chapter 7

~ Rowan’s POV ~

I hadn’t slept in four days.

The empty whiskey glass on my desk had a ring stain beneath it that my assistant had stopped bothering to wipe away. She’d stopped bothering with a lot of things lately. Half my staff had that same look now, the quiet, careful stillness of people watching a building burn and calculating how far they needed to stand to avoid the falling debris.

I stared at the screen in front of me and the numbers still didn’t change.

They never changed and that was the problem.

NightCore Technologies, my company, my pack’s financial backbone, the empire I had built from the ground up with Mira’s quiet, invisible hands working behind every system, every firewall, every growth strategy she had never once been credited for was bleeding.

No bleeding was too gentle a word.

It was dying.

“Alpha.” My head of IT, Marcus, stepped into the office for the third time that morning, his face carrying the particular shade of grey that men wore when they were about to deliver news they didn’t want to be shot for. “The breach has gone deeper than we initially assessed.”

“How much deeper?” I asked, keeping my voice flat.

He swallowed. “They’ve accessed the client database, all of it. Contracts, proprietary data, financial projections for the next fiscal year.” He paused. “The Halverson deal pulled out an hour ago.”

I said nothing.

“The Renfield Group called fifteen minutes after that.”

“Also out?” I asked in confusion.

“Also out,” Marcus replied.

I leaned back in my chair slowly, pressing two fingers to my temple. The Halverson deal alone had been worth forty-three million. The Renfield Group, sixty-one. In the span of one morning, over a hundred million in secured contracts had evaporated like morning frost.

“Who did this?” I asked.

Marcus opened his mouth.

“And don’t tell me you don’t know,” I said quietly. “You’ve had four days.”

He closed his mouth again, shifted his glasses anxiously. “Whoever it was, they’re… exceptional. We’ve never seen code architecture like this. It’s not any signature we recognize from known hackers or rival firms. It’s completely Untraceable.” He hesitated. “It’s almost like they built a door into our system years ago and just… waited.”

Years ago.

Something cold moved through my chest but I didn't want to act weak now.

“Get me options,” I said. “Every cybersecurity firm, every tech consultant, every….”

“We’ve tried, Alpha.” His voice dropped lower. “Word travels fast when a company this size takes a hit like this. No one wants the liability. DataShield declined this morning. Vertex Corp said they couldn’t allocate resources. Orion Security didn’t even return the call.”

Silence followed.

I turned back to the screen. The numbers were Merciless.

“There’s one option left,” Marcus said.

I already knew what he was going to say. I had known for two days. I had been circling it the way you circle a fire aware of the heat, aware of the damage, unable to look away.

“Don’t,” I said.

“Alpha…”

“I said don’t.”

“The Cyber Empress is the only firm in the world with the capability to….”

“I know what she’s capable of.” The words came out harder than I intended. I stood abruptly, moving to the window, my back to Marcus and his careful, apologetic face.

Below, the streets didn’t know or care that NightCore was crumbling. The people down there didn’t know that Alpha Rowan Blackwood of the Nightshadow Pack had spent the last four days trying to outrun a disaster that was closing around him like a fist.

She was the only one who could fix this.

The woman I had framed, exiled, laughed at when she begged. The woman I had watched walk across a gala stage three weeks ago in a silk dress that cost more than some of my board members earned in a month, with her chin up and her eyes cold and her name on every powerful person’s lips in that room.

The Cyber Empress.

My ex-wife, “I regret ever hurting her.” I just have to apologize to her and I know she would forgive and accept me back, It would only take time and I don't mind waiting.

I pressed my fist against the window frame.

“Set up the meeting,” I said without an ounce of shame.

*********

Her office building was aggressively impressive, forty-two floors of glass and steel in downtown Philadelphia, the WyrmTech logo etched in silver above the entrance. I stood outside it for longer than I would ever admit, my jaw tight, my hands in my coat pockets.

I had faced rival Alphas, I had led my pack through wars and I had never once walked into a room feeling like the smaller person.

I walked through those doors feeling approximately two inches tall.

Her PA a sharp-eyed young woman who looked like she had been specifically trained to make powerful men feel unwelcome kept me waiting for twenty-two minutes in a reception area that was deliberate. The chairs were comfortable enough but positioned so that whoever sat in them was facing a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the city, the kind of view that made you feel small against the scale of everything beyond the glass.

This is her house, I thought. And she wants you to feel every inch of that.

“Mr. Blackwood.”

I stood.

The PA didn’t smile. “She’ll see you now.”

The elevator ride to the thirty-eighth floor was silent. The doors opened into a private corridor, and at the end of it, a set of double doors that swung inward without me touching them.

And there she was.

