Chapter Five

ELI'S POV 

The call came on a Wednesday, seven days after the dinner, while I was in the middle of a deposition I had been waiting three months to conduct.

I let it go to voicemail.

It rang again.

I excused myself from the conference room with the kind of apology that isn't really an apology, stepped into the hallway, and answered.

"Eli Navarro."

"Mr. Navarro." A voice I didn't recognize. Male, measured, the specific register of someone who expects to be listened to. "My name is Cael Draven. I'm the Director of the regional Supernatural Governance Board. I think you know who that makes me."

I knew exactly who that made him. The governance board had been the structural resistance behind every major Omega rights case for the last decade. Draven had been its director for six of those years. I had never spoken to him directly. I had read his rulings, annotated his decisions, built arguments specifically designed to go around the walls he constructed. I knew his legal fingerprints better than I knew some of my colleagues' faces.

"I know who you are," I said.

"Good. I'll be brief. I'm calling as a courtesy — one professional to another — to let you know that there are several board members who have significant concerns about the treaty timeline. I wouldn't want those concerns to become formal complications down the road." A pause. "I thought it would be kinder to mention it informally first."

I leaned against the hallway wall. "What kind of complications."

"The procedural kind. Questions about jurisdiction, standing, the scope of the filing." Another pause, lighter, almost conversational. "Nothing that couldn't be resolved with a different approach to the timeline. Or perhaps a different lead counsel."

The hallway was beige and silent and I looked at the door to the conference room where three months of preparation were waiting for me.

"Are you suggesting I step down from my own case," I said.

"I'm suggesting," Draven said carefully, "that sometimes the most effective advocates know when their personal proximity to a matter creates complications for the matter itself."

I said nothing.

"You've done excellent work," he said, with the warmth of someone who has never once meant it. "I'd hate to see a technicality undermine it."

There was a beat of silence between us — the kind that has weight, that both parties are aware of, that means something is being decided without being said.

"I appreciate the call," I said finally, in the tone I use when I appreciate nothing about something.

"Of course," he said. "My door is always open, Mr. Navarro. I hope we can keep this collegial."

He hung up before I could.

I stood in the beige hallway for exactly four seconds. Then I went back into the deposition.

---

I finished it. I was, from the outside, completely fine — sharp questions, clean record, exactly the attorney that three months of preparation produced. The witness on the other side left looking like he'd been cross-examined by something that didn't need to sleep.

When it was over and the room had cleared, Drea stayed behind.

She closed the door. She sat across from me. She waited.

"Draven called," I said.

Her expression did something brief and controlled. "What did he want."

"To suggest, very politely, that I consider stepping down from the treaty case."

"On what grounds."

"Personal proximity to the matter."

She was quiet for a moment. I watched her process it — not just the call, but the architecture of the call. Drea thinks in structures, in the shapes that things make when you step back far enough to see them.

"He knows," she said. "About you and Kieran."

"About the family connection at minimum."

"And he's using it."

"He's warning me he'll use it. There's a difference." I pulled my notes together. "He wants me to remove myself so the case stalls and he doesn't have to get his hands dirty doing it."

Drea nodded slowly. Then: "Are you going to tell me you're fine again."

"I'm strategically concerned."

"That's not the same thing."

"No," I agreed. "It isn't."

She was quiet for a moment, which with Drea always means something is being assembled. Then: "How did he know. About the family connection."

I looked at her.

"It's not public," she said. "Your father's marriage isn't in any pack registry yet. Sienna Voss hasn't changed her name on any legal document I've seen." She leaned forward. "So how does the director of the governance board know that you sat at Kieran Voss's family dinner seven days ago."

I hadn't asked that question yet. I should have asked it in the hallway. The fact that I hadn't asked it meant the call had rattled me more than I'd admitted to myself, which was useful information about my own state that I filed away to deal with later.

"Someone told him," I said.

"Yes. Someone close enough to know." She held my gaze. "Eli. Someone inside that dinner, or someone who was told about it by someone inside that dinner."

The list of people at that dinner was very short. I thought about each of them in sequence, the way I work through a witness list before a cross — not accusation, just assessment. My father, who tells people things when he's comfortable. Sienna, who I'd stake a significant amount on being exactly who she appeared. Kieran, who had no reason to arm the man currently pressuring him about his medical situation.

Which left the people who were told about the dinner afterward.

"It's someone in Kieran's circle," I said.

Drea said nothing. She didn't need to.

She opened her laptop and pulled up the case file and said: "Then let's build something he can't touch. What do we need."

---

I have a habit, when things get complicated, of going back to the beginning.

Not emotionally. Practically. I go back to the first document, the original filing, the note I wrote myself before anything had been built yet, when the case was just a conviction and a direction.

I went back that night.

At the top of the first page, in my own handwriting: *Because it's right.*

I sat with that.

I thought about Draven's voice on the phone. I thought about his phrase — *personal proximity to the matter* — and how technically, legally, he was not entirely wrong. I was personally proximate to this matter. I had been for ten years. The proximity was called a rejection in front of two hundred wolves, and it had made me a lawyer, and the lawyer had made this case, and the case had arrived at a point where the one signature it needed belonged to the man my father had just made my stepbrother.

Proximity, yes. He wasn't wrong about that.

What he was wrong about was thinking that proximity would make me smaller.

My phone buzzed on the desk. I looked at it.

Kieran Voss. Direct number — not his office line, not his legal team. His number.

I stared at it for one long moment.

Then I answered.

"Eli," he said. His voice was different from the dinner. Something had been removed from it — the careful, the measured, the Alpha-public. What was left sounded like someone who had been awake since three in the morning.

"Kieran," I said.

A silence. Then:

"Draven called you, didn't he."