Chapter Twelve: Twin plan

'AT LUNA MIRELLE'S PLACE'

Rhydian had always believed that the best plans were the ones that looked like accidents.

The cottage sat at the northern edge of Thornwell territory, tucked back from the tree line like something that had been trying to disappear for years and was mostly succeeding. Luna Mirelle's retirement, the pack called it. A dignified withdrawal. A choice.

It had never been a choice.

Rhydian stood by the window with his hands in his pockets, looking out at the dark tree line, listening to his sister move around behind him with the particular unhurried energy she got when things were going well. The cottage smelled like lavender and old grief and the specific kind of loneliness that settled into walls when someone had been alone inside them for too long.

He'd always found it depressing.

Saskia found it useful.

"She's not going to tell him anything useful," Saskia said from across the room. Her voice was light, almost bored. "She barely knows anything."

"That's not why we're here."

"I know why we're here."

Rhydian turned from the window. Luna Mirelle sat in the armchair by the fireplace, very still, her hands folded in her lap with the careful composure of a woman who had learned a long time ago that stillness was its own kind of armor. She was watching Saskia the way you watched something you couldn't afford to look away from.

Smart woman. Always had been. Just not smart enough, apparently, to stop loving a man who destroyed everything he touched.

"You don't have to look at her like that," Saskia said pleasantly, crouching down to Mirelle's eye level in a way that was designed to feel condescending. "We're just visiting."

Mirelle said nothing.

Saskia smiled and stood back up.

Rhydian's phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out, looked at the screen, and felt the particular satisfaction of a thing confirmed. The photograph was clear enough. Fourth floor apartment building, third window from the left, a light burning behind thin curtains. Time stamped just past midnight.

He turned the screen toward Saskia without a word.

She looked at it for a moment, then looked at him, and something passed between them that didn't need language.

"That was fast," she said.

"It wasn't complicated. She drives the same route home every night. Parks in the same spot." Rhydian pocketed the phone. "Creatures of habit are easy to find."

Mirelle's eyes moved to him. Something shifted in her expression, something that had been composure a second ago and was now something colder and more focused.

"Whatever you're planning," she said quietly, "leave her out of it."

Rhydian looked at her with genuine curiosity. "You don't even know her."

"I know what she is to my son."

"Then you know she's already in it." He said it without cruelty, which somehow made it worse. Just a fact. Just the shape of things. "She was in it the moment he walked into that club. We didn't put her there. Fate did. We're just making use of the geography."

Mirelle's jaw tightened. She said nothing.

Saskia had drifted to the fireplace, picking up a framed photograph from the mantle and examining it with the detached interest of someone browsing a shop they had no intention of buying from. Kadence, maybe fifteen in the picture, standing beside his mother with his hand on her shoulder and that look on his face he'd always had even then. Like he was already carrying something too heavy and had already decided not to say so.

"He really is devoted to you," Saskia said, setting the photograph back down with exaggerated care. "It's almost sweet. Fourteen years of holding everything together. Running himself into the ground for a pack that mostly just feels sorry for him." She tilted her head. "Do you ever feel guilty about that?"

"Saskia." Rhydian said it without heat. A correction, nothing more.

She stepped back from the mantle.

Rhydian checked his watch. Eleven minutes since the phone call. Kadence had been at Ember when they'd reached him, which meant depending on how fast he was driving, and Rhydian had a reasonable idea of how fast Kadence was driving right now, they had somewhere between four and seven minutes before headlights appeared at the end of the cottage road.

That was enough.

The point had never been the confrontation. Kadence arriving to find his mother unharmed, shaken but unharmed, and the two of them already gone was exactly the intended outcome. Let him rage at empty air. Let him pace the cottage and hold his mother's hands and feel the particular helpless fury of someone who got there just in time to find nothing to fight.

That feeling would do more damage than anything Rhydian could have said to his face.

And while Kadence was here, burning hours he didn't have on a crisis that had already resolved itself, other things would be moving. The elders had ears everywhere. Word traveled fast in a pack this size. By morning the story would have shifted slightly in the retelling, the way stories always did, and somewhere in that shifting a seed of doubt would take root.

An Alpha who couldn't protect his own mother.

An Alpha whose mate lived alone and unguarded in a human apartment building on the wrong side of the territory line.

An Alpha who was already distracted, already compromised, already half lost to a woman the pack hadn't accepted yet.

Seeds were patient things.

Saskia appeared beside him, pulling on her coat with the unhurried movements of someone who had already decided the evening was a success.

"Time?" she asked.

Rhydian looked out the window at the empty road.

In the far distance, at the very edge of where the tree line broke, two pale lights appeared. Moving fast. The sound of an engine pushing hard carried through the cold air a second later.

"Now," he said.

He held the door open for his sister and didn't look back at Mirelle as they walked out into the dark.