Nothing Come Free

LEAH

"Who sent you?" I asked low and sharp.

"The one responsible for your father's death."

That stopped me cold. My father, died eleven years ago in a lycan brutal attack. He was just a man who doing his job, trying to protect a warehouse full of food and medicine supplies, and those fucking monsters tore him apart without a second thought until he took his last breath.

I stared at the driver, eyes narrowing, gaze dropping to his collar. There was a small emblem stitched there, one I knew the second I saw it, because a shredded piece of that same emblem was balled up in my father's fist when Cain's Dad found him.

The Vorreth.

A lycan clan that had the whole country scared to say their name out loud. Killers who operated completely above the law. A name nobody in our pack said above a whisper after that night.

"We can offer you shelter," the bald man said.

I said nothing, just stared at the long empty road ahead. Hot, bare, stretching on in a way that didn't promise much at the other end, especially not with my wallet nearly wiped out from paying Whitmore.

"Are you planning to kill me too? The way your people killed my father?"

"Not at all. Our boss has an offer we think you'll find very hard to turn down."

I looked down, thinking, eyes landing on my ankle which had already started to swell. The pain from the miscarriage was still there, dull and persistent, and my stomach had been empty since morning.

What I had left in my wallet would maybe stretch a few days if I was careful.

And starving to death wasn't exactly part of the plan.

"And if I say no?"

"I think you already know what Hargrove does to people who stop playing by their rules."

"Cain Hargrove isn't just going to let you walk away."

He was right. Cain would do whatever it took to drag me back. Not because he wanted me, I was clear on that. Because I'd slipped out of his grip, and that was the part he couldn't stomach.

I didn't say another word. I pulled open the back door and got in. The guy beside me stirred for a second, cracked one eye open, then let it fall shut again like my presence had already been accounted for somewhere in his sleep.

The car pulled away.

I sat with my back straight, bag in my lap, eyes forward, and told myself the questions could wait until I knew exactly where this was going.

No one spoke for the entire hour it took to get there. The car finally rolled to a stop in the basement of a skyscraper sitting right in the middle of Mheigtos, the only city in this territory that actually had room for pure humans.

The bald man nodded for me to follow. We went through a side door that opened on the other guy's fingerprint.

"I'm Dex," he said, not bothering to look at me.

"I'll be your escort for as long as you're stay here." His voice was low and a little rough around the edges.

"Only if I decide to stay," I said.

"You'll stay." He kept walking toward the elevator ahead of us. "Because our boss has something you're going to want to hear."

Access card elevator. Which meant only a handful of people could use it.

He pressed a button, no floor numbers, just a sequence of codes that meant nothing to me, and the elevator climbed. When the doors opened, there was nothing but a long empty corridor leading straight to a black door at the far end.

"He's in there." Dex stepped back into the elevator and let the doors close, leaving me standing alone in front of the door of a man I'd never seen and whose clan had taken everything from me.

I stood there for a few seconds, doubt gnawing at me from the inside. No way of knowing if I'd made the right call or just handed my already wrecked life one more reason to fall apart.

I breathed out and raised my hand to knock, but before my knuckles hit the wood, a voice cut through from the other side.

"Come in. Don't waste my time."

I pushed the door open and walked in.

The room was massive, one full wall of floor-to-ceiling glass giving way to the city spread out below.

He was standing with his back to me. Hands in his pockets. Black shirt, sleeves pushed up to the elbows. A cologne that reached me before I'd even fully crossed the threshold, something dark and clean that for reasons I couldn't explain made every hair on the back of my neck stand up.

"Leah Alexandra Callahan."

He knew my middle name. I hadn't used it in years. That alone threw me more than I wanted to admit.

"Skip the part where you act like you know me," I said, keeping my voice steady, steady enough at least to cover the rest of it.

He turned.

A slow, unreadable smile. Dark gray eyes that landed on me like they'd already decided something. Sharp. Unhurried. The kind of dangerous that doesn't need to announce itself.

Clean jawline. Symmetrical. His alpha presence filled the room without him doing a single thing to put it there, and if I was being honest, that alone was enough to make breathing feel like a little more effort than usual for someone like me.

And here's the part that made no sense, my body locked up in a way I couldn't explain. Part of me wanted to close the distance between us. The other part wanted to put a knife in him and call it even for what his clan did to my father.

"Sit," he said.

"I'm good standing."

"Fine." The corner of his mouth pulled up, somewhere between attractive and insufferable.

"Drink?" He was already pouring wine into a crystal glass.

I didn't answer. He poured one for me anyway.

"What do you actually want from me?" I asked. My patience was just about gone.

He took a step closer. Then another. That same unhurried smile.

"I'm going to help you burn Ironveil to the ground. Cain Hargrove. Celeste Kingham. Margaret. All of it. And I'll give you back everything that should've been yours to begin with." He paused.

"But nothing comes free, I don't do charity." His hand came up slowly, his thumb grazing along my jaw the way a predator touch something it had already decided belonged to it.