The Enemy Alpha’s Daughter

CHAPTER 3: The Red Wolf

Aria arrived at Blackcom forty minutes before anyone else on her floor.

The lobby was quieter at this hour, just the soft hum of the building waking up and the click of her heels on the marble floor. She liked it better this way. Fewer people meant fewer performances.

The receptionist at the front desk looked up as she came through the doors, and her face did something it hadn’t done on any of the previous three mornings. It brightened.

“Malia! Good morning.” The woman’s name tag said RAE. She leaned forward slightly, the way people did when they were about to say something they had been holding since the night before. “You’re in early.”

“I like to get a head start,” Aria said. She kept her voice easy and her smile in place.

“Smart.” Rae nodded, then added, very casually, “Mr. Blackwood is already in, by the way. He’s always the first one here. Every single day.”

“Good to know,” Aria said causally.

Rae tilted her head. “You know, people were talking yesterday. About the elevator.” She let that sit there for a moment. “I mean, no one uses that lift except the senior executives and Mr. Blackwood himself. And you just… walked out of it. Looking completely normal. Like nothing happened.” Her voice had the careful, expectant tone of someone who very much wanted to be told what happened.

Aria blinked. “I took the wrong elevator. That’s all.”

Rae looked like she didn’t believe a single word of that but was too polite to say so. “Of course,” she said. “Have a good morning, Malia.”

Aria took the regular elevator to her floor and sat down at her desk.

The trading wing was still half empty, the overhead lights running at their early-morning level, the screens glowing without anyone watching them. She pulled up her workstation and let the numbers load while she thought.

Yesterday’s rumor had already moved through the building. She had seen it in the way the security guard near the door nodded at her, in the way two women near the coffee station had stopped talking when she walked past. A junior analyst and the CEO, alone in the executive elevator. In a building that ran on hierarchy and gossip in equal measure, that was more than enough.

Her phone buzzed.

She glanced down. The message was from Dax.

‘Four days. Nothing to show. Frank is thinking about pulling you out.’

Aria stared at the screen. She typed back without hesitating.

‘Tell him to wait. I’m close.’

She wasn’t close. Not yet. But she would be.

The chair in the cubicle next to hers scraped back and her coworker, a man named Joel who had the energy of someone who survived entirely on office drama, leaned around the divider.

“So,” he said. “The elevator. I heard som...”

Aria stood up, picked up her notebook, and walked away.

She had spent four days trying to find a way up to Ryker’s floor and hitting the same walls every time. Blackcom was not a building that left gaps. Cameras covered every corridor, every stairwell, every access point she had tested. The security desk at the executive level required a keycard she didn’t have. She had mapped the whole building in her head over the first two days, every route and every angle, and she noticed something.

The executive elevator had no cameras.

She had noticed it yesterday, standing inside it, instinctively scanning the corners the way she always did in an enclosed space. No lens. No small black dome in the ceiling. Nothing. It was the only space in the entire building where she could move without being recorded, and it was exactly the right place to plant a listening device.

She moved through the building the way she always did when she needed not to be noticed: unhurried, purposeful, like someone going somewhere she was supposed to go. She took the route that kept her out of the sightline of the cameras she had already logged, cut through the east corridor, and reached the executive elevator without anyone looking twice at her.

The doors opened. She stepped inside, reached up to the trim along the top of the panel, and pressed the device into place behind the metal lip. Flat. Invisible unless you were looking for it. She stepped back and checked. Nothing to see.

She turned to leave and nearly walked into someone.

A woman. Moving fast, head slightly down, a stack of folders under one arm and her phone in the other hand. She glanced up at Aria with the brief, distracted look of someone whose mind was already three steps ahead of her body, and then she kept moving. No pause. She was gone around the corner before Aria had fully processed her.

Aria watched the empty corridor for a moment, then walked back to her desk.

The message was waiting for her when she got there, delivered through the internal system. Short. Official.

Mr. Blackwood would like to see you. Fourth floor. Now.

Aria read it twice. Then she smoothed her blazer, picked up her notebook for something to do with her hands, and went.

The fourth floor was different from every other floor in the building. The noise stopped at the elevator doors. The carpet was thicker, the kind that swallowed footsteps. The lighting was warmer. Two assistants sat at desks outside a set of double doors and both of them looked up when she stepped out, assessed her in the way people did when they were deciding if you belonged, and then the one on the left stood and led her to the doors without saying anything.

