All Chapters of BLACK WOLF THE MIDNIGHT CIRCUIT- HER FINAL RACE: Chapter 1 - Chapter 6

Ashes of an EmpireMilan hadn't slept in two days.By the time Valentina's car turned onto the street outside her father's estate, the road was already lined three deep with photographers and strangers who had come only to watch.Cameras hit the windows before the car fully stopped."Valentina! Over here!""Miss De Luca, is it true the company is bankrupt?""Do you have a statement for the family?"A microphone struck the glass an inch from her face before the driver finally cleared the last of them. She kept her hands folded in her lap and her eyes forward, the way she had learned to sit in a hundred boardrooms before any of them mattered this much. Somewhere underneath that stillness, a version of her was screaming. Nobody outside the car would ever know it.The gates opened. The noise fell away behind her, replaced by a silence that felt almost worse.Inside, the estate looked wrong dressed for mourning. Black cloth hung over the same windows that used

CHAPTER FOUR : The Vault Beneath the EmpireThe cold followed her through the door, wrapping around her ankles as she stepped past the threshold and into the room her father had built without telling a living soul.The air smelled of dust and metal and something faintly chemical, the smell of paper kept somewhere it was never meant to age.Motion-sensor lights blinked on overhead in sections as she walked, one row at a time, so that the room seemed to reveal itself to her a few meters at a time, unwilling to show her all of it at once.The shelves ran back further than she'd guessed from the doorway, ceiling to floor, folder after folder stamped with numbers instead of names. She reached for the nearest one with hands that weren't quite steady and pulled it free.Ledger pages.Rows and rows of them, entries logged in a code she didn't recognize, columns of figures that meant nothing until she found the conversion key tucked into the back cover, her father's handwriting cramped into th

Sirens were close now, red and blue light beginning to strobe against the buildings at the end of the alley.Valentina forced herself up, one shoe missing, glass biting into her bare heel as she pushed off the pavement, and understood, with total clarity, that if she was still standing here in another sixty seconds, none of what she'd found underground would matter at all.She ran.Not toward the sirens.Away from them, through side streets she barely recognized in the dark, one foot bare against the cold stone, the encrypted drive gripped so tightly in her fist that her knuckles ached.She didn't call anyone.She didn't trust a single number left in her phone anymore, not after tonight, not after a voice she hadn't heard in seven years had just told her to run.There was one place left she could think of, mostly because nobody alive should have remembered it existed.A design studio outside the city, abandoned since the main factory absorbed its work fifteen years ago, the kind of bu