Novels by Sommy Writes

Elise's POVThe envelope went to Don Savio on a Friday. No letter. No explanation. Just a clean summary of every move Enzo Albero had made over the past two years using Greco resources without authorization — the placement of Jade inside Adrian's company, the hospital plant, the press piece, the approach to Adrian for financial records. All of it documented. Timestamped. Presented in the kind of order that left no room for interpretation.I did not sign it.I did not need to. Don Savio was not a stupid man. He would know exactly who had sent it and exactly why, and the why would tell him that I was not asking for a war — I was offering him an exit. Clean up your own house and I will deal with mine and we do not have to spend the next two years destroying each other.It was a gamble. My father had looked at the envelope for a long time before he let me send it."Savio is proud," he said."I know.""A proud man doesn't like being shown he was being used by his own people.""A proud man

Elise's POVThat night I couldn't eat. I sat at the dinner table with my father and moved food around my plate and answered his questions in the right places and smiled when it was required and the whole time there was something sitting in the middle of my chest that I couldn't identify precisely enough to address.It wasn't fear. I had learned what fear felt like — it was fast and loud and it sharpened everything. This was the opposite. Slow and heavy, like sediment settling.After dinner I went to my mother's garden.It was too cold for it, really. Late in the season, the flowerbeds stripped back, the paths damp and dark under the security lights. I sat on the stone bench in the far corner — the one nobody else ever used because it faced the wall instead of the house and the view was just old stone and ivy and a sliver of night sky above it.My mother had sat here. I knew that from photographs, not memory. In the photographs she looked like someone who came here to be done with perf

Elise's POVJade's meeting with the Greco legal team was at eleven.I knew the location by Wednesday evening — Cain had come through, same as before, a text with an address and nothing else. A private members' club in the north quarter, the kind of place that catered to people who needed meetings that didn't appear in calendars. I had been inside it once, years ago, on my father's arm when I was seventeen and still learning which rooms mattered.I did not go myself.I sent two people — a woman who looked like she was there for lunch and a man who looked like he was waiting for someone who wasn't coming. Both of them had been doing this for longer than Jade had been alive.I sat in the war room and waited.Nico was beside me. We had been working in a comfortable shared silence for most of the morning — the kind that develops between people who have spent enough consecutive hours in the same space that the silence stops feeling like something that needs to be filled. I had noticed it ha

Adrian's POVThe fourth investor pulled out on a Wednesday.I found out through my CFO's assistant because my CFO had stopped taking my calls directly, which told me everything I needed to know about how far the collapse had traveled. When the people who work for the people who work for you start managing your access, you are not in a negotiation anymore. You are in a decline.I sat in my office with that information and I thought about Jade's press piece — twelve thousand shares, she had told me proudly, like shares were the currency that mattered here — and I tried to find the moment it had shifted from a reasonable strategy into the thing it currently was, which was a provocation against a family that did not respond to provocations the way normal people responded to provocations.Jade was not worried.That was the thing that was starting to unsettle me about Jade. She had been calm through all of it — the divorce papers, the accounts bleeding out, the press piece. Calm in a way I

Elise's POVThe hardest part was acting normal around Marco.Not because I was a bad actor — I had spent seven years performing contentment inside a marriage that was quietly killing me, I knew how to hold a face. The hard part was that Marco was good too. Thirty years of it. He sat across from me at the morning briefing with his folder and his coffee and his careful measured voice and nothing about him said traitor. Nothing about him said I called your uncle last night and gave him information that could get you killed.He just looked like Marco.I let him run the briefing. I asked questions in the right places. I made notes on things I had no intention of acting on and I nodded at the right moments and when it was over I thanked him and watched him leave and then I sat alone in the war room for sixty seconds doing nothing at all.Then I got up and went to find Nico."I need something for him to find," I said.Nico was at his desk — a small room off the main corridor that he had set

Elise's POVI did not sleep that night.Not because I was afraid — fear was not the thing keeping me awake. It was the arithmetic of it. I kept laying out everything I knew the way you lay out cards, trying to find the sequence, and every time I thought I had it there was one piece that didn't sit right. One detail that was slightly off-angle from everything else.By three in the morning I was sitting at the window in my room with my knees pulled up and a cold cup of tea on the sill beside me and I had stopped trying to force the sequence and was just letting it sit.My father trusted very few people completely. Marco had been with him thirty years. Nico five. The inner circle beyond that was deliberately small — my father had always said that loyalty was not a quality you could scale. The more people who knew everything the less everything was worth knowing.So who.Someone with access to operational detail. Someone present for the briefing where the observation post was discussed. I

