.

Outside, the captain has a medic kit at the ready. “Oxygen,” I say. “Watch for arrhythmias.”

“We got him,” she answers, quick and sure.

Celes arrives at the tape like a late storm. Veronica floats at his shoulder, immaculate. Clay’s tie is gone; regret hangs crooked in its place.

“The Council will take custody,” Celes says, as if human words are a trick he learned for sport.

“No,” I say.

Ashford unholsters a printout like a weapon. “Emergency injunction,” he tells Celes. “Judge Alvarez. Temporary custody to Noor Street Community Trust for minors found on premises of an active criminal investigation. Council may submit a claim through the usual channels. The queue is long.”

Celes’s mouth barely moves. “You mistake my patience for permission.”

“I’m a doctor,” I say. “You mistake my no for a discussion.”

He looks at me the way a mathematician looks at an inconvenient variable. “Neighbors,” he says, the word like a warning and a promise.

“Neighbors,” Arden says back, even. “The kind who knock.”

Veronica’s smile is flawless. “We’ll send blankets,” she says. “Cotton, of course.”

“Send receipts,” Ashford replies. “We collect those.”

The medic waves us toward the ambulance. The child—not property, no matter what his broken tag tried to say—watches me like he’s memorizing the angle of my breath.

“Pip will have a friend,” I tell Noah, and he nods like that’s a list he likes to keep.

Noah’s phone buzzes. He shows me a live thumbnail from Rhea: Dock 7 cam—river black as a blade, cranes like praying mantises, a container with SERENE stamped in tasteful font, men in hoodies moving like they think the dark belongs to them.

“Midnight?” Noah asks.

“Earlier,” Arden says. “They’ll move it now.”

“Then we move faster,” I say. My hands start to tremble; I tuck them into the pockets of my jacket where pride can’t see. The scar on my wrist throbs a slow warning—cost paid, cost accruing.

“Lynn,” Arden says, reading the tremor the way he reads rooms. Not a question. An invitation to name a boundary.

“I’m fine,” I lie. Then I fix it. “I will be in one hour if I sit for ten minutes and drink something that believes in sugar.”

He nods, immediate. “Noah will set Dock 7. Ashford will file everything that breathes. You and I will get you glucose, then we go.”

“I can—” I start.

“You choose to,” he corrects, quiet as a rule. Consent is our hard line. I exhale like my bones remember how.

Behind us, the building exhales a last plume of smoke. Cameras catch the angle that pretends to tell the whole story. The captain barks her people into the next necessary thing.

Clay steps close enough that my wolf lifts her head. His eyes look like a man who watched a fire he didn’t start and knows he still brought kindling.

“Lynn,” he says, voice full of things I don’t owe him. “The armory logs—there are errors. Transfers that don’t exist. I can—”

“Send them to Ashford,” I say. “Do not come to my clinic. Do not come to Noor Street. Choose to be useful where I don’t have to see you.”

He nods like a sentence and steps back into the space that wants him.

Celes doesn’t move. His gaze drops once, briefly, to the steel band on Arden’s hand and the faint silver crescent on my wrist. He files the image in whatever drawer men like him keep for inconvenient math.

“Neighbors,” he says again, almost gentle.

“Bring coffee,” I say. “Cotton washes.”

We leave before I cut myself on something I can’t afford to bleed on.

⸻

The SUV smells like rain and smoke and the idea of coffee. My hands shake through the first sip of something sweet and cheap from a night cart, then steady.

“Dock 7 has three city cams,” Noah reports. “One blind spot by the east crane. I can put two men there; Rhea will float drones from the river walk.”

Ashford texts: Injunction acknowledged. Alvarez added a note: “Keep rituals off my docket.” Then: Chain-of-custody doc attached. News line as agreed: “Herbal solvent fire.”

Arden watches my face instead of the screen. “Cost?” he asks.

“Some,” I admit. “Not ruinous.”

“Tell me where the line lives,” he says.

“In my hands,” I say. “And my body tells me before my pride does.”

He inclines his head as if my rules are the geometry he wants to build around.

Outside, the river hoards night. Cranes lean like saints in bad weather. The clock on the dash is a finger tapping.

Noah’s radio murmurs; the Dock 7 feed flickers into resolution on his phone. A container with SERENE stamped across it sits under a crane hook. Three men move like they think they invented shadows. A fourth steps from the blind side and lifts his head as if he can smell us from a mile off.

The wind shifts. Under smoke and river, a familiar note threads the air—cloves, faint and wrong.

My wolf bares her teeth.

“Neighbors,” I say, and this time the word feels like the right one for the kind of trouble that claims to live next door.

“On your mark,” Noah says.

“Not yet,” I answer, watching the man by the container tilt his face to the dark. The silver scar on my wrist warms, a thread pulled tight from somewhere I cannot see.

“Wait,” Arden says, at the same time, the same tone.

Consent arrives between us like a shared breath.

Down on the dock, a crane begins to move.