Elara

Chapter 3: Elara

Kae's Pov

I looked at the name and message on the screen for three seconds and then I looked at Lucian, the man who had not flinched once since confessing to murder in front of fifteen Alphas.

He was looking at his Beta's message like it had reached through the phone and grabbed him by the throat.

I took the phone and turned the screen back toward myself and read it again.

“They know about Elara.”****

"Who is Elara?" I asked.

Lucian stood up and held his hand out for the phone and I pulled it back because I am not in the habit of handing things to people who haven't answered my questions.

"Kae." He said tiredly.

"Who is Elara?" I repeated.

He looked at me and something moved across his face, and then he sat back down and pressed both hands flat on his thighs and breathed out once through his nose.

"Give me the phone and I will tell you everything," he said. "But I need to call Karl first because if Karl sent that message it means something has already happened and I need to know what."

I handed him the phone. And he called his beta. It rang eleven times and went to nothing, and the way Lucian's jaw tightened told me everything about what that meant.

He called again and again but got the same silence and then he set the phone down on the floor between us and looked at the wall.

"Karl has been my Beta for nine years," he said. "He doesn't send messages like that and then goes dark. That's not who he is."

"So someone sent it for him?" I asked.

"Or someone sent it as him." He was now looking directly at me.

I let that sit for a moment because both of those options were bad in different directions and I needed to think clearly and thinking clearly was becoming more difficult than it should have been in a locked room on the twenty-eighth floor with Lucian Freud sitting four feet away from me looking like that.

I stood up and walked to the door and put my back against it and crossed my arms.

"About Elara," I said again.

He looked at me. "You're not going to like it."

"I haven’t liked anything that has happened tonight so far. So keep going."

He was quiet for a moment that stretched long enough to be a decision and then he said, "Elara was a wolf. She ran a small independent pack out of the southern corridor about seven years ago. And the pack has no territory claim, they are just thirty wolves living quietly outside the political structure." He paused. "Vane wanted the southern corridor. It was the last piece of territory in the north that wasn't formally aligned and he wanted it absorbed before the next Summit so the map was clean…"

"I know about the southern corridor," I cut him off. "Vane absorbed it six years ago. Because there was no resistance."

"There was no resistance because there was nobody left to resist." And somehow the room went very quiet.

"Elara's pack was removed," Lucian continued, and the word removed landed the way he meant it to. "And they never relocated or disbanded. They just got removed. All thirty of them, overnight, before any of it was ever put on a record that would reach the Summit table."

I stared at him. "Vane ordered that."

"Vane ordered it and someone carried it out and that someone was not acting alone." He looked up at me then. "Your father was the Alpha of the southern corridor's neighboring territory at the time Kae. He would have known. He would have seen the signs, the movement, and timing. If he had gone to the Summit with what he knew it would have ended Vane's entire tenure before it reached the next vote."

My father died six years ago. And the report said it was due to heart failure. I had buried him and grieved him and moved forward because that is what you do and that is what he would have wanted.

He was fifty-three years old and had never been sick a day in his life.

"Kae," Lucian said quietly.

"Keep going," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I felt.

"I found out eight months ago. Not all of it, but enough to know that Vane had been sitting at the head of that table for eleven years on top of what he did and nobody was going to touch him because nobody had the evidence and nobody had the standing." He stopped. "I had both."

"So you killed him?" I asked.

"I made the best choice." He responded not looking at me.

"That's the same thing."

"It's not the same thing," he said, and for the first time tonight his voice had an edge to it. "Killing is what Vane did to thirty wolves who never raised a hand against anyone. What I did tonight was a debt being paid. You can disagree with the method. You don't get to make them equal."

I didn't say anything to that because I was thinking about my father at fifty-three with a heart that had never failed him and a neighbor who had seen something he was never supposed to see.

Scrolsal knocked twice and opened the door locking his eyes on me.

"The vote is locked," he said. "And at dawn." He looked at me specifically. "Armstrong, your objection is noted and it costs you nothing to withdraw it now. Your path to the title is clean. You've earned it and everyone in that room knows it. So step back and let this proceed."

He said it kindly. That was the part that almost worked.

Then he said, "Vane always spoke very highly of your father. It would have pleased him to see his territory go to someone worthy."

And he left.

I stood there and thought about the word *pleased* and the word *worthy* and my father at fifty-three and thirty wolves in a southern corridor that nobody talks about anymore.

Then I turned around and looked at Lucian Freud who was watching me with the careful stillness of a man who knows the next thirty seconds will decide something.

"Tell me everything," I said. "All of it. Every name and detail you have."

He held my eyes. "And then?"

"And then I'm getting you out of here."

It seems as if relief filled his face, except for Lucian Freud it looked more like pain.

His mouth opened to talk when the lights went out.