Chapter 4: The signature in Blood

The security monitors mounted on the far wall of the office told a story written in violence and shattered glass.

I stood frozen, the heavy brass doorknob digging into the palm of my hand, watching the ground floor of Smith Blood-Security turn into a slaughterhouse. The feed was grainy, but the embroidered silver crown on the tactical vests of the invaders was unmistakable. Mauris’s hounds. My father’s personal executioners.

A blaring, mechanical siren abruptly tore through the silent penthouse. Emergency strobe lights recessed in the ceiling began to flash, bathing Reymond’s dark leather and mahogany office in a rhythmic, apocalyptic red glow.

Beneath my worn sneakers, the floor literally vibrated. It wasn’t the hum of the climate control anymore. It was a heavy, rhythmic thrumming echoing up the main elevator shafts. The sound of claws on reinforced steel. The guttural, echoing snarls of monstrous grey wolves shifting mid-stride as they began their vertical hunt.

They were coming up.

Panic, cold and sharp as a butcher’s knife, slid between my ribs. My lungs seized. For seven years, I had meticulously checked every corner, slept with one eye open, and poisoned my own bloodstream just to ensure this exact moment never happened. And yet, here I was, trapped on the top floor of a glass tower with absolutely nowhere to run.

I spun around, pressing my back against the heavy door, my chest heaving beneath my oversized black hoodie.

Reymond Smith hadn’t moved. He stood exactly where I had left him, a towering monolith of bespoke black fabric, broad shoulders, and lethal composure. The flashing red emergency lights caught the sharp, cruel angles of his jaw and the cold, molten silver of his eyes. He didn’t look like a CEO whose headquarters was currently being gutted by a rival pack. He looked like a spider watching a fly exhaust itself in the center of his web.

“Why?” The word ripped out of my throat, raw and shaking. I pushed off the door, taking two steps toward the center of the room, my hands balling into fists. “Out of all the people in this city, out of all the women in Europe, why me? I have nothing! I am a ghost! I live in the dirt!”

Reymond slowly reached into the inner pocket of his suit jacket. The movement was so deliberate, so terrifyingly calm in the face of the approaching slaughter, that it made my stomach violently churn. He pulled out a thick, cream-colored piece of folded parchment and dropped it onto the glass surface of his desk.

“Because ghosts don’t have attachments, Felisha,” he replied, his voice a low, dark rumble that easily cut through the wailing sirens. “And I need someone who doesn’t exist on any political chessboard.”

“Don’t give me riddles!” I screamed, the sound of my own voice cracking.

A heavy, sickening thud echoed from the floor directly beneath us. Level ninety-nine. They had breached the executive suites. The sound of automatic gunfire rattled through the vents, followed by the wet, tearing sounds of a wolf ripping through human flesh.

I flinched, my eyes darting toward the floor, my heart hammering a frantic, suicidal rhythm against my sternum.

Reymond circled the desk, closing the distance between us with that predatory, liquid grace. The overwhelming scent of dark cedar and winter frost rolled off his skin in heavy waves, battling the smell of cordite and blood that was beginning to filter through the ventilation system.

“My senior council rival, Aubert Tunner, is staging a coup,” Reymond stated, stopping less than two feet away from me. He looked down, his sheer height forcing me to tilt my head back to meet his gaze. “He has invoked an archaic pack law. He claims my rule is unstable, that my bloodline is prone to violence, and that I cannot hold the seat of the Syndicate without a Luna to anchor my reign. He has given the Elders until the Winter Solstice to formally strip me of my title.”

I stared at him, my breath shallow, erratic. “So find a willing noble. Pay off some desperate alpha’s daughter.”

“A willing noble comes with a pack,” Reymond countered, taking half a step closer. The heat radiating off his chest seeped through the damp fabric of my hoodie. “A pack comes with alliances, demands, and leverage. I don’t share my empire. I don’t answer to in-laws. I need a Luna who carries the royal lineage required to satisfy the Elders, but who has absolutely no family left to back her. A scentless, forgotten royal who belongs to no one.”

He leaned down, the molten silver of his eyes narrowing. “A dead princess.”

I swallowed hard, the bitter taste of fear coating my tongue. His political logic was sound. It was ruthless, calculated, and perfectly aligned with the monster he was rumored to be. But as I looked into his eyes, a violent shudder racked my spine.

His pupils were blown wide. The silver irises were bleeding into a dark, hungry gold. The way his gaze tracked the erratic pulse fluttering at the base of my throat, the way his jaw clenched when I instinctively stepped back—it wasn’t the look of a man securing a business transaction. It was the look of a starving predator who had finally cornered his favorite meal.

There was something much darker, much more deeply obsessive lurking beneath the surface of his political excuse. He hadn’t just stumbled upon me. He had orchestrated this. I could feel it in the heavy, suffocating weight of his alpha aura pressing down on my shoulders, demanding submission.

The impact against the heavy mahogany doors of the penthouse office sounded like a detonated explosive.

I screamed, instinctively throwing my arms over my head and dropping to a crouch as the reinforced steel frame of the door groaned in agony.

“Open the door, Smith!” a deep, guttural voice roared from the hallway. I knew that voice. It was Gregor, my father’s chief enforcer. The man who had set the fires seven years ago. “We know the bitch is in there! Hand her over, and Mauris lets you keep your miserable tower!”

Another catastrophic impact struck the door. The wood began to splinter down the center, the heavy deadbolt warping under the sheer, brute force of three massive wolves throwing their combined weight against it.

