Damien Sinclair stared at the amber liquid in his crystal tumbler. He didn't drink it. He just watched as a thin layer of condensation frosted the outside of the glass.
He exhaled, and a puff of white mist drifted into the air.
It was freezing.
His fifty-thousand-dollar home office, a fortress of mahogany and leather located at the pinnacle of New York City, was currently sitting at a crisp forty-eight degrees Fahrenheit.
He pulled his phone from his pocket, his fingers stiff. He brought up the smart-home app. The screen flashed red: *SYSTEM OVERRIDE. MANUAL LOCKOUT.*
"Cute," Damien muttered, a cloud of vapor escaping his lips.
He didn't call security. He didn't call the maintenance crew to reset the legacy servers. Instead, he stood up, walked over to the vintage coat rack in the corner, and pulled on a thick, cable-knit sweater he kept for trips to the Aspen lodge.
He sat back down, took a sip of the freezing whiskey, and stared at the lines of code scrolling on his secondary monitor.
It wasn't a clumsy hack. It was elegant. The intruder had bypassed the primary firewall by piggybacking on the HVAC's maintenance protocol—a backdoor that hadn't been patched since the building was constructed.
Leo.
Damien's eyes drifted to the security feed on his left screen. The camera in the East Wing guest suite showed a peaceful scene: Aria curled up on the bed under a mountain of duvets, and Leo sleeping soundly on the small cot next to her.
The timestamp was current. They were asleep.
Or so the camera said.
Damien narrowed his eyes. He leaned closer to the screen, watching the rhythmic rise and fall of Aria's chest. It was perfect. Too perfect. The rise and fall repeated in a loop of exactly six seconds.
*It's a recording.*
A slow, dark smile tugged at the corner of Damien's mouth. The anger he expected to feel wasn't there. Instead, there was a strange, vibrating thrill in his chest.
His son wasn't just smart. He was a prodigy. And his ex-wife? She wasn't the terrified victim he had carried out of the slums hours ago. She was playing a game.
"You want a war?" Damien whispered to the empty, freezing room. "Fine. Let's see how long you can last."
He didn't go to the guest room to confront them. That would be too easy. Besides, he had work to do. The Council was demanding a report on the unauthorized use of Wolfsbane in the city, and Elena had called him fourteen times in the last hour.
He ignored the calls. His mind kept drifting back to the words Mia had mumbled in her fever.
*Not like the Scarecrow.*
The image burned in his mind. A fake father made of old clothes. That was what his children had lived with for four years. A hollow shell stuffed with straw, because the real man was too busy building an empire to know they existed.
The whiskey suddenly tasted like ash. Damien set the glass down. The cold in the room wasn't bothering him anymore. It was the cold inside his chest that he couldn't shake.
---
Forty feet above him, Aria was trying not to scream.
The ventilation shaft was a nightmare of galvanized steel and claustrophobia. It was barely two feet wide, forcing her to crawl on her elbows and knees. The air up here was stagnant, smelling of dry dust and ozone.
"Move, Mom," Leo whispered from ahead of her. His voice echoed strangely in the metal tunnel. "We have a twelve-minute window before the thermal sweep cycles back to this sector."
"I'm moving," Aria gritted out. Her knees were already bruised. She was wearing a pair of black leggings and a tight turtleneck she had found in the guest closet—probably left by one of Damien's previous 'guests,' though she tried not to think about that.
Leo stopped at a junction. The shaft split in two directions.
"Left goes to the laundry chute," Leo whispered, checking the tablet strapped to his forearm. Its blue light was the only illumination in the darkness. "Right goes to the central maintenance spine. That drops us directly over the vault antechamber."
"Right," Aria said. "Lead the way."
They turned right. The shaft angled downward. Aria had to brace her boots against the rivets to keep from sliding.
"How did you know?" Leo asked suddenly, not stopping his crawl.
"Know what?"
"That he wouldn't come check on us. I looped the footage, but if he physically walked into the room, we'd be busted."
Aria paused for a second to wipe the sweat from her forehead. "Because he's Damien Sinclair. He solves problems with money or violence. He doesn't check on sleeping children. He thinks he won the battle by bringing us here. He's arrogant."
"He's cold," Leo added venomously. "He turned the heat up in our room, though. Did you notice?"
Aria blinked. She hadn't. "Focus, Leo. The vault."
They crawled for another fifty feet until Leo stopped abruptly. He pointed down.
Through the slats of a vent grate, Aria could see light.
She inched forward and peered through.
They were looking down into the Private Gallery—the Antechamber to the Sinclair Family Vault. It was a round room with marble floors and walls lined with portraits of dead Alphas. In the center of the room stood the Vault Door.
It was a beast of a machine. A circular slab of titanium and reinforced steel, three feet thick. There was no keyhole. Just a sleek black panel on the wall next to it.
"Okay," Leo whispered. "Here's the plan. I drop the fiber-optic cable through the grate and jack into the panel's maintenance port. I run a brute-force decryption on the keypad code. That gets us past layer one."
"And layer two?" Aria asked, eyeing the small glass lens above the keypad.
"Retinal scan," Leo said. "That's all you. You got the files from the Gala?"
Aria patted the small, waterproof pouch at her waist. Inside was a high-tech contact lens she had printed three days ago, using the stolen biometric data from the Engagement Gala. It contained a perfect replica of Damien's retinal pattern.
"I have it," she said.
"Good. Then layer three is the voice print," Leo continued. "I synthesized his voice using clips from his news interviews. I have it on the tablet."
"And layer four?"
Leo hesitated. "Pulse check. The sensors in the floor measure your heart rate and biological signature. It has to match a Sinclair Alpha."