Mira sat behind a desk that could have served as a landing strip, her attention on the open laptop in front of her, a pen moving between her fingers in a slow, absent rotation. She wore a charcoal blazer, hair pulled back with the kind of effortless precision that took effort to achieve, and she did not look up when I walked in.

She let me cross the entire length of the office before she acknowledged me.

When she finally looked up, her eyes met mine with the temperature of deep water.

“Rowan,” she said, not Alpha, not Mr. Blackwood. Just my name, stripped of every title, in a voice so flat it barely registered as a greeting.

I had rehearsed this. I had stood in my own office the previous night running through versions of this conversation, calibrating tone, deciding what to offer, what to withhold.

All of it dissolved the moment I sat across from her.

“My company has been compromised,” I said.

“I know,” she replied.

Of course she did, Everyone knew.

“I need help.”

The pen stopped rotating between her fingers. She set it down. Folded her hands on the desk with the composure of someone who had never once in their life been caught off guard.

“Help,” she repeated.

“Cybersecurity Recovery, the breach…”

“I’m familiar with your breach, Rowan.” Her voice didn’t change. That was the most unnerving part. Three years ago she would have trembled in front of me. She would have stumbled over her words and searched my face for warmth and found none. Now she sat there like I was a mildly inconvenient appointment she had slotted in between more important things. “Every major firm has turned you down. You’ve run out of options. So you came here.”

“Yes,” I said.

I would not grovel, I was an Alpha after all, I would never grovel.

“I’m asking you to fix it,” I said. “I’ll pay whatever rate you name, Full contract, full authority over the recovery process, whatever you need.”

She looked at me for a long moment. Long enough to make me feel uncomfortable. Long enough for me to remember, against my will, the way she had looked at me across that gala floor three weeks ago like I was a ghost. Like I was already a memory she had filed away somewhere she didn’t visit anymore. Gosh, she was pretty and all I want to do right now is kiss her lips.

“No,” she said.

The word landed painfully.

My jaw tightened. “Mira….”

“I won’t be taking on the NightCore recovery contract.” She reached for her pen again, her eyes drifting back to her laptop like the matter was already concluded. “However.” She paused just long enough to make me lean forward slightly. “I will buy it.”

I stared at her.

“NightCore Technologies,” she said, her voice smooth and precise as a blade. “In its current state, given the breach and the contract losses, I’d assess market value at roughly thirty percent of what it was eight months ago. I’ll offer thirty-five. It’s generous, considering.”

The air left my lungs.

“You want to buy my company,” I said slowly.

“I want to buy a distressed asset before it collapses entirely and becomes worthless,” she corrected. “Whether it was once your company is not a relevant factor in the valuation.”

I stood up.

The chair scraped back harder than I intended and she didn’t flinch nor did she even blink, she just watched me rise with those dark, level eyes that gave away absolutely nothing.

“You’re enjoying this,” I said, my voice dropping to something low and dangerous.

“I’m offering you a lifeline,” she replied. “Whether you take it is your decision.”

“I built that company…”

“We built it,” you are lucky I'm not taking it from you without a fair offer, she said.

I stared at her across that enormous desk and for one fractured second I saw her not the Cyber Empress in the charcoal blazer, not the cold-eyed woman who had just carved me open with four syllables but the woman who had sat across from me at a kitchen table three years ago with tears streaming down her face and divorce papers shaking in her hands, asking me why.

I had laughed.

I swallowed that memory back down where it belonged.

“I’ll be in touch,” I said, and walked out.

**********

~ Mira’s POV ~

I waited until the elevator doors closed behind him before I allowed the corner of my mouth to twitch.

I turned back to my second monitor, the one that faced away from visitors, the one no one in that meeting had seen, and looked at the lines of code still scrolling lazily across the black screen.

NightCore’s architecture was elegant. I had built most of it myself, quietly, in the years I had spent being invisible inside that pack. I had known every corridor of it like the rooms of a house I had once lived in.

Which was precisely why, eight months ago, it had taken me less than a weekend to build the door.

And four days ago, I had simply walked through it.

I closed the window with a single keystroke, reached for my coffee, and pulled up my PA’s extension.

“Cancel my two o’clock,” I said when she picked up. “And send the NightCore acquisition paperwork to legal. I want it ready to move the moment he breaks.”

I set the phone down and looked out at the city beyond my floor-to-ceiling windows.

He would break. They always did, when the ground they had stolen from someone else finally opened up beneath their feet.

I had just made sure his ground opened a little faster.

Welcome to my world, stupid Alpha, this is just the beginning of it because I would make you crawl on your knees and have you offer your life.

I took a slow sip of coffee.

You created me, remember?