Chapter 2

“Everything,” Marcus said, “is a lot, so buckle in.”

I put my feet up on the corner of Petra’s desk, earning myself a swat that I ignored, and let him talk.

“Alpha Kieran Ashwood. Took the seat six years ago after his parents were killed in a border raid — Blackmoor Pack, up north, and before you ask, no, that situation never got resolved, it just went quiet for a while. It’s not quiet anymore. That’s part of why this contract’s moving so fast.”

“Define fast.”

“Signed and settled inside two weeks, ideally. He’s got a Council breathing down his neck about succession, and with the border heating back up, an heir isn’t optional politics anymore, it’s stability politics. Packs get nervous about a throne with no clear next hand on it, especially when a hostile neighbor is testing the fence.”

I glanced at Petra, who’d stopped pretending to work and was listening outright now, chin propped on her hand.

“And the intended can’t carry,” I said. Not a question. Marcus wouldn’t have called me for anything less.

“Selene Thorne. Same raid — she was hurt badly enough that carrying’s not possible for her. Old injury, permanent. The betrothal’s been in place for years regardless, both packs are invested in the alliance holding, and from what I hear it’s not a cold arrangement, they’ve built something real out of it. But an heir’s an heir, and biology doesn’t care how real it is.” Marcus paused, and I could hear the smile in it when he came back. “This is exactly your kind of job, Runa. High profile, high pressure, and a payout that reflects both.”

“How high?”

He told me the number. I sat up straight enough that my feet came off the desk, and Petra, watching my face, mouthed what at me with enough urgency that I had to turn away from her to keep listening.

“That’s triple my usual rate,” I said.

“That’s what desperate and wealthy looks like when it’s the same pack. You in?”

“I want the full contract terms before I commit to anything. And I want the meeting in person — I’m not signing a bloodline clause off a phone call, no offense.”

“None taken, I’d think less of you if you did. I’ll set it up. Two days?”

“Two days,” I agreed, and hung up before he could hear me exhale.

Petra didn’t wait a full second. “Triple your rate.”

“Apparently.”

“For a job you haven’t even seen the paperwork on yet.”

“I’ve seen enough paperwork in five years to know what a desperate pack looks like on the phone, Pet. This is a big one. That’s not new information for me.”

“It’s a border war pack.” She said it slowly, the way you’d point out a crack in a foundation to someone still admiring the paint job. “You do heirs for stable packs with money problems, or fertility problems, or both. You don’t do heirs for packs actively getting raided by a hostile neighbor while the Alpha’s still burying his own parents from the last time it happened.”

“He buried his parents six years ago.”

“You know what I mean.”

I did know what she meant, and the honest answer was that some small, uncomfortable part of me had already clocked the same thing on the phone and filed it under manageable instead of warning sign, mostly because I trusted my own rules more than I trusted Petra’s read on a client I hadn’t met yet. Five years of doing this had taught me the difference between a pack in crisis and a pack that was simply loud about ordinary stress, and Marcus’s voice hadn’t had the ragged edge that came with the former. Urgent, yes. Desperate, maybe. Dangerous to me specifically — that was a different question, and one I’d answer better in person than over a broker’s phone line.

“I carry the child,” I said, out loud, mostly for my own benefit as much as hers. “I don’t carry the border war. That’s his problem, and his Council’s problem, and eventually his fiancée’s problem when she’s Luna. It’s not mine. It was never going to be mine.”

“You say that about every job.”

“Because it’s true about every job.” I stood, stretched out the ache that three days of postpartum care visits had left in my lower back, and started gathering the Renwick file off the desk to clear space for whatever the Ashwood contract was about to become. “That’s the entire business model, Petra. I go in, I do the one thing almost nobody else on the continent can do, I collect an obscene amount of money for doing it, and I leave with my heart exactly as intact as it was when I arrived. Twelve for twelve. This is thirteen.”

Petra was quiet for a second, which for Petra was its own kind of statement.

“Just—” She hesitated, which she also rarely did. “This one sounds bigger than your usual work. That’s all I’m saying. Bigger stakes, bigger money, bigger everything. Bigger things have bigger ways of going sideways.”

“I’ve handled sideways before.”

“Not this sideways.”

I didn’t have a clever answer for that, so I didn’t try to find one. Instead I texted Marcus back — confirmed, two days, send the preliminary terms tonight — and started running the actual logistics in my head instead of the theoretical ones: what I’d need to pack for a residency contract instead of a standard delivery arrangement, how long I’d realistically be embedded on Ashwood land if this went the way triple-rate jobs usually went, whether Petra could handle the practice’s other two active contracts without me for however many months this turned into.

The number Marcus had quoted sat in the back of my mind the rest of the afternoon, doing the kind of quiet, persuasive work numbers like that always did. It wasn’t just the down payment on the building expansion I’d been eyeing for two years. It was that and then some — enough to make the difference between renting the boathouse and owning it outright, enough to make Petra a full partner instead of the best-paid assistant on the coast, enough that I’d have been a fool to let a little extra danger talk me out of a meeting I hadn’t even had yet.

I’ve never claimed to be anything other than practical about what I do. This was, on paper, simply the most practical decision I’d made all year.

The preliminary terms came through from Marcus that night — a broker’s summary, not the full pack-law contract, but enough to confirm the shape of what I’d already guessed. Alpha Kieran Ashwood. Selene Thorne. A residency clause instead of a standard visitation schedule, which meant living on pack land for the duration, closer than I usually got. A payout that made me reread the number twice to be sure I hadn’t misplaced a decimal.

And beneath all of it, in the broker’s flat, professional language, one line about the border situation that I read three times before I set the phone down: ongoing tension, currently stable, subject to change.

I fell asleep telling myself that last part didn’t concern me.

I was in a car to Ashwood territory two mornings later anyway.