Chapter 2 The Boardroom Takedown

8:30 a.m. Kingston Group headquarters break room.

Darcy stood in front of the coffee machine, waiting for her black coffee.

She wore a plain black business suit today, unremarkable and slightly drab. The kind of outfit that let you blend into the background of a corporate hallway without anyone bothering to remember your face. Her thick raven waves were pinned up neatly at the back of her head, not a single strand out of place. Her pale skin caught the fluorescent light with a cool sheen, and her amber eyes were calm as water, hiding every trace of sharpness beneath the mask of a "part-time actuarial analyst."

Click-clack. Click-clack.

High heels struck the wooden floor, crisp and rhythmic.

Chloe walked in, dressed in a sleek skirt suit, two lattes in hand. As a fellow escapee from the North Barrens, Chloe had used her gray-fox hybrid blood, soft and docile, to slip into the company's front desk rotation without raising suspicion.

Her eyes swept over Darcy's cheap outfit. Something flickered beneath her expression. A mix of fear, envy, and desperate dependence she couldn't quite hide.

"Darcy, you worked so late last night, didn't you?"

Chloe set a latte beside Darcy's hand, lowering her voice to barely a whisper.

"Thorne pack scouts have been circling the city lately. I heard from someone in the mailroom that a couple of unfamiliar wolves have been asking questions at the front desk. You pulled core data from the risk control system last night. Please tell me you didn't leave any traces."

She stepped closer, grabbing Darcy's hand with both of hers. Her fingers were cold and trembling. The kind of trembling that came from a place of real, bone-deep terror. Her eyes shimmered with a mix of genuine panic and testing.

"Listen to me. If the board questions the numbers later, don't push back. Just take whatever they throw at you and let it pass. People like us, packless rogues with no territory, no backing, no one to vouch for us, we can't afford to lose what we've built here. I helped you forge your identity file. If you get caught, if they trace it back to me, I'm dead. We're both dead. You understand that, don't you?"

By the end, Chloe's eyes were red-rimmed. She was genuinely terrified. Jealous of Darcy's actuarial brilliance even without a wolf form, yes, but far more afraid of the nightmares hunting them from the frozen North. Every shadow in the hallway could be a Thorne pack scout. Every unfamiliar scent in the elevator could be a tracker.

Darcy gently pulled her hand free. She picked up her black coffee, letting the warmth seep into her palm, and her voice came out soft and calm. The voice of someone who had long ago learned that panic was a luxury she couldn't afford.

"Just do your front desk job. Smile at the visitors, direct the deliveries, keep your head down. As long as you follow what I told you, as long as you don't do anything stupid, your forged file won't be an issue. I made sure of it."

Chloe stared at Darcy's unruffled composure, her jaw tightening. The fear behind her eyes deepened, sharpening into something almost like resentment. How could this woman, this no-wolf, defective Omega, be so calm when everything around them was falling apart? Chloe had spent years trying to claw her way up from nothing, and Darcy made it look like a casual stroll through a park.

But she said nothing. She just nodded, forced a smile, and stepped back into the shadows of the break room.

Nine o'clock. Top-floor boardroom.

The oval table was packed with executives and representatives from five major affiliated packs. The air was thick with the suppressed Alpha auras of different territorial wolves. A tension that felt less like a business meeting and more like a battlefield waiting for the first shot to ring out.

The PR director sat near the front, straightening his tie, a self-satisfied smirk playing at the corners of his mouth. He was in charge of the merger's PR packaging, but he'd already struck a deal with a rival pack, planning to pin the entire thirty-million-dollar bad debt on Darcy, the "unconnected part-timer" with no one to defend her. In his mind, she was the perfect scapegoat. No pack backing. No influential friends. No history in the company that would make anyone question her guilt.

Darcy walked in and took the seat directly across from the head of the table. She set her laptop down, opened it, and waited.

Creak.

The heavy wooden doors swung open. The low murmur in the room died instantly, as if someone had sucked all the air out of the space.

Asher Kingston walked in.

He wore a bespoke suit cut with brutal precision, every line of it screaming wealth and power, and the savage Alpha energy rolling off him was fresh, like he'd just stepped off a battlefield and hadn't bothered to wipe the blood off his hands. With each step he took, the air thickened with a pressure that carried traces of gunpowder and frozen pine, weighing down the breath of every pack representative in the room. Several of the older executives actually flinched.

Darcy looked up.

As the supreme ruler of the Kingston Pack, the man before her bore no resemblance to the beast who'd lost control in the elevator last night. He was cold. Regal. Untouchable. A king seated on his throne, looking down at his subjects with the quiet contempt of someone who knew he could crush any of them with a single word.

But her gaze caught the small, fresh wound on the right side of his lower lip, still beaded with blood at the seam. He'd bitten himself last night. To stop himself from touching her.

The moment he settled into the head chair, his steel-gray eyes cut toward her without warning, locking on with lethal precision. There was no warmth in that gaze, no recognition, just the cold, calculating assessment of a predator sizing up a potential threat.

The temperature in the room seemed to freeze solid.

