The smile that came across Seraphine’s face was lovely and about as warm as January concrete.

She remembered their first negotiation clearly, every carefully applied pressure point, every moment of maneuvering she’d had to do before Voren finally gave ground.

She’d worked for that investment. Earned it the hard way, through patience and precision and knowing exactly when to push. And now here he was, running the exact same play back at her with the same unhurried, unshakeable confidence, like he’d studied the manual she’d written and decided it applied both directions.

She couldn’t quite decide if she was more annoyed or grudgingly impressed by that. She settled somewhere in the narrow space between the two and made sure she showed neither.

"Mr. Ashkael." Her voice was smooth and pleasant the way a surface is pleasant right up until the moment you realize there’s nothing solid underneath it.

"Since when did increasing your investment become non-negotiable? Say one more thing to provoke me and I will have every share you own returned to you, interest and all, by end of week."

Voren didn’t move, didn’t blink. "Don’t use that line on me." His voice was flat, absolute, and final, as he refused to accept her refusal. "I’m not one of your boy toys you could use and damp whenever you want."

That landed somewhere it had no business landing, Seraphine went still. "Excuse me?"

"I’m not Corvine," he said, and rattled off the rest of the list with the blunt, unembellished efficiency of someone reading names off a page they’d already memorized.

"Not Leon, not Damon, not Augustine or not any of the men who quietly rearrange their whole lives around whatever you need that particular week." 𝒇𝒓𝙚𝒆𝔀𝓮𝓫𝒏𝓸𝙫𝓮𝓵.𝓬𝙤𝙢

The air between them pulled tight and stayed there.

"Oh, so you want me rearranging mine around yours instead?" Seraphin’s voice dropped into something that was soft and sharp at the exact same time, the mock-pout she gave him carrying a very real edge riding just underneath it.

"Or is your ego just too oversized to handle the possibility that a mouth this small could end a conversation you actually wanted to win?"

It was clear that Seraphine had not forgotten the day Voren called her mouth small at Humphrey and Kylie’s residence.

’You are genuinely terrible at this,’ Bloodfang said from Voren’s mind, timing it with an almost artistic precision.

’Stay out of it. This is business, and you know how I don’t joke with such.’

He pulled his attention back to the table. Seraphine had resettled into a posture of pointed, elegant exhaustion, chin resting in her hand, a yawn escaping her that she barely made any effort to cover. "I want to go to bed."

"Damon is your spy inside Ravyn’s pack," Voren said. "And I’m going to tell Ravyn."

The yawn died immediately. Seraphine went completely still, and then a sound came out of her that wasn’t quite a growl but lived right next to one, low and involuntary and pressed down hard before it could fully take shape. "You wouldn’t dare."

He already had his phone in his hand. "Wanna bet?"

Informing Ravyn right now about Damon being her spy could amount to Damon being executed right there and then. He was at the pack so pack rules would apply.

His actions would be termed betrayal to his Alpha, even if he was wealthier, and as a former Luna, Seraphine knew the rules too well.

The silence that followed had real texture to it, and for the sake of Damon, Seraphine had to think twice.

She breathed through it, running the options quickly, her mind already sorting through the angles while her face stayed composed.

"How much did you hear?"

"Enough," he said simply. "Enough to have Ravyn execute your spy before morning and take every lead you’ve been building through him with it. Every piece of inside information, and every thread you’ve been carefully running. Gone."

He paused, and when he continued his voice had dropped into something almost easy, the specific ease that belongs to someone who knows they’re holding the better hand and isn’t in any rush to show it.

"I’m not going to ask what you’re doing or why. Whatever happened between you and Ravyn... that’s between the two of you. It’s none of my business. After all, you are a bitter woman."

"I am not bitter," Seraphine said, and the heat sitting right behind the words made clear she already knew exactly how that sounded. "I am as mad as hell. He ordered to have my child killed, Voren. For Daisy. And you want to call it bedroom issues?"

Her voice cracked at the edges, not from weakness, not from losing composure, but from the sheer compressed pressure of it, from carrying something that heavy for that long.

"He deserves everything that’s coming to him, and I genuinely hate you right now for being in a position to take it away from me."

Something moved in Voren’s face. Not softening, but more like a quiet, internal recalibration. The look of a man who has just had a piece of information slot into a picture he’d been reading with something missing, and who now has to decide what that changes.

He didn’t address it out loud. He filed it the way he filed everything that mattered, carefully, somewhere accessible, and kept going.

"Accept the offer," he said. "I keep my mouth shut. No questions asked. No interference." There was a beat of silence, clean and measured. "I’m pulling capital from four other companies to put here. Five hundred billion total."

The number sat between them on the table like a physical thing.

Seraphine stared at him.

She had built everything she had through a combination of sharpened instinct and the nagging, uncomfortable awareness that somewhere along the way the moon goddess had decided to compensate her by pouring success and favorable timing into her life like a payment she had never asked for and couldn’t find a way to refuse.

While the thing she actually wanted, was something no amount of money or power or perfectly executed strategy would ever come close to touching, was still out there somewhere. Her daughter. Still missing. Still the thing every accomplishment quietly circled back around to and couldn’t fix.

No number balanced that. Not even in the same universe.

"That’s too much," she said, her voice cooler now, more settled, the sharp heat of a moment ago smoothed back down into something controlled and precise. "I won’t take more than the original amount. Two hundred. That’s the ceiling."

She knew exactly what five hundred billion bought, and it wasn’t partnership. It wasn’t collaboration. It bought control, the quiet, patient, installed-from-the-inside kind that smiles at you from across a boardroom table and never has to raise its voice because it doesn’t need to.

And she would be damned before she hands over that level of power to someone as measured and long-thinking as Voren Ashkael.