Chapter 5: The Heir

Lola's POV

I did not sleep.

I sat in the study until the sky outside the window moved from black to the particular dark blue that comes just before dawn, the financial records still open on the screen in front of me, the words no legal union on record sitting in my chest like a stone I had swallowed whole.

By five in the morning I had made a list.

Everything I had built. Everything that was mine before I ever met him. Every asset, every contract, every proprietary document the IPO depended on — the core materials that existed because of my mind and my labour and my years of burning through the night while he slept. I went through it methodically, the way I had learned to do everything, quietly and without performance.

By six I heard his alarm go off upstairs.

By six fifteen I heard Sofia's door open down the corridor.

By six twenty the three of us were in the kitchen and I was making coffee like none of it was happening.

"You look like you didn't sleep," Tristain said, not looking up from his phone.

"I slept fine."

"You should rest more. Dr. Callum said the fatigue gets worse if you push through it." He turned a page of something on his screen. "Did you take your medication last night?"

I poured his coffee and set it in front of him.

"Yes," I said.

Sofia came in. She went to the baby first — she always went to the baby first — lifting her from the small seat by the window, settling her against her hip with the ease of someone who had been doing it her whole life. Not learned. Instinctive.

"She was up at four," Sofia said to Tristain. Not to me. To him.

"Is she alright?" he asked. To Sofia. Not to me.

"She's fine now. Just unsettled."

I stood at the counter and drank my coffee and watched the two of them talk about the child I had been told was abandoned at a border gate, in my kitchen, in my home, with a familiarity that had long since stopped pretending to be anything other than what it was.

I set my cup down.

"I'm going out this morning," I said.

Tristain looked up. "Where?"

"Errands." I picked up my bag. "I won't be long."

He watched me for a second. Something moved behind his eyes, a brief calculation, quickly smoothed over. "Take the driver."

"I'll drive myself."

"Lola…"

"I'll drive myself, Tristain."

I left before he could finish the sentence.

****

The private investigator's name was Dre.

He met me at a diner outside pack territory. He was already seated when I arrived, a closed folder on the table in front of him.

He pushed it toward me without ceremony.

"It's all in there," he said. "I'll walk you through the highlights if you want, but I think you'd rather read it yourself."

I opened it.

The photograph was on top.

Tristain and Sofia. Formal wear. Smiling at the camera. Behind them the unmistakable interior of a registry office that had pale walls and a clerk's desk and a bouquet of flowers that nobody had put enough thought into.

A marriage certificate.

Dated fourteen months into my relationship with Tristain.

I turned the page.

The DNA report was second. A private laboratory, outside pack territory. The baby's bloodline matched Tristain at full paternity. The match was not partial, not inconclusive.

Ninety-two percent.

I closed the folder.

Dre was watching me carefully, the way people do when they’re waiting for the moment something sinks in… something they know will break you.

It didn't break me.

I had already done the breaking alone at three in the morning in a study with the door shut. This was just confirmation. This was just the world catching up to what my wolf had known for months.

"There's a second envelope," Dre said. "Under the folder."

I looked down.

A smaller envelope, plain white, my name written on the front in handwriting I didn't recognise.

"Where did this come from?"

"It was delivered to my office yesterday morning. Someone knew you were coming to me." He paused. "Someone has been trying to reach you for a while, it seems. Whoever it is, they were careful."

I opened it.

A single page. Dense with legal language. I read it once. Then again more slowly.

Then I sat very still.

In the matter of the Nightwood bloodline estate and the rightful heir to the founding seat of Crescent Ridge Pack council—

I kept reading.

My father's name. My mother's name. A date, twenty years ago, the year they died. A trust. A fortune held in bloodline custody for two decades, frozen, waiting. A founding seat on the Alpha Council that had been held under illegal proxy authority since their deaths, occupied by a man named Gerald Nightwood.

My uncle.

A man I had never met.

A man who had spent twenty years making sure I never would.

At the bottom of the page, there was one line that made the rest of the document feel like background noise.

The sole living heir to the Nightwood bloodline is confirmed by blood and by the Moon's Seal.

I looked up slowly.

"Who sent this?" My voice was barely above a whisper.

"A lawyer," Dre said. "Your father's lawyer. He's been trying to reach you for two years." He leaned forward slightly. "Your husband has been intercepting his correspondence. Every letter. Every call. For two years, Lola, someone has been trying to tell you who you are."

The diner was noisy around us. Wolves at other tables eating breakfast, talking, laughing, living ordinary mornings. I sat in the middle of it and felt the floor of my entire life shift beneath me.

Nightwood.

I had grown up in the Crescent Ridge Pack Orphanage with no bloodline, no sponsor, no family name. The pack had looked at me like I was an  orphan. I had built everything I had from nothing, or what I believed was nothing.

But it was never nothing.

It had always been something.

It had always been this.

"The crescent mark," I said slowly. The birthmark on my inner thigh, the one I had covered my entire life without knowing why. The one I had always felt strangely protective of, strangely private about, without ever having a reason.

"The Moon's Seal," Dre said quietly. "The founding pack's proof of royal bloodline. Your uncle has spent twenty years and a great deal of money making sure you never learned what it meant."

I thought about Tristain.

About the marriage that had never been filed.

About the title he had received the day we bonded — Alpha of Consort, access to pack governance, a seat at tables his bloodline could never have reached.

About the company I had built and the shares that had been quietly moved out of my name.

About the pills.

About the diagnosis.

About a man who had found the Nightwood heir before she knew she was one, and had spent five years extracting everything he could from a woman he intended to leave with nothing.

I folded the letter.

I put it in my bag.

I looked at Dre across the table.

"I need one more thing," I said. "The pills. The ones Dr. Callum prescribed. I need them tested at an independent laboratory. Outside pack territory. Outside anyone's reach."

Dre studied me. "You think—"

"I think," I said carefully, "that a perfectly healthy wolf doesn't collapse at a press conference without a reason." I held his gaze. "And I think that reason has been dissolving in a glass of water every morning for the last eight months."

The diner hummed around us.

Dre nodded once.

I stood, picked up my bag, and walked to the door.

Outside, the morning was bright and ordinary, the pack territory going about its business the way it always did. I sat in the car. I did not cry.

I thought about a little girl in an orphanage who had been told she was nobody, who had believed it, who had worked herself to the bone to become something from nothing — not knowing that the nothing had been manufactured. That the nobody had been a deliberate construction, built by men who needed her to stay small so they could stay powerful.

I thought about everything they had taken.

And then I thought about everything I was going to take back.

I started the car.

My phone rang. Unknown number.

My hand was already moving away from it, letting it go to voicemail when something made me stop. My wolf. The same instinct that had refused the pill. The same quiet certainty that had been right about everything else.

I answered.

Silence for a moment.

Then a voice—deep, low, the kind that made the room shrink around it.

"Miss Nightwood."

My grip tightened on the phone.

"My name is Williams Schofield," the voice said. "And I think it's time we met."