Standing at the presentation podium, Darcy could feel that gaze travel along her neck, her collarbone, all the way down to her right hand resting on the keyboard. The back of that hand still bore three thin scratches from his claws last night. They'd scabbed over, but under his stare, they seemed to prickle with a dull, familiar heat.

The skin under his stare prickled with a faint, electric charge, as if he were standing right behind her instead of ten feet away at the head of the table. It took everything she had not to press her hand against the back of her neck, where the small hairs had started to rise.

Darcy's fingers tightened almost imperceptibly on the edge of the podium. She forced down the faint tremor that rose in response to the superior Alpha's pressure. She didn't look away. Instead, she lifted her chin slightly, meeting that suffocating weight head-on with her calm amber stare. A tiny, deliberate defiance that only the sharpest eyes in the room would have caught.

Asher's knuckles went white against the table. A deep gold flicker stirred behind his irises, there and gone in less than a heartbeat.

He was restraining himself. And she was provoking him. The raw, unspoken tension crackled between them, more ferocious than any words could be. A battle of wills fought in the space between two pairs of eyes, invisible to everyone else in the room.

"Begin."

Asher's voice cut through the silence, low and hoarse, like a string stretched to its breaking point, snapping hard against every eardrum in the room.

The director rose first, his tone heavy with false grief. "Board members, Mr. Kingston. The risk assessment for this billion-dollar merger has uncovered massive bad-debt exposure. Due to a verification error by our part-time actuarial analyst, Darcy."

He shot Darcy a cold smile, jerking his chin toward the podium. Get up. Take the fall.

Darcy rose unhurriedly, laptop in hand, and walked to the presentation station. Her heels clicked against the polished floor, each step steady and deliberate.

She ignored the director's provocation, plugged in her flash drive, and let her fingers fly across the keyboard, overwriting the screen with her own data in one smooth, practiced motion.

"This isn't just an ordinary exposure. This is an inter-pack embezzlement scheme." Darcy's voice came out clear and steady, cutting through the murmur of the room like a blade.

On the big screen, the messy accounts dissolved into a razor-sharp fund flow chart. Red arrows traced every corrupt transaction, every hidden transfer, every carefully concealed lie.

The director's face drained of color. "Darcy! What the hell are you putting up there?! Take it down this instant!"

"This thirty-million-dollar transfer went through an offshore laundering channel commonly used by the Thorne pack in the North Barrens." Darcy arched an eyebrow, her gaze cold enough to freeze fire. "And the legal representative of the offshore company that received the money is your wife."

Boom.

The room erupted. Representatives from the affiliated packs exchanged sharp, alarmed glances. The director's carefully constructed narrative collapsed in real time, and the whispers that rippled through the room were sharp with sudden, hungry suspicion.

The director went white as paper, his voice cracking with rage. "You're lying! The North Barrens offshore channel has ancient contractual encryption! There's no way a low-level clerk could crack it! You forged this data! This is a setup!"

"Enough."

From the head of the table, Asher spoke. The crushing weight of his Alpha presence descended like a mountain, silencing the chaos instantly. The room went so quiet that Darcy could hear the faint hum of the air conditioning.

He leaned forward, forearms braced on the table, jaw lowered, the posture of a lone wolf locking onto its prey, muscles coiled for the kill. His gaze swept over the trembling director like he was already dead, then shifted to Darcy on the podium.

"The back-end vulnerability in the North Barrens offshore contract is known to no more than three people in this city. Darcy. Where did you get the decryption logic?"

Under the supreme wolf king's scrutiny, Darcy's cool face curved into a composed smile. The kind of smile that said she'd been waiting for this question.

"I encountered similar models in the North. The risk system's underlying logic shares the same origin. It wasn't difficult to calculate."

The director slumped in his chair, shaking violently. His face had gone from white to a sickly gray, the color of a man who knew he'd just been caught with his hand in the vault.

"Take him out. Hand him over to legal for territorial treason." Asher's words dropped like a blade, clean and final.

Two guards stepped forward and hauled the limp director out of the room. His legs dragged against the carpet, the only sound the shuffling of his ruined dignity.

Chloe shrank into the corner of the conference room, face pale as death, watching Darcy shine under the spotlight. The envy and complexity in her eyes burned deeper than ever, a poisonous seed watered with the sweet nectar of another woman's victory.

Asher rose to his feet. His dominant gaze landed on Darcy like a brand, hot and unyielding.

"From today on, you are the Chief Risk Officer for this billion-dollar merger. Effective immediately."

Under territorial law, strength was authority. No one dared question the appointment. The representatives from the five packs exchanged glances, then, one by one, they nodded their assent.

The meeting broke up. The looks from PR and risk control staff toward Darcy had completely changed. The whispers that had been sharp with mockery an hour ago were now sharp with something else. Respect. Fear. The kind of grudging admiration that only came from watching someone pull off the impossible.

Darcy packed up her laptop. The moment she stepped out of the boardroom, Asher's chief aide was already waiting for her, as if he'd known exactly when she would emerge.

He held out a sleek black card with a respectful bow.

"Miss Clark. Mr. Kingston is waiting for you in the top-floor office."