Isabella Voss sat alone in the velvet darkness of L’Ombre, the most exclusive underground club in lower Manhattan, a place she herself had bankrolled three years ago as a neutral ground for deals too delicate for daylight. The air was thick with low crimson light, pulsing bass, and something far worse: the cloying, saccharine perfume of dozens of omegas in heat or close to it. It coated the back of her throat like syrup. She hated it. Hated the way it made her temples throb, hated the way it reminded her of every simpering, treacherous creature who had ever tried to slide a knife between her ribs while batting wet eyelashes.

Her fingers drummed once on the rim of her glass (Macallan 25, neat, untouched). The ice had melted an hour ago. She hadn’t come here to drink. She had come because her penthouse felt like a cage tonight, because three lieutenants had been arrested in Lisbon, because Interpol was circling closer, because the Colombians were demanding a sit-down, because her own reflection had started looking like a stranger wearing her face.

Thirty-four years old, ruler of half the black market on the eastern seaboard, and she was unraveling in a nightclub that smelled like melted candy and desperation.

She never came to her own venues. Neutral ground was for other people to bleed on. Yet here she was, dressed down (for her) in a charcoal silk blouse unbuttoned just enough to reveal the thin gold chain at her throat and the faint scar beneath her collarbone, black trousers tailored sharp enough to cut glass, hair pulled into a low knot that made her cheekbones look like weapons. No bodyguards inside. They waited upstairs, sweating, knowing she’d skin them if they disobeyed.

Isabella’s gaze was fixed on the amber liquid in her glass as if it might confess something useful when movement at the edge of her peripheral vision snagged her attention. She looked up slowly, the way a panther lifts its head when it hears a twig snap.

And there, cutting through the haze of omega sweetness like a blade through silk, was this person.

They stood ten feet away, half in shadow, half bathed in the red glow of a neon sign that read SINFUL in looping cursive. Not posturing, not preening, not trying to catch her eye like every other soul in the room who knew exactly who she was and wanted either her favor or her throat. This one was simply… still. Watching her with the same predatory patience she herself usually wielded.

The scent that reached her first wasn’t the suffocating sugar of omega. It was something darker (cedar, gun oil, storm air), something that made the hair at the nape of her neck rise in a way that was not entirely unpleasant. Her pulse, which had been hammering with stress all night, slowed to a deliberate, dangerous rhythm.

Isabella did not smile. She rarely did.

For the first time in weeks, the noise in her head quieted.

She set the glass down with a soft click that somehow cut through the music. Then, almost lazily, she crooked one finger (just one) in a silent, imperious command that had ended lives for less defiance.