The screens changed at exactly 8:12 a.m.
One second, the holographic displays across the executive floor were cycling through market opens, shipping forecasts, and polished corporate lies. The next, every sheet of glass in Thorne Group went dead black.
Then white text slammed across the screens.
CONFIDENTIAL MEDICAL RECORD — SILAS THORNE
INTERNAL CONTRACTUAL AGREEMENT — PROXIMITY STABILIZATION PROTOCOL
The entire floor forgot how to breathe.
Then the panic hit.
Phones lit up. Chairs scraped hard across marble. Someone in Legal dropped a coffee mug, and the ceramic shattered like a gunshot. On the trading floor twenty stories below, numbers kept moving, but nobody was looking at them. Every eye was fixed on the blown-open carcass of a secret this company had protected with careers, money, and fear.
I stood in the middle of the corridor, expression flat, and watched Silas's medical history crawl across twelve feet of glass.
Age of onset.
Chemical sensitivity escalation.
Neurological damage.
Violent feral episodes.
They had even attached an old assessment image: Silas strapped into a reinforced steel chair, pupils blown wide, veins black against his throat, his mouth bloodied from biting through restraints.
He looked monstrous.
They had chosen that picture carefully.
The second document hit harder.
The contract.
My contract.
The line items glowed in cold legal font.
24/7 proximity clause
Residential cohabitation
Exclusive stabilization dependency
Daily compensation amount: $100,000
Gasps broke around me in sharp little bursts.
Then the audio feed kicked in.
A hijacked broadcast patched directly into the building's intercom. The voice was digitally distorted, rich with counterfeit outrage.
"Behold the Alpha King, brought to heel by a scentless outsider. A human contaminant. An unregistered operative. Perhaps chemical. Perhaps occult."
Red text crawled beneath the broadcast.
MIND-CONTROL.
BLOOD CORRUPTION.
HUMAN WITCHCRAFT.
THE THRONE IS COMPROMISED.
So that was the story the Elder Council had chosen.
Not secretary.
Not analyst.
Weapon.
They were framing me as a human witch who had drugged the Alpha King and bent him to her will.
The werewolf underworld would love that.
I felt eyes turning toward me from every direction. Fear moves through a hierarchy faster than truth ever can.
Bastian's voice cut across the emergency comms a second later.
"Executive lockdown in effect. All staff remain on assigned floors. Anyone attempting to exit secure zones will be restrained."
Good.
Clear. Efficient. Slightly dramatic.
The private elevator doors opened behind me.
Silas stepped out.
No suit jacket. Black shirt open at the throat. Sleeves rolled to his forearms. The building was having a collective breakdown, his deepest humiliation was being broadcast to the entire city, and he looked exactly the way he had in the boardroom five seconds before violence.
Calm.
That was always the dangerous stage.
His gaze moved over the corridor once, landed on me, and held.
He didn't ask if I was all right.
He crossed the space and stopped close enough that the heat of him cut through the aggressive air-conditioning.
"Who touched the internal feed?" he asked.
"Three relay breaches," I said at once. "One from media, one from external investor access, one from inside our own legacy architecture. Coordinated."
He nodded once.
Not at the information.
At the fact that I was still standing there. Still functioning. Still within reach.
Bastian appeared at the far end of the corridor with two elite mercenaries behind him. They carried short-barreled rifles now, no longer pretending discretion mattered.
"Crowd forming outside," he said. "Pureblood loyalists, challengers, Council proxies. More arriving every minute. Over seven hundred and rising."
I crossed to the nearest window and looked down.
The plaza in front of Thorne Tower was packed solid.
Pureblood banners. Council colors. Black vehicles lining the curb. Wolves shoulder to shoulder against security barricades already starting to buckle. At the center of the crowd, a digital sign flared with my face—a blurred surveillance still from the gala, silver dress catching the light.
HAND OVER THE WITCH
I almost smiled.
Efficient narrative design.
"Snipers?" Silas asked without looking out the window.
"Roof teams in place," Bastian said. "Mercenaries are ready to deploy gas and suppress if the perimeter breaks."
Silas looked down at the crowd and made his decision in less than a breath.
"No suppression."
Bastian's shoulders tightened. "Sir?"
Silas didn't raise his voice.
"If they breach the line," he said, "kill them."
The words landed in the corridor like a falling blade.
Clean. Quiet. Final.
No one moved.
Bastian held his Alpha's gaze for one hard second, fully understanding that Silas was authorizing mass slaughter in the middle of Manhattan.
Then he nodded.
"Understood."
I turned my head slowly. "You're about to start a civil war over bad press."
Silas looked at me then.
Not at the screens. Not at the crowd. Me.
"They're not here for press," he said.
No.
They were here for me.
He stepped closer and caught the back of my chair, pulling it a few inches toward him until I was exactly where he wanted me—near enough to touch without reaching.
The screens behind him flashed his medical file again.
Then the contract.
Then my face.
His expression didn't shift.
"They can have my reputation," Silas said, voice low and absolute. "They can have the throne. They can have every board seat and every alliance in this city."
The roar from the plaza rose through the glass.
His hand stayed on my chair.
"But no one," he said, each word dropping colder than the last, "is taking you out of this building breathing."