What the blood carries

"Who called?" I ask.

Nadia doesn't answer right away. She gets up and checks the hallway again through the narrow gap in the door, then closes it and turns the small lock at the handle. I have never seen her lock that door in three years.

"He didn't give a name," she says. "He asked if we had a Volana wolf registered with the pack. I told him no. He said he already knew the answer and hung up."

The folder is still open on my lap. I look at the test results without really seeing them. My brain is doing that thing it does when there is too much incoming at once, going very quiet and very still, sorting fast underneath the surface.

"How would someone outside this pack know to call here?" I ask.

"Because a Volana pregnancy puts off a signal." Nadia sits back down across from me, her hands flat on the desk. "I know that sounds impossible given what your father did to you. But the suppression ritual didn't eliminate your bloodline, Lena. It buried it. And buried things don't stay buried when the body has a reason to fight back."

I close the folder.

"How long have you known the suppression didn't work?" My voice comes out steady. I am proud of it.

She holds my gaze without flinching, which tells me she rehearsed this. "I suspected it for about a year. I confirmed it four months ago when I ran a standard wellness panel and your markers came back wrong. Wrong in a way that doesn't happen unless something dormant is activating."

"Four months ago." I let that sit in the air between us. "You knew for four months."

"I was trying to figure out how to tell you without telling him." She means Bastien. She doesn't have to say the name. "Your contract was still active. If it came out that you were a fully intact Volana wolf living inside Iron Fang territory, the political fallout would have been immediate and dangerous. For you specifically."

I stand up because sitting still is no longer something my body will agree to.

I walk to the window. It looks out onto the side street, not the main entrance, and there is nothing down there except a delivery truck and two pigeons on a ledge and the ordinary Tuesday afternoon world that has no idea what is happening four floors up.

Eight weeks pregnant. Wolf waking up. Someone already calling.

My father's card still in my coat pocket.

"The person who called," I say, still looking out the window. "You said he already knew the answer. Which means he wasn't fishing. He was confirming."

"Yes."

"Which means he picked up the signal before today."

"Yes."

I press two fingers to the glass. It's cold against my skin and I focus on that for a second, the specific temperature of it, just to stay inside my own body.

"Cassian Wolfe," Nadia says quietly behind me.

I turn around.

She has a second folder open now, thinner than the first. She slides it across the desk but doesn't tell me to look at it, just leaves it there.

"He's the Alpha of the Ashen Pack. Northern territory, about four hundred miles from here. He's been looking for a Volana wolf for at least a decade." She pauses. "There are three confirmed disappearances of Volana bloodline women in the last eight years. All in territories that border his."

The room feels smaller than it did a minute ago.

"He's a collector," I say.

"I think he believes Volana blood is the key to something. I don't know what exactly. But the search has been consistent and methodical and very, very quiet." She looks at me directly. "He will not stop now that he has a location."

I pick up the second folder. There's a photograph clipped to the inside cover. A man in his late thirties, photographed from a distance like someone didn't want him to know the picture was being taken. He's broad, dark-haired, and he's looking at something off-camera with the focused expression of a person who has already decided what they want and is simply working out the logistics.

I close it.

"Does Bastien know about Wolfe?" I ask.

"Bastien knows of him. They've had political dealings. But he doesn't know about the disappearances and he doesn't know Wolfe has been actively tracking Volana bloodlines." She folds her hands. "I've been sitting on this information for four months trying to decide what the right thing to do is."

"And what did you decide?"

"That you needed to know before you walked out that door." She meets my eyes. "Because if you leave Iron Fang territory today, you will be unprotected. And Wolfe already knows you're here."

I set both folders back on her desk.

Here is the thing about being raised by Gregor Crest. You learn very early that every person who tells you they're protecting you is also protecting something else. You learn to find the second reason before you agree to anything.

Nadia is genuinely trying to help me. I believe that. But she is also a pack doctor inside Iron Fang territory and whatever she knows, whatever she's held back for four months, exists inside a system that is not mine.

"What do you want me to do with this information?" I ask.

"I want you to stay," she says. "At least until we can figure out how to contain the signal. There are ways to suppress it temporarily, certain compounds that can dampen the Volana markers. It wouldn't be permanent but it would buy time."

"Time for what?"

She hesitates. Just one beat, barely noticeable. But I notice.

"Time to tell Bastien," she says.

There it is.

I pick up my bag from the floor. I check my phone, which has a car confirmation for ten AM that I have already missed by forty minutes. I pull up the app and reschedule for noon.

"I'll think about it," I say.

"Lena, if Wolfe has already called here, he is already moving. This isn't something you have days to think about."

"I understand that." I pull my coat straight. "I said I'll think about it."

She nods because she knows me well enough by now to understand that pushing harder will only make me more certain.

I open the office door.

Bastien is standing in the hallway.

Not leaning against the wall. Not pretending to be there by coincidence. Just standing there with his arms at his sides and his jaw set and his eyes on my face the way they get when he has already processed something and arrived at a position he is not going to move from.

Behind me I hear Nadia go very still.

"How long have you been out here?" I ask.

"Long enough," he says.

His voice is quiet but there is something underneath it that I have never heard before. Not anger exactly. Something tighter than anger. Something that sounds almost like fear wrapped in control.

"The call came in on my line too," he says. "Routed through the pack security system. Whoever it was, he didn't just call Nadia." His eyes don't leave mine. "He called me directly. He said one sentence and hung up."

My hand tightens on the strap of my bag.

"What did he say?" I ask.

Bastien's jaw tightens.

"He said, tell the Volana wolf that the contract ending doesn't change what she is. And that I should enjoy the time I have left with her.”