She smelled it before the doors opened.

Wolfsbane. Not the harsh, acrid kind used as a weapon. This was something rarer, something she had only ever read about: a refined strain that worked differently, that didn’t burn or repel but settled. It moved through her like a slow exhale, reaching down into her chest and finding the wolf there, the restless, coiled thing that had been running just under the surface of her skin since the m******e, and it went quiet. Not gone. Just still.

She had not felt her wolf go still like that in two years.

The doors opened and she walked in.

The office was large and clean and said exactly what it was meant to say about the man who occupied it. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over the Chicago skyline, the city spread wide and grey-bright in the morning light. The desk was dark wood, wide and almost bare. Two chairs sat in front of it. And on the wall to her left hung a painting that stopped her for just a second before she could stop herself from stopping.

It was a wolf. Red, or rather painted in red, standing at the center of a scene that didn’t leave much to the imagination. Around it, other wolves. Some bowing. Some not moving at all anymore.

Ryker was standing at the window with his back to her. He didn’t turn immediately. He let her stand there for a moment, and she understood that was also intentional.

He turned.

In the elevator she had caught his reflection, the rough shape of him. In the lobby she had kept her eyes down. Now there was nowhere to look except at him, and she took in what she had been avoiding taking in: the dark hair, the sharp line of his jaw, the broad set of his shoulders beneath a suit that fit like it had been made to. He was, she noted with the detached part of her brain that was still doing its job, exactly as physically present as his reputation suggested. The rest of her brain she told firmly to focus.

He gestured toward one of the chairs. She sat. He sat across from her and picked up a folder from the desk.

Her file.

“Northwestern,” he said, reading. “Top three percent of your year. Before that, Calloway and Reed in New York. They don’t take people who aren’t exceptional.” He turned a page. “Your modelling scores from our hiring process were the highest we’ve seen in three years.” He looked up.

“So what I want to know is why someone like you is sitting in a junior analyst seat on the trading floor.”

Aria held his gaze and kept her face calm. Underneath it, something tightened. He was good at this. The question was reasonable on the surface and pointed underneath, and he knew exactly what he was doing with it.

“I wanted a change,” she said. “New York was fast. I wanted somewhere I could actually build something instead of just running numbers for people who never learned my name.” She paused just long enough. “Blackcom has a reputation for promoting from within. I figured starting at the bottom of the right building was better than staying at the top of the wrong one.”

Ryker looked at her for a moment. He had more green in his eyes. She had noticed that yesterday. Up close they were sharper than she expected, the kind of eyes that didn’t miss much and knew they didn’t.

“That’s a good answer,” he said.

“It’s a true one,” she said.

The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. He reached across the desk and slid a folded document toward her. She picked it up.

“Your memo,” he said. “The one you apparently didn’t receive.”

She opened it. Building rules. Access levels. The list of elevators and their designated users printed clearly on the second page. She kept her expression neutral.

“Thank you,” she said.

Her eyes moved, almost without meaning to, back to the painting on the wall. “Is that a red wolf?”

Ryker followed her gaze. Something crossed his face, quick and unreadable. He looked back at her.

“No,” he said. “That’s not a red wolf. It’s red with the blood of its enemies.”

Aria nodded slowly. “Of course,” she said.

She stood. He stood. Neither of them moved toward the door for just a second, and in that second the room felt smaller than it was.

She walked to the door and pulled it open.

She almost missed it. A small device mounted flush against the wall beside the door frame, dark grey, no bigger than a thumb. She had seen one before, in a training manual Frank had made her read three times. A listening inhibitor. It disrupted audio transmission within a set radius. It didn’t block wolf hearing exactly, but it explained why her attempts to listen had produced nothing. The whole floor was covered.

She stepped out, pulled the door shut behind her, and walked to the elevator.

She kept her face neutral all the way down.

The doors opened at the ground floor. She stepped out. And her phone vibrated in her blazer pocket.

She looked at the screen.

A message from Dax: ‘Frank wants an update. Tonight.’

She stood in the lobby for a moment, the building moving around her, and thought about the painting on the 41 floor wall. Red with the blood of its enemies.

She put the phone away and walked back to her desk.