MasukChapter 158He texted me the morning after his release.Not a long message. Just can we talk? Once. Properly. I'll come wherever is easiest for you.I showed it to Matthias. He read it and handed my phone back and said nothing, which was his way of saying the decision was entirely mine and he wasn't going to make it easier or harder by having an opinion out loud.I texted back: The café on Brent Street. Thursday at eleven.The same café where I'd told him about Cassius. Neutral ground that had already held one honest conversation between us. It felt right to end things where a different kind of beginning had happened.He was there before me.Same corner table. Coffee he wasn't drinking yet. The plain clothes he'd been wearing since his release, nothing announcing anything about who his father was or what his name used to mean.He looked up when I came in and there was none of the old complexity in it, none of the mate bond's pull, none of the hunger, none of the entitlement that had o
Chapter 157The paperwork came through on a Thursday.Dante brought it to Matthias's office in the morning with the neutral expression he used when something had multiple layers and he was leaving the layers for Matthias to sort through rather than editorialising.Matthias read it. Set it down. Looked at the window for a moment.Then he called the holding facility and confirmed the terms.The charges had been reduced through a process that took three weeks and involved more legal machinery than I'd known existed for internal Lycan proceedings. The estate assault. The attempted abduction of Elena. The financial crimes connected to the rogue territory operation. All of it real, all of it documented, all of it reducible, in the specific legal arithmetic of a system that valued cooperation, because Caden had given testimony against Cassius's operatives that no one else could have provided.He had been inside the operation from a different angle.He had seen things the external surveillanc
Chapter 156I found Dorian in the garden after Kane left.He was standing near the hedgerow on the east side, not doing anything in particular. Just standing in the morning light with his hands in his pockets, looking at the estate grounds with the specific quality of someone trying to understand a place they'd arrived at after a very long journey.I walked out to him.He heard me coming and turned, and the careful hope in his expression when he saw it was me, not Dante, not Matthias, just me choosing to come find him, was something I had to look at directly and let be what it was."Walk with me," I said.Neither of us spoke for a few minutes.The grounds were quiet in the morning way they were quiet, staff moving in the distance, the perimeter lights still on from the night, the gardening crew not yet arrived. I walked at a pace that wasn't rushing anywhere and Dorian matched it, and I thought about what I wanted to say and how to say it honestly without saying it unkindly.There was
Chapter 155Kane arrived the following morning.Not because we'd called him urgently, Matthias had sent a message the previous evening, measured and factual, that Dorian Voss had appeared at the estate gates and was now inside. Kane had read it, apparently, while eating breakfast in the northern territory house he used when he was in the region, and had driven down without being asked.That was Kane.He came in through the main entrance at nine, declined coffee, and stood in the sitting room looking at Dorian Voss with the particular quality of a man running a piece of information against a long-held file.Dorian looked back at him steadily."I know your name," Kane said finally."I know yours," Dorian said."Not from anything recent," Kane said. "From twenty years ago. The circle your wife was part of. The founding bloodline research." He tilted his head slightly. "You were the one who was supposed to be at the meeting the night the fire happened.""Yes," Dorian said. Quietly."But y
Chapter 154Dorian stayed for dinner.Not planned, it happened the way things happened when a conversation had more in it than one sitting could hold gradually, without announcement, the afternoon becoming evening and nobody suggesting he leave because the things still unsaid outnumbered the things that had been said.My mother had left food at the secondary property for my father. Matthias's kitchen had enough for three more. Dante ate standing in the corridor, which was simply how Dante ate at events he hadn't planned for.We sat at the kitchen table.Dorian and Matthias had not spoken directly yet. They had occupied the same room for two hours with me between them and had managed it with the particular careful respect of two men who understood they were important to the same person in entirely different ways and were still working out what that meant.Over food, that changed."Cassius," Matthias said.Not preamble. Just the name, placed in the space between them like something to b
Chapter 153We went to the small sitting room off the main entrance.Not Matthias's office that felt too formal, too much like a meeting with stakes being managed. Not the library, which was mine in a way I wasn't ready to share yet. The small sitting room had chairs that faced each other and a window that looked out onto the garden and nothing on the walls that meant anything to anyone.Neutral ground.Dorian sat across from me.Matthias took the chair to my left, slightly back from the conversation, present without inserting himself. I had asked him to stay and he had said yes without asking why, which was one of the thousand small ways he had learned how to love me correctly.Dante was outside the door."Start from the night of the fire," I said.No preamble. No small talk. I had spent two lifetimes learning that preamble was usually fear of the main thing, and I was done being afraid of information that belonged to me.Dorian looked at his hands for a moment.Then he looked at me.
Chapter 81 The second interrogation happened two hours after the first. Different person. Different energy in the room. The man they'd brought in before had been calculating. Weighing options. Deciding how much cooperation bought how much safety. This one was already frightened before she sat dow
Chapter 78The clock on his nightstand read 11:59.I was staring at the ceiling and I don't know when I started counting the seconds but I was, and at midnight I said it before I'd decided to."It's my birthday."The words were quiet. They filled the room anyway.Matthias had been in the chair acro
Chapter 76The word *now* sat on my screen for three seconds before I moved.One word. No context. No photograph. Just the certainty of someone who had been waiting for the right moment and had decided this was it.I was already moving when Dante appeared in the corridor."My father," I said. "Som
Chapter 75I knew it was a trap before I took the second step into the east corridor.I went in anyway.The corridor was too quiet in the specific way that spaces went quiet