Back at the restaurant, the waiter came back to the table with the careful, composed expression of someone carrying information he wasn’t completely sure how to deliver.

"Alpha." He kept his voice low. "They’re gone."

Voren’s face didn’t change. But something behind his eyes did. A single, quiet recalibration that came and went fast enough that you’d miss it if you weren’t paying attention.

He set his glass down and looked at the waiter for just a beat longer than he needed to.

That was not how rogue assassins behaved. Not the real ones. Real assassins didn’t turn around because somebody dropped a name at them, not unless someone had paid them more to expose whoever sent them than they’d been paid to finish the job.

Or unless they’d genuinely had no idea who was in that restaurant, and the name had rattled them enough to pull back and reconsider.

"Did you get anything? The name of whoever sent them?"

The waiter shook his head. "The second I said your name, Alpha, they moved fast. I don’t think they knew you were here."

Voren sat with that for a moment, turning it over quietly. Something in the shape of it didn’t add up. He silently made a mental note to look into later, thanked the waiter, and let him go.

Across the table, Seraphine lifted her wine glass with the easy, rearranged composure of a woman who had just mentally stepped over an interruption and kept moving. Not shaken. Not particularly guarded. Just processing, in that quiet, unhurried way of hers.

"Someone wants me dead," she said. Flat. Vaguely conversational. Like she’d just observed that it might rain.

"You’re not afraid," Voren pointed out.

’We should’ve gone out there,’ Marsha said from the back of Seraphine’s mind. ’A gifted wolf doesn’t go down that easily. We could’ve handled every single one of them.’

Seraphine let the corner of her mouth curve just slightly, in a way she didn’t explain to Voren.

If the rogues had insisted on seeing her, then she would have been afraid because she would keep wondering who sent them but if they left at the mention of Voren, then she could easily guess who was behind it.

The truth was that the only wolves gifted wolves could not defeat were Alpha wolves. Everything else was just noise. But that wasn’t a card she was laying face-up in front of Voren. Not tonight, and probably not ever.

"Do you want me in the corner hyperventilating?" She drifted into a breathy, helpless register with the precision of someone drawing from direct experience, both hands clasped under her chin. "Or please, somebody save me—" she mimicked Daisy’s screams of that night at the pack house.

Voren laughed, short, real, caught completely off guard, the sound escaping before whatever mechanism he usually kept running had a chance to catch it. "That’s not what I meant," he said. "I don’t want a damsel in distress." He paused. "I just want to know who and why."

Seraphine knew exactly who. She’d known before he finished the sentence, because there was only one person in her life who moved like this, calculated in these exact moves, at this exact tempo.

But putting it in front of Voren was a different matter. The first time she’d tried pointing at Daisy with Ravyn in the room, Voren had been right there not believing a word of it.

He and Ravyn were the kind of friends whose loyalty ran deep enough to create genuine blind spots, and she had no interest in wasting her breath on ears that were already closed.

"Leave it," she said, settling back into her chair. "Tell me what you actually came out here to say."

He held her gaze for a moment, the look of a man making a mental note to pursue this himself, later, through his own channels, without telling her he was doing it. Then he let it go.

"I want to increase my shares in MindNest."

The laugh that came out of Seraphine was short and not even a little warm. "You might as well just try to buy the whole company and put me on a leash."

The laugh that came out of Voren was bigger, surprised out of him by the way she’d put it, a real laugh, full and open, doing something entirely different to his face for exactly as long as it lasted.

And then it was gone completely, like a light switched off. The ease of it replaced in an instant by that smooth, unreadable composure he wore everywhere else.

Seraphine noticed but did not dwell on it.

"You have a way of putting things," he said, his voice back in its professional register. "But from a straight business standpoint, I invest more where my returns are higher. That’s all this is."

Seraphine’s smile arrived polished and about five degrees below freezing. "My answer is no. Investment slots are closed."

She didn’t need more capital. She had plenty of liquid to work with, and the outrageously high entry threshold she’d set for investors in the first place had been entirely intentional, designed precisely to keep the circle small. If Voren thought he was going to expand his foothold after the fact, he needed to recalibrate.

Something moved through his expression, not offense, just the slight, particular flicker of a man who didn’t hear no often enough to have stopped noticing it.

"I think I phrased that wrong the first time," he said, his tone smoothing into something conversational that had absolute immovability underneath it. "I’m not asking for a new position. I’m increasing an existing one."

"That’s not how it works," Seraphine said, letting her eyes rest on him with the patient steadiness of someone who had sat across from powerful men too many times to still be rattled by the weight they put behind their words. "I set a target. I exceeded it. The position is closed, yours included. I don’t need your money, Mr. Ashkael."

It landed exactly where she meant it to.

Voren looked at her for a long moment. Then, with the absolute unhurried calm of a man who had simply decided the conversation wasn’t finished: "We can do this the easy way or the hard way. Your call."