LOGINZADENI gave them until morning.Damian thought I should move immediately. I told him no. I wanted them to sleep in their beds one last night believing they were safe. I wanted them to come down to breakfast and sit at the table and pour their coffee and feel completely, entirely untouchable.And then I wanted to take that from them.I called the full pack at nine.Not a meeting. A gathering.Callum and Tobias both came.Callum came in talking, easy, relaxed, making a comment to one of the warriors near the door. He scanned the room with the particular casualness of a man who has learned to perform relaxed as a survival skill. His eyes moved over Damian. Moved over me. Found nothing on either of our faces and took that as good news.It wasn't.Tobias came in quieter. He stood near the back. He didn't look for exits…that was interesting. He looked at me directly, just once, and then looked at the floor. A man who has decided something.Reina was there. She stood with Lena near the far
REINASofia called at nine.I'd been sitting on my bed staring at the wall and not thinking about any of the things I was thinking about, and her name on my screen felt like a rope thrown into deep water.I picked up before the second ring."Hey." Her voice was warm"Hey," I said."You sound tired.""I'm fine.""Reina.""I'm a little tired."She made a sound that meant she didn't believe me and was choosing to let it go, which was its own kind of kindness.Then she told me about her week, the university program, a professor she found annoying, a girl in her cohort who'd become something more than a study partner, the way the city looked at night from her window.I lay back on my pillow and listened and let her voice fill the room."You're not talking," she said after a while."I'm listening.""You're being weird.""I'm always weird.""You're being a different kind of weird." A pause. She had good instincts, Sofia. Always had. "Are you okay?I thought about the honest answer. About the
ZADENI heard it at eleven forty-three.It wasn't a sound really. It was like a missing sound.The garden at night has its kind of quiet. I got used to it over the weeks. I would stand at my office window staring out more than I should have.This was different. The silence felt off. Something was wrong, with how quiet it was.My wolf was already moving before I decided to.I was out of my office and through the house in under a minute. The east corridor, the back passage, the garden entrance. Moving fast with the focus of a man who has stopped questioning his wolf's instincts on this specific subject.I came through the garden entrance and saw them.Two figures at the far wall. They are not part of my pack. I know every person in my pack by the way they move and these two people are moving in a completely different way. They are being very careful and deliberate, with a kind of energy that you can tell they have been taught to use when they are sneaking into a place, like this.Blackt
REINASofia did not want to go.I had known she wouldn't. I had prepared for it.I had rehearsed the conversation in my head three times before I knocked on her door Thursday morning and I still felt the weight of it when I said the words."I need you to go home… today."She looked at me from the bed where she had been sitting cross-legged with her phone. "Why?""Because things are about to get complicated here and I need to know you're somewhere safe.""I'm safe here.""Sofia.""There are literally guards everywhere, Reina. It's probably the safest place I've ever been in my entire…""I need you safe so I can focus," I said. "That's the truth. I can't do what I need to do here if I'm watching you at the same time. I can't carry both things at once."She looked at me.Her mouth opened then closed.The argument she had prepared dissolving because I hadn't given her something to push against. Just the truth. Simple and direct and not possible to argue with because it wasn't about rules
ZADENDamian came to my office at seven.I looked up from the eastern alliance review I had been staring at for the better part of an hour."She's with me," he said.Reina walked in behind him.I looked at her. She looked at me. Her expression was the focused, not tense, just present. The one I had learned meant she had already done considerable work and was here to deliver the result of it."Sit down," I said.She sat. Damian sat beside her. Which was itself a statement. Damian's chair was usually to my right, not across from me beside someone else."Tell me," I said.Damian told me.He went through it, Callum's confirmed handwriting on the note, the communication logs, the two encrypted channels running to the same destination. Then he looked at Reina and nodded.She took it from there.She laid out Tobias. Sofia's account of the phone call. Her own observations, the questions, the access to operational information he shouldn't have, the corridor outside my private study. The arriva
REINAI needed to think before I went to Zaden.Not because I doubted Sofia. I believed her completely, the way she had described the phone call and everything. Sofia was many things but she was not dramatic about facts. She saved the drama for opinions.What I needed to think about was how to present it.Because walking into Zaden's office with my seventeen-year-old sister's secondhand account of a partial phone conversation was not going to be enough. Not for what I was suggesting. Not for what it meant if I was right about Tobias.I needed it to connect to something else. Something already in the picture.I sat in the garden after I sent Sofia to rest, she had gone pale after the adrenaline wore off and I wasn't going to let her sit with it alone, so I went through everything methodically. The way Reina Castillo had always survived. By building the picture from its pieces.Tobias.Arrived unannounced. Inserted himself into my orbit within hours. Asked questions that felt warm but b
ZADENI was not watching her.I want to be clear about that. I was at my desk, where I had been since six in the morning, working through a stack of territory reports that needed responses before end of day. I was working. The window was simply there, the way windows are always simply there and at
REINAI found it by accident.I wasn't looking for anything. I wasn't even supposed to be at the back of the house, I had taken a wrong turn somewhere between the east wing and the kitchen, which was embarrassing enough that I was grateful nobody was around to see it.This house was enormous in the
REINAI wasn't trying to eavesdrop.I want that on record, even if the only person keeping record is me. I was not standing outside Zaden's office with my ear pressed to the door like some desperate, lovesick girl with nothing better to do. I was walking past. That's all. I was walking past and the
ZADENI had been awake since four in the morning.Not because of pack business. Not because of a threat or a territory issue or anything that had a clean, logical explanation I could point to and say… that. That is the reason.I was awake because something had been sitting at the edges of my mind s







