Apex, Declawed

"You don't have words for what's happening in your books," Joel says. "That's why you hired me." Joel Asante has built a career exposing what powerful people think they've hidden—following numbers across continents, dismantling empires with nothing but precision and proof. Detached, controlled, and relentlessly logical, he doesn't get involved. He solves problems and moves on. Until the Ironveil Pack hires him. Deep in the Pacific Northwest, a centuries-old wolf shifter territory is quietly bleeding land through a scheme no one understands. Their accountant is dead. Their records don't add up. And nearly half their ancestral territory is already gone. Joel is brought in to trace the money—but the deeper he digs, the clearer it becomes that this isn't just embezzlement. It's a long game. Patient. Calculated. Designed to strip the pack of everything they've built. And someone on the inside is helping it happen. Working alongside Rafe Malone, the pack's formidable Enforcer, Joel finds himself navigating a world that doesn't operate on logic alone. Rafe is controlled power—watchful, territorial, and dangerously perceptive in ways Joel isn't prepared for. As the case tightens around a hidden architect with a history of destroying communities from the inside out, the line between professional distance and personal entanglement begins to blur. Because this case doesn't want to let him go. And neither does the man watching him too closely. As secrets unravel and the truth comes into focus, Joel must decide how far he's willing to go to finish what he started—before the last of the pack's land is taken, and before the connection he never planned for changes everything. What happens when the only way to win is to stay—and risk losing control of everything he's built?