Mob psychology is dull once you strip away the myth.
Angry wolves chanting outside a glass tower are still just numbers.
And numbers can be mapped, cornered, and bled dry.
So while half the executive floor was discovering religion and the other half was quietly revising their wills, I sat at the secured operations terminal, opened three trading interfaces, and began shorting the Elder Council's public proxies.
Panic had already shaved six points off their primary holdings.
I routed through offshore buffers, built a synthetic pressure ladder, and paused only once—when the system yielded a level of authority I should not have possessed.
Interesting.
Silas hadn't merely given me access in the boardroom.
At some point, quietly and without warning, he had handed me the root architecture of his empire.
I was holding the launch codes to Thorne Group.
I entered the first sequence.
SELL.
LEVERAGE.
FREEZE.
REROUTE.
Below us, the crowd howled.
I didn't look up.
Silas stood at the window behind me, one hand braced against the glass. He had not left my line of sight for more than a few seconds since the leak began. His presence sat over the room like pressure. Heavy. Possessive. Protective enough to feel almost physical.
I opened a second sequence and started positioning against the Grand Elder's maritime fleet.
That was when my private terminal flashed red.
Not the company tablet.
Not the executive dashboard.
My private encrypted channel.
The alert header stopped my hand cold.
VIP MEDICAL WING: ROOM 11A — LIVE BREACH FLAG
Noah.
Everything inside me went still.
I opened the feed.
The image sharpened into black-and-white. Two of Silas's mercenaries lay unconscious in the hospital corridor. One was twisted half under a chair, his weapon still holstered, as if whatever dropped him had happened faster than a trained hand could move.
Inside the room, Noah was asleep.
Small body under white sheets. Dark lashes against pale skin. One hand curled near his face.
Unharmed.
My lungs started working again.
Then I saw the object resting on the pillow beside his head.
A silver crescent medallion.
Old. Tarnished. Smeared with dried blood gone nearly black.
The exact same shape as the relic hidden up my sleeve.
The message was so clear it didn't need words.
We can touch him whenever we want.
The office disappeared.
The roar of the crowd. The clipped orders from security. The low crackle of comms. All of it dropped away under one bright, catastrophic fact:
Conventional security meant nothing.
Not against them.
Not against Witch-wolf assassins who could move through wards and armed men as if the whole human concept of perimeter was a joke.
My chair shot backward hard enough to slam into the glass.
Heads turned.
Silas was already moving before the metal legs stopped scraping across the floor.
"Elara."
I grabbed my coat and the terminal in one motion. The world had narrowed now into clean, violent geometry—exits, bodies, weapons, angles, obstacles. Who could be ignored. Who would need to be broken.
Silas caught my wrist before I made it three steps.
His grip locked down like iron.
"Where?"
I yanked once. Useless.
"Noah."
That single word changed his face.
The calm vanished.
Not into panic. Into something harder. Sharper.
"What happened?"
I shoved the terminal against his chest. He looked down. Saw the unconscious mercenaries, the sleeping child, the medallion on the pillow.
For the first time since I had met him, his control visibly cracked.
"I'm sending a second team," he said, already reaching for his comms.
"No."
My voice came out cold enough to cut.
He looked at me.
"You're too late for teams," I said. "They got through your perimeter without waking him."
The room seemed to tilt around us.
Bastian had gone still. The mercenaries nearest the corridor were watching without pretending otherwise now. Everyone in sight understood that something far worse than a mob was unfolding.
I stepped closer to Silas and lowered my voice.
"They can reach him whenever they want," I said. "Men with rifles are decoration against what's in that room."
His hand tightened around my wrist.
"The building is on total lockdown," he said. "There's a mob outside and at least three kill teams buried in that crowd. You are not walking out there."
He was right.
I did not care.
"I'm going to the hospital."
"No."
The word hit hard.
Not argued. Not pleaded.
Commanded.
And beneath it was something worse than dominance—need.
I could see it in the tension at his throat. Feel it in the way he stood too close, as if distance itself was becoming a problem. The room was full of fear, adrenaline, rage. He needed me near him to keep the pressure from turning into pain.
My brother needed me somewhere else.
Something inside me snapped.
Not dramatically.
Not loudly.
Just cleanly.
The old coldness fell away. The secretary. The human disguise. The carefully muted edges I had worn for ten years. All of it burned off in one brutal second.
Silas felt the shift before he fully saw it. His expression changed from command to warning.
"Elara—"
Silver light rose into my vision.
Not metaphorical.
Real.
It flooded my irises, turning reflected office lights into something bright and liquid and wrong. Energy moved under my skin with a hungry crackle, old and starved and finally awake. The air around us changed with it, sharp with ozone and pressure.
The corridor responded first.
A reinforced glass panel beside us spiderwebbed from top to bottom.
Bastian stumbled back a step, his hand flying to his gun on instinct.
Silas did not move.
Of course he didn't.
He watched extinct magic burn into my eyes and still held my wrist like the larger problem here was my route to the elevator.
I lifted my gaze to his.
No mask left.
No secretary left.
Only what I had been born as.
"Get out of my way, Silas," I said.
My voice carried a second note under it now. Something old enough to make the nearest lights flicker.
His jaw locked.
He did not release me.
The silver in my eyes burned brighter.
"Or I will make you."