Dung3onH@ndcuffPadd!e
Spre@derCr0pSpank1ng.
Subm!ssiveC@neC0me
Those words aren’t random at all. And I’m counting on Wolf keeping a log, so he’ll know exactly what I’ve tried.
My husband should be home by now. “Quick business trip,” my arse.
I glare at the painting on the wall to my right, the one I threatened my first day in the house. It looms out of the darkness, all reds and blacks, thick slashes that look like hunks of bleeding meat. It’s a terrifying work of art—what he deserves, Wolf said.
Here in his office, under the Soutine’s baleful gaze, he keeps himself under perfect control. He reduces the universe to cold, emotionless lines of code. He butchers the online world, carving up byte after byte.
The painting in our bedroom has the same colors—crimson and shadows. But the poppy couldn’t be more different. It’s lush. Sensual. It drips with desire.
The poppy lies. Wolf is exactly the same upstairs as he is inthis office. He ignores spontaneity. Emotion. He refuses to fuck me, even once.
And suddenly—alone in this house, an abandoned newlywed bride—I’m not willing to let that lie stand. Forty million he said it would cost me, if I damage the Soutine.
But I don’t intend to damage it.
It takes more work than I expect to liberate the painting. It’s suspended on the wall from two sunk bolts. The house could go through an earthquake, a hurricane, and a torrential flood, and that painting wouldn’t budge.
I’m gasping by the time I get it up the stairs. The wooden frame is heavier than it looks.
The art in our bedroom is fastened just as securely. Gritting my teeth, I wrestle it from its fittings. I’m sweating by the time I’m done, breathing like Wolf’s kept me in the dungeon for hours.
After I hang the bleeding meat on the bedroom wall, I’m almost too tired to bring the flower down to Wolf’s office. But I force myself to complete the switch.
I almost change my mind after I climb into bed. The meat glistens on the far wall—violent, angry, brutal. I try to imagine how terrifying it would be in the dark, a wordless threat looming across the room.
But I don’t have to glimpse that painting in the dark. I leave the lamp on, the way I do every night. And I fall asleep wondering what Wolf will say—what he’lldo—once he sees what I’ve done to his collection.
39
COLE
I’ve never had a client like Fiona Moran.
Most of my customers—like Kate’s father—want to monopolize my time. They fill my days with questions and unlikely scenarios, attempting to secure themselves against disasters that will never happen. They ignore my advice to protect against real risks in the actual world.
Fiona doesn’t do any of that. She’d be content if we never spoke again, beyond the freeport’s monthly Diamond Ring meetings. She just wants her clan’s finances secured.
Tyler Orbach should have been a perfect match for Fiona and her Old Colony Crew. He’s never met a law he wasn’t willing to twist, bend, or break, for the correct financial incentive. He’s creative when it comes to writing code. There is literally nothing Fiona and her criminal clan could do that would make Orbach lose a minute of sleep.
But Fiona hates that Orbach is even younger than she is. She hates that in forty-eight hours, he’s suggested wholesalechanges to her business model—not just simple tweaks to the way she uses computers, but foundational shifts to her clan’s entire hierarchy. She hates that I tasked him with checking in with me three times a day.
She hates everything about him.
The customer isn’talwaysright. But this customer has proven herself a quick study. And if she’s this opposed to Orbach after two days, it’s my job to build a lasting solution. So when Fiona complains again, I fly to Boston on short notice, taking a new prospect with me on my private jet.
I just don’t count on the trip taking three days.
Chuck Bertolli is everything Tyler Orbach wasn’t. He’s one of the few Lone Wolf employees who came to me from a real-world contact; he’s never set foot in Winter Reckoning. He got his training at the National Security Agency until he became disillusioned with the limitations on Uncle Sam’s power. I lured him to Lone Wolf after he got within thirty seconds of hacking into the War Department of a certain South American country that pays me to keep their military secrets under wraps.
Chuck is forty-five years old. He has a beard long enough to cover half his pregnant-looking stomach. He doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, and doesn’t dress like he’s heading out to a club the instant he fixes one more line of code.
Bertolli doesn’t bathe either—which makes for three long days in Boston. But by the end of my intervention, he’s up to speed on all of Fiona’s business needs. He understands the underlying account structures that she inherited, the ones I needed to break into when she first took over leadership of her clan. He has a sense of the clan’s day-to-day transactions. And he’s geared up for the future.