Two months passed before we held the trial. Two months of healing. Of freed prisoners slowly remembering how to be people. Of wardens learning to live without collars. Of everyone adjusting to a world where Draven was chained instead of controlling.The trial was public. Every pack invited. Every victim given the chance to testify. Every crime detailed for the world to see.They brought Draven in chains. He'd aged in captivity. Lost weight. Lost that aura of invincibility. Now he just looked like what he was. An old wolf who'd hurt too many people for too long.The chamber was packed. Standing room only. Freed prisoners filled the front rows. Their eyes fixed on the monster who'd destroyed them. Some faces showed hate. Some showed fear. Some showed nothing at all.Kira sat beside me. Her hand kept touching her neck. Confirming the collar was gone. That this was real. That Draven was the one in chains now."Are you ready to testify?""No. But I'm doing it anyway." Her voice was steadie

The journey back to Shadowcrest took two weeks instead of the planned one. The freed prisoners couldn't travel fast. Years of imprisonment had weakened them. Made long days on horseback impossible. So we moved slow. Stopped often. Let them rest when needed.Kira rode beside Tor most days. Learning from him. Asking questions about how to live without the collar. How to use her gift without the compulsion forcing it. How to be a person instead of a weapon."I don't remember who I was before." Her voice was quiet. "Sixteen feels like a lifetime ago. Do you remember who you were?""Pieces. Fragments. Like looking at someone else's memories through foggy glass." Tor's hand touched his neck habitually. "But I'm building something new. Someone who remembers the past but isn't defined by it.""Is that possible? Building something new after being broken so completely?""I don't know. But I'm trying. That's all any of us can do."Through my gift I felt Kira's fragile hope. Felt her wanting to b

We made camp outside the compound. No one wanted to stay in that place longer than necessary. The freed prisoners huddled by the fire. Uncertain. Lost. Still not believing freedom was real.Thea set up her workspace under torchlight. Laid out tools that looked more like torture implements than medical equipment. Kira sat in the center. Hands steady. Face blank."This will take all night. Maybe longer. You'll be conscious throughout. I need you to tell me if something feels wrong. If the pain becomes too much. If you feel the magic fighting back harder than you can stand.""I've survived five years of the collar. I can survive this.""The collar kept you alive. This might kill you. There's a difference.""I know. I'm choosing anyway."Tor knelt beside her. "I'll be here the whole time. Holding your hand. Reminding you that you're not alone.""Why? You don't know me. Don't owe me anything.""Because I know exactly what you're going through. Because someone held my hand through my surger

Kira stood. Moved toward me. Her collar pulsed brighter with each step. The compulsion radiating from her was overwhelming. Stronger than Draven's had been. Younger. Rawer. Uncontrolled.My shields went up automatically. Blocking the worst of it. But I felt it pushing. Testing. Trying to find cracks."You don't need to do that." My voice stayed calm. "I'm not here to fight you.""Everyone fights eventually. It's just a question of when."She circled me like a predator. Studying. Assessing. Looking for weakness. Her movements were too precise. Too controlled. Like she'd forgotten how to be casual."My name is Dian. I came to offer you freedom.""Freedom." She said it like a foreign word. "That's what they all say before trying to kill me.""Who's they?""Wolves who think removing the collar is mercy. Who think death is better than this." Her hand touched the metal at her throat. "They're wrong. This is better. This is clarity. This is purpose."Through my gift I felt the lie underneath

Two days of rest. That's all Thea allowed before declaring us fit enough to travel. Tor needed longer but he insisted on coming anyway, his hand constantly touching his bare neck like confirming freedom was real."The last compound is the worst." His voice was rough from disuse. "The warden there is young. Maybe your age. Draven collared her five years ago when she was just sixteen."My stomach dropped. Sixteen. Just a kid when Draven stole her life."What's her name?""Kira. She was gentle before the collar. Wanted to help people." Tor's eyes went distant. "The collar broke that gentleness. Made her cruel because cruelty was easier to survive than feeling what she was forced to do."Through the bond Kael's anger flared. Another child destroyed. Another life stolen. Another reason to be grateful Draven was dead."How many prisoners?""Fifteen. Maybe twenty. Hard to say. The compound has high turnover because Kira..." He stopped. Swallowed. "Because the collar makes her hurt them more

Tor led us inside his compound without guards or weapons or any attempt to fight, led us through corridors that were more depressing than threatening with their crumbling walls and rust-stained floors and the overwhelming sense that this place was dying along with the wolves it held."Thirty prisoners when I started. Twenty-three now. Seven died over the years and Draven never bothered to replace them because this compound wasn't important enough anymore." His voice held no emotion at all, like he'd used up his entire lifetime supply of feelings decades ago. "I'm the oldest warden. The first experiment. The proof of concept that collaring empaths would work.""I'm sorry." The words felt inadequate but I said them anyway. "I'm sorry Draven did this to you.""Why? You didn't collar me. Didn't break me. Didn't spend thirty-five years forcing me to hurt others." He stopped walking and turned to face me. "I did all of that myself. The collar only gave me the excuse.""That's not true. The