Aria went cold. "You didn't mention layer four."
"I didn't know about it until I saw the floor schematics five minutes ago," Leo admitted. "But... I have a theory."
"A theory?"
"You," Leo turned his head to look at her in the dark. "Dr. Aris said your blood is Royal. The White Wolf. That's higher on the food chain than a standard Alpha. The system *should* recognize your biological signature as superior access. It acts like a master key."
"Should?" Aria hissed. "And if it doesn't?"
"Then the automated turret in the ceiling drops down and turns you into Swiss cheese," Leo said matter-of-factly. "Ready?"
Aria closed her eyes. *For Mia.*
"Do it."
Leo silently unscrewed the grate. Aria slipped through the opening, hanging by her fingertips before dropping the eight feet to the marble floor. She landed in a crouch, silent as a shadow.
Leo lowered the cable to her. She plugged it into the panel.
Above her, Leo's fingers flew across his tablet. The panel beeped once.
*ACCESS CODE: ACCEPTED.*
Step one down.
Aria put the contact lens in her right eye. She blinked, feeling the foreign object settle. She leaned forward, placing her eye against the scanner.
A red light swept over her vision.
*Scanning... Scanning...*
Aria held her breath. If this failed, the alarms would scream, and Damien would be down here in seconds.
*RETINAL MATCH CONFIRMED: DAMIEN SINCLAIR.*
She exhaled.
"Voice print," Leo whispered from the vent. He pressed a button on his tablet.
A synthesized voice, indistinguishable from Damien's deep baritone, played from the tablet's speaker: *"Sinclair Alpha. Clearance Level Zero. Open."*
The panel flashed green.
*VOICE CONFIRMED.*
Now for the floor.
Aria stepped onto the circular metal plate in front of the door. She felt a hum vibrate through the soles of her sneakers. The sensors were reading her. They were tasting her blood, her heartbeat, her very essence.
The light on the panel flickered yellow. Then red. Then yellow again.
*ERROR. UNKNOWN BIOLOGICAL SIGNATURE.*
Aria froze. Leo gasped in the vent.
"It's not working," Aria whispered frantically.
*ANALYZING POTENCY...*
The machine was confused. It didn't recognize her as Damien, but it recognized *power*. It was sensing the White Wolf bloodline, something the system hadn't encountered in centuries.
*WARNING. ANOMALY DETECTED.*
"Mom, get off the plate!" Leo hissed. "It's going to trigger the turret!"
Aria didn't move. She couldn't. If she stepped off now, the system would reset, and they would never get another chance. She closed her eyes and *pushed*. Not physically, but mentally. She pushed her aura down, the same way she had scared the shopkeeper in the apothecary. She let the wolf inside her snarl at the machine.
*Open, you piece of junk.*
The panel flashed violently.
*OVERRIDE ACCEPTED. WELCOME, MATRIARCH.*
*Matriarch.* Not Alpha. Matriarch.
The massive steel bolts of the vault door retracted with a ground-shaking *thud-thud-thud*. The heavy door swung open slowly, revealing the dark, cool interior.
"Yes!" Leo whispered triumphantly.
Aria's knees nearly gave out. She pulled the cable free and stepped toward the open vault.
Inside, rows of safety deposit boxes lined the walls. But in the center, on a velvet pedestal, sat a single, glowing glass vial inside a cryo-case.
The Seraphim Serum.
It was right there. Ten feet away.
Aria took a step forward.
*Ding.*
The sound of the elevator arriving down the hall froze the blood in her veins.
Aria spun around. The vault door was open. She was standing in the middle of the antechamber. There was nowhere to hide.
"Mom! The vent!" Leo hissed, reaching his hand down.
"Too high," Aria whispered. "I can't jump that."
She looked around wildly. There was a large marble pillar behind the vault door. If she squeezed behind it, the shadows might conceal her.
She dove for the shadows just as the heavy oak doors of the gallery swung open.
Damien walked in.
He wasn't wearing his suit jacket anymore. He was wearing a thick, cable-knit sweater that made him look deceptively domestic, but his face was hard. He was holding his phone to his ear.
"...I don't care what the Council thinks, Elena," Damien was saying, his voice echoing off the marble walls. "The investigation is closed."
He stopped.
He stood ten feet from where Aria was crouching in the dark.
Damien lowered the phone slowly. He didn't look at the vault door. He didn't look at the vent.
He lifted his head and inhaled.
Aria stopped breathing. She pressed her hand over her heart, praying it would stop beating so loud.
Damien frowned. He took a step forward, directly toward her hiding spot.
"Moonflowers," he murmured.
He smelled her.
Aria squeezed her eyes shut. She reached into her boot and gripped the handle of the small tranquilizer dart gun she had brought. If he took one more step, she would have to shoot him.
Damien took another step. He was so close she could see the dust motes dancing in the light of the hallway.
"Damien?" Elena's voice tinny and shrill coming from the phone he was still holding. "Are you listening to me?"
Damien didn't answer. He stared right at the shadow where Aria was hiding. His grey eyes were searching, confused, intense.
"I know you're here," Damien whispered.
Aria's finger tightened on the trigger.
Then, a loud *CLANG* echoed from the ventilation shaft above.
Leo. He had dropped the tablet.
Damien's head snapped up toward the vent.
Aria used the split second of distraction. She didn't shoot. She didn't run. She did the only thing that could save them.
She threw the small pebble she had picked up earlier across the room, hitting the far wall.
Click-clack.
Damien spun around toward the noise.
In the vent, Leo held his breath, praying his mother knew what she was doing.
In the shadow, Aria watched the father of her children, the King of the city, standing between her and the cure for their daughter.
The heist had gone wrong. Now, it was a hunt.