CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

KNOX

The archivist's name was Petra. She'd been with the pack for thirty years — longer than me, longer than my father's tenure — and when she called me I knew before she said anything that whatever she'd found was the kind of thing that changes the shape of the past.

She said: "During the estate audit. Documents in a sealed file. I need you to know about them before they go into the official record."

She sent them encrypted.

I read them once. Then I read them again. Then I put the phone face-down on the kitchen counter and stood in the empty penthouse and was very, very still for a long time.

My father had contracted a tracker named Belos nine days after the rejection. Belos specialized in surveillance and containment — a euphemism that, in pack terms, meant he made problems go away quietly. The documents specified Riley's route. Her expected trajectory. Instructions to ensure she did not reach Seattle intact.

The brake failure. Her first apartment's electrical fire, the one that took everything she owned in the second month. Three other incidents I hadn't known about, documented in Belos's reports as *completed interventions.*

She'd had no idea.

She'd been running from a city, from a pack, from me — and she'd also been running, unknowingly, from an active threat that I had been the indirect cause of. That I had been the direct cause of, because my rejection had been the trigger and my father had done what my father always did, which was treat the world as a system of problems to be solved with available resources.

I killed him six months after the rejection. That was in the documents too, though Petra didn't know that part — the hunting accident was officially what it had always been listed as, and the documents she'd found predated it, and the connection was mine to carry.

I'd killed him for the right reasons. I want to be clear that I had killed my father for the right reasons, because what those documents described was a pattern that would have continued, that had likely continued in other directions I still didn't know about, and that ended when he ended.

But I'd also done it after. Not in time to protect her. Not in time to undo what had already been done.

I went downstairs at eleven-thirty at night.

Riley opened the door half-asleep — messy hair, paint on her wrist she'd missed washing off, the faded sleep shirt she wore when it was cold. She looked at my face and woke up fully in about three seconds.

I went in. Sat on her kitchen floor. And told her.

I told her about Petra. About the file. About Belos and the brake failure and the apartment fire. I told her about the other three interventions. I told her about my father, the real version, the version she'd never had, because she deserved the full shape of it.

When I finished, the kitchen was quiet.

"I knew about the brake thing," she said. Her voice was completely flat. "I took the car to the mechanic and he said the line had been cut. I told myself it was vandalism. Random. Seattle can be — I told myself it was nothing." She paused. "The fire too. I always thought the wiring was old."

"It wasn't the wiring."

"No." A long breath. "No."

Then she started shaking.

Not crying, not at first. Just the shaking that comes before, when your body gets the information before your face does. I moved off the stool and sat on the floor beside her. She didn't ask me to. She didn't tell me not to.

I didn't say anything about the bond. I didn't say anything about us, about the sixty days, about what any of it meant going forward. I just sat there because there wasn't anything I could offer that was adequate and I knew it, and sometimes the only honest thing to do is be present without pretending that your presence fixes anything.

She cried. Eventually. Quietly, turned slightly away, and I sat beside her and stayed.

I don't know what time it was when she stopped. Late enough that the city outside had gone quiet. She'd ended up leaning against my shoulder without really deciding to, and I'd stayed very still so she wouldn't notice and move, and at some point the weight of her head got heavier and her breathing evened out.

She was asleep.

I sat on her kitchen floor with her asleep against my shoulder and the pre-dawn city through the window and thought about Belos and the documents and the things I still needed to do. Not angrily. The anger had burned out somewhere in the first twenty minutes and what was left was something quieter and more specific — a precise and organized resolve.

He wouldn't get near her again. Belos was retired, which in his line of work was either a coincidence or wasn't, but the people who'd hired him and the people who were currently trying to invoke the Heir Recall Act and the people who were making inquiries about where my mate lived — they were not going to get close to her or my children.

I'd been approaching this politically, legally, carefully. I'd been giving the pack system room to work.

I was done giving it room.

When morning came I would call Grayson and start a different kind of preparation. When morning came I would escalate every open file simultaneously. But for now Riley was asleep against my shoulder and outside the window the city was going blue with early light, and I sat with the weight of her and the weight of what I knew and I did not move.