“They’re going to get in,” I whispered, panic completely hijacking my nervous system. I scrambled backward across the Persian rug, my boots slipping. “They’re going to drag me back. He’s going to breed me to one of his generals. He’s going to lock me in a cage.”

Suddenly, a massive hand wrapped around my bicep, halting my frantic retreat.

Reymond hauled me effortlessly to my feet, his grip bruising in its intensity. He didn’t look at the splintering door. He didn’t even flinch at the sound of the snarling beasts waiting on the other side. He only looked at me.

“No one is putting you in a cage, Natalia,” he said, his voice dropping an octave, vibrating with a dark, lethal promise. “Unless I build it.”

He dragged me toward the desk and shoved me gently but firmly against the edge of the glass. He tapped a long, calloused finger against the heavy parchment resting there.

“The Mutual Protection and Fake Mate Agreement,” Reymond said. The emergency strobes painted his face in flashes of blood-red. “You sign this, you become my official fiancée on paper. The Smith Syndicate becomes your legal sanctuary. If Mauris touches you, it is an act of war against my entire empire. I will slaughter every hound in that hallway, and we walk out of here alive.”

I stared down at the document. The elegant, cursive script swam before my eyes.

One of the top hinges of the mahogany door sheared completely off its frame with the shriek of tearing metal. A massive, grey-furred snout shoved its way into the crack, snapping its jaws, thick saliva flying onto the pristine hardwood floor of the office.

“And if I don’t?” I choked out, tears of absolute terror burning the corners of my eyes.

Reymond stood right behind me, his chest pressing flush against my back, trapping me between his hard body and the edge of the desk. He leaned down, his lips brushing the shell of my ear.

“Then I step aside,” he whispered softly. “I open the door, and I let you face the consequences of your freedom.”

He was a monster. He was just as bad as my father, maybe worse, because he didn’t use physical chains to bind me, he used my own desperate will to survive. He had engineered a scenario where my only escape from hell was to willingly sign my soul over to the devil.

“I hate you,” I breathed, my voice shaking so badly the words barely formed.

“I know,” he murmured, his breath hot against my neck. “Sign the paper, Natalia.”

The door groaned again, the second hinge beginning to bend. The grey wolf at the crack shifted back into human form, a thick, muscular arm reaching through the splintered gap to feel blindly for the deadbolt. Gregor.

“I smell her!” Gregor roared, his voice muffled but terrifyingly close. “I smell the ozone! Break it down!”

I had absolutely zero options left.

I lunged forward over the desk, my hands shaking violently. Next to the parchment lay a heavy, ornate gold fountain pen. I grabbed it, my knuckles turning white. The metal felt ice-cold and unnaturally heavy in my grip.

“Bottom line,” Reymond instructed, his hands coming to rest heavily on my hips, anchoring my trembling body to his.

I pressed the pen to the thick paper. My hands were vibrating so fiercely that the tip of the pen skidded across the parchment.

The deadbolt finally gave way. The mahogany door blew inward, the massive slabs of heavy wood crashing onto the rug with the force of a small earthquake.

“Get her!”

Three towering men, covered in blood and grey fur, stormed into the penthouse.

Panic blinded me. I jammed the pen down with too much force. The sharp gold nib caught the paper, snapped, and sliced directly across the fleshy part of my palm.

I gasped as a sharp, burning pain flared in my hand. A bright, crimson bead of blood welled up from the cut, heavy and thick. Before I could wipe it away, the drop fell from my skin, landing squarely on the signature line next to the hastily scrawled letters of my true name: Natalia Walker.

A drop of royal blood, binding the contract in the most ancient, irrefutable way known to our kind.

The second the blood hit the parchment, the air in the office violently changed.

The temperature plummeted to freezing. The ambient scent of dark cedar exploded into a suffocating, crushing wave of pure, unfiltered Alpha dominance. It hit the three invading wolves like a physical wall, freezing them in their tracks halfway across the room.

I turned my head, looking up at Reymond.

The man holding my hips was gone. The cold, calculated CEO had vanished.

His eyes were no longer silver. They were blazing, molten gold, burning with a feral, possessive fire that defied all human reason. The veins in his neck were thick and corded, his jaw locked tight enough to shatter bone. He stared at the drop of blood on the paper, and a low, earth-shaking rumble tore from his chest.

It was the sound of a beast claiming its prize.

Gregor recovered first, drawing a heavy tactical blade from his thigh and lunging forward with a roar.

Reymond didn’t even look at him.

His large hand swept over the desk, snatching the blood-stained contract. In the same fluid motion, his other arm wrapped like an iron band around my waist, hauling me completely off the ground and flush against his side.

He slammed his fist down onto a hidden pressure plate built into the edge of his mahogany desk.

The glass floor directly beneath our feet vanished.

I didn’t even have time to scream. Gravity abandoned me. The floor simply dropped open like the trapdoor of a gallows, plunging us into the pitch-black abyss of a high-speed pneumatic extraction chute hidden within the spine of the building.

The last thing I saw before the darkness swallowed us was Gregor’s blade slicing through empty air where my throat had been a second before.

As we plummeted downward into the suffocating dark, dropping hundreds of feet toward the armored transport waiting in the subterranean garage, Reymond pulled my body tight against his chest. He buried his face in my neck, inhaling the terrified, racing pulse beneath my skin, and let out a growl that vibrated through every bone in my body.

“Mine.”