Chapter 4: Invisible

Lola's POV

I stopped taking the pills on a Thursday.

Not because I had made a decision. My wolf simply refused the next dose. I stood at the bathroom sink with the tablet on my tongue and my body said no with a certainty that had nothing to do with thought. I spat it into the sink, rinsed my mouth, and looked at myself in the mirror for a long time.

Then I went downstairs to make breakfast that nobody would eat with me.

The house had a new rhythm now and I was not part of it.

Tristain came home earlier since Sofia moved in—after she came back and he said she had nowhere else to go, like that was the end of the discussion. His returning home earlier should have felt like something. Three months ago I was begging the universe for an evening where he walked through that door before eight. Now he was home by six every day, sometimes five thirty, and he walked past the kitchen where I was standing and went directly to wherever Sofia was.

I heard them before I saw them most mornings.

Her laugh first. Then his, lower, less guarded than the version he used with me. The baby between them like punctuation. I would come around the corner and the scene would shift — not dramatically, not obviously — just a slight realignment.

"Good morning, my Luna." Always warm. Always first.

"Morning," I would say.

And then I would sit at my own table in my own kitchen and feel like a guest who had overstayed.

The maids felt it too. I could see it in the way they moved around the house now, careful, avoiding eye contact with me in the hallways. Two of the original ones were already gone. Tristain had let them go quietly, one week apart, replacing them with new faces I didn't recognise who had appeared the same week Sofia moved in. When I asked him about it he said the agency had sent better candidates.

I didn't push.

I was doing a lot of not pushing.

"I need you at the coronation planning meeting on Friday," Tristain said over dinner.

Sofia was at the table. She was always at the table now. The baby was asleep upstairs and the three of us sat in a triangle that felt nothing like a family.

"What time?" I asked.

"Seven in the evening. The council wants to confirm the catering arrangements and the seating for the allied territories." He looked at me directly. "You're better at that than anyone. You know how to handle the egos in that room."

"You want me to manage the seating plan for your coronation dinner."

"I want you there because you're my wife and it would look strange if you weren't." He said it simply, like it was obvious, like there was nothing underneath it worth examining.

Sofia refilled her glass without looking up.

I looked at him for a moment. This man who had stood at the edge of a lake five years ago and promised to go to war for me. Who had held me in a hospital car park and shaken with grief that I now was not sure belonged to me. Who had built an entire reputation on the foundation of loving me well, and used it, I was beginning to understand, just long enough to get what he wanted.

"I'll be there," I said.

He smiled. "I knew I could count on you."

Sofia finally looked up.

Our eyes met across the table.

She looked away first.

****

I found the documents on a Tuesday night.

I hadn't been looking for them. I had been in the study trying to finish the final IPO structures, the ones I had been pushing through on willpower alone while my body did whatever it was doing, or not doing, since I had stopped the pills. I needed an older financial file, something from the company's third year, and I went into the shared drive the way I had a hundred times before.

The folder was there.

But the numbers inside were not right.

I pulled another file. Then another. I went back further, year by year, and the further back I went the clearer the shape of it became.

The company's capital had been moved in increments. Small enough not to trigger an automatic flag. Each transfer signed by Tristain. Each one timed, I noticed with a cold that started in my chest and moved outward, to the weeks I had been most unwell. The weeks I was in bed, or at appointments, or too exhausted to sit at a desk.

My shares had been restructured.

My name was missing where it was supposed to be.

I sat back in the chair.

My hands were steady. I was surprised by that.

I opened the joint account records next. The account we had opened together in our first year, the one I had put my first real business earnings into, back when the company was still a dream with a spreadsheet attached. It had been converted to a personal account. His name only. The bank correspondence had gone to an email address I had never seen before.

He had made a separate email address to receive the bank's notifications.

I sat with that for a moment.

All of it, the shares, the capital, the account. It had been done slowly, deliberately, over years. This was done strategically, it was like something you plan from the beginning and execute patiently, only when you're certain the other person is too tired or too sick or too trusting to look closely.

I thought about the pills I had stopped taking.

I thought about the diagnosis that had arrived at exactly the right moment, when the IPO was right around the corner.

I thought about Tristain's face in Dr. Callum's office. The tears that had come quickly. The hands that had held mine so tightly.

I picked up my phone.

I did not call him.

I called a private investigator, a packless wolf operating outside territory, a name passed to me months ago by a financial contact who had once said keep this number, you never know, and I stared at the wall while it rang.

He answered on the third ring.

"I need a full background check," I said. "Financial records, legal records, personal history. Everything you can find." I kept my voice even. "On my husband."

He didn’t say anything for five seconds.

Then — "How soon do you need it?"

"As soon as possible," I said.

I ended the call.

Outside the study door, the house was quiet. Upstairs, the baby was sleeping. In this same house, the man I had given everything to was also sleeping, peacefully, the way he always did.

I turned back to the screen.

There was one more thing I hadn't checked yet.

Our marriage certificate.

I had never actually held the physical document. Tristain had handled the registration, said it was being processed through the council, said these things took time. In five years I had never once pushed for it because pushing would have meant admitting I didn't trust him. And I had trusted him.

I typed in the pack council's legal registry.

I entered both our names.

I waited.

The search returned one result.

No legal union on record.

I read it three times.

Then I closed the laptop slowly, pushed my chair back, and walked to the window. The pack territory stretched out below, quiet and dark, the lights of other homes where other wolves were sleeping beside the people they had chosen.

I had never been his wife.

Not legally. Not once. Not ever.

I pressed my forehead against the cold glass.

And I made myself a promise, quietly, to no one but myself—and the wolf inside me who had been trying to warn me for months.

I will not leave this house as nothing.