Chapter 5

KIAN POV

"She's gone."

My Beta said it like it was nothing. A staffing problem. An inconvenience to be logged and forgotten.

"Gone where?"

"Nobody knows. Left the omega house before dawn. No note." He shrugged. "Good riddance, if you ask me, after the trouble she caused."

I didn't answer. I kept my face exactly where I'd trained it to stay, flat and unreadable, while something underneath my ribs dropped like a stone through water.

She was gone.

I told myself it didn't matter. I told myself it three times before I even made it back to my study, and by the third time I already knew I was lying.

I shut the door and stood there with my hand still on the handle.

Gone.

Alone. In the human world, or worse, somewhere with no pack protection at all, no healer, nothing, because of decisions I had made standing over her while she cried and I had said absolutely nothing to stop it.

My wolf snarled low in my chest. He'd been doing that for weeks, ever since the full moon, a constant restless pacing that never fully quieted no matter how many times I told him this was the right choice. He didn't care about right choices. He cared about her.

I sat down at my desk and stared at the papers in front of me without reading a single word.

My father used to sit exactly like this. I remembered it now, sharper than I wanted to. Him at this same desk, staring at nothing, after my mother left for the last time. I used to think it was grief. I understand now it was something worse. It was the specific rot of a man who knew, somewhere underneath all his excuses, that his own choices had built the cage his mate ran from.

I was not going to become that. I had promised myself that a hundred times since I was twelve years old, standing at his funeral, watching a pack bury an Alpha who'd let one woman unmake him.

I would not let one woman unmake me.

But she wasn't just one woman. That was the entire, unbearable problem. The bond had settled into my chest the second I woke beside her, a hook through the ribs that hadn't loosened once in the weeks since, no matter how coldly I'd spoken to her, no matter how many times I told myself it was only biology, only the moon, nothing that required action.

A knock came at the door.

"Alpha." My Gamma, Silas, stepped in without waiting for an answer, which meant it was urgent. "The Harts are asking about the engagement date. Marisol wants it moved up before word of the scandal spreads any further."

Scandal. As if Elira had done something to me, rather than the other way round.

"Tell them I'll consider it," I said.

Silas hesitated at the door. He'd served my father before me. He knew things about this family that most of the pack had long since forgotten.

"You should also know," he said carefully, "that the housekeeper the Harts dismissed years ago, the human woman, was seen in town yesterday. Talking to a young woman matching Elira's description."

Every muscle in my body went still.

"Greta," I said. "Robert's old housekeeper."

"The same one who was let go rather suddenly, if I remember right. Right around the time Elira's mother died."

I hadn't thought about that servant's dismissal in years. I hadn't had a reason to. Now the two facts sat side by side in my mind and refused to separate, and a slow, cold understanding began working its way up through my chest.

"Find out everything you can about why Greta was really dismissed," I said. "Quietly. I don't want the Harts knowing we're asking."

Silas's eyebrows rose slightly, but he nodded and left without another word.

I sat alone in my study with the engagement papers still unsigned in front of me, and for the first time since that morning I'd looked into Elira's eyes and told her it meant nothing, I let myself admit exactly how badly I had lied.

I didn't yet know how deep the rot in this family truly ran, or that by the time I found out, Elira would already be three steps ahead of me, building a life and a fortune out of nothing but fury and a stolen bottle of evidence, and that the next time I saw her face, she would be someone

I no longer recognised at all.