Elara

Chapter 5: Elara

Kae's Pov

I stood in that stairwell and let Karl Whispere's last sentence settle over me the way cold water settles, slowly, until there is no part of you it hasn't reached.

Someone at that table tonight ordered my father's death.

I have thought about my father's death every day for six years and I have never once let myself say the word murder out loud because the moment you say it you have to do something with it.

And I was not ready to do something with it until I was ready to do something with it properly and completely and without leaving anything on the table.

I turned and looked at Lucian. He was already looking at me.

"We should go meet her," I said.

"Kae…"

"We meet her now, Karl, where is she?"

Karl looked between us once and then he moved and we followed him down the remaining stairs and out through the east exit.

The the service road was empty the way Lucian had said it would be, no cameras, no light except what came from the building behind us.

Karl took us left and then left again into the narrow lane that ran between the Halcyon Building and the parking structure beside it.

Then we stopped in front of a woman who was leaning against the wall like she had been there for hours and wasn't planning on going anywhere.

And I just guessed that it was Elara. She was smaller than I expected and I don't know why I expected anything because I didn't know this woman.

I knew her name already, and what had been done to her pack and the outline of her as a reason for things that had already happened.

But not her face, not the way she stood, not the particular quality of her stillness which was the kind that comes from someone who has been surviving for a very long time and gotten very good at it.

She looked at Lucian first.

"You're not dead yet?" she asked.

"I’m working on it," Lucian said.

Then she looked at me and her expression changed in a way I couldn't fully read and she said, "Kae Armstrong." More like she was confirming something to herself.

"You have names," I said. "Karl said you have names."

"I have one name," she said. "The one I held back. The one I didn't give Lucian eight months ago because I needed to know first if he would actually do it or if he'd take the evidence and sit on it the way everyone else has sat on everything for eleven years." She looked at Lucian. "You did it."

"You used me," Lucian said, and his voice was completely flat.

"Yes," she said simply, and didn't apologize for it, and somehow that was more honest than anything else she could have done.

"The name," I said. She reached into her jacket and pulled out a folded envelope and held it toward me and I took it and opened it and unfolded the single page inside and read it in the light coming from my own phone screen.

The name at the top of the page was not something I expected.

It was not any of the fifteen Alphas who had been sitting at that table tonight.

It was a name I knew the way you know the layout of a house you grew up in, without thinking or having to look, because it was built into you at a level below conscious memory.

The name was that of my Beta. Ren Cole.

Ren Cole, who had been with me for four years and answered every call and managed every meeting.

Someone who had sat three rows behind me in that summit room tonight and handed me water when I asked for it.

I folded the page back up. I was very calm. I want to note that. I was completely calm in the way you are completely calm when something hits hard enough that your body just decides feeling it now is not an option and schedules it for later.

"There's proof," Elara said. "It's all on that page, the transaction records, the communication trail, the name of the man Vane paid to do it and who that man reported to afterward." She paused. "Ren Cole has been Vane's inside contact in your pack for three years. He came to you after your father died because your father's death is what created the opening."

Lucian said my name very quietly. I didn't answer because I was doing arithmetic in my head, every conversation I'd had with Ren in four years, every piece of information he had access to, every time I had trusted him with something I hadn't trusted to anyone else, and laying it against this, against what was on this page, and watching it all reframe itself into something uglier and more patient than anything I had built.

I thought about my father at fifty-three with a heart that had never failed him.

"Where is Ren now," I said.

"He is still in the building," Karl said. "On the thirtieth floor, I saw him go up when the lights cut."

"Who cut the lights," Lucian said, and he was looking at Elara when he said it.

She met his eyes. "I did. You needed to get out and I needed Armstrong to read that page before Ren figured out what I gave you." She pushed off the wall. "There's a car two blocks east, it'll take you somewhere safe, both of you, and in the morning you can decide what to do with what you know."

"And you," I said.

"I've been deciding what to do with what I know for six years," she said. "I'll be fine."

She walked away and Karl watched her go and I stood there with the folded page in my hand and six years of grief that had just changed its shape entirely.

Lucian stepped beside me and we stood there in the dark of that narrow lane and neither of us said anything for a moment.

Then he said, "Are you alright?"

I laughed and it came out too short. "No. I’m not fucking alright."

"Kae…"

"Ren was there," I said. "The night my father died, Ren was the one who called me, he was the one who said it was his heart, he was the one who handled every arrangement and I let him because I was…" I stopped. "I was grieving and he was there and I let him. And fter two years, I made him my beta."

Lucian didn't say anything and I was grateful for that because words right now were not what the moment needed.

Then my phone lit up in my hand. It was a message from an unknown number.

“Did she tell you about yourself and what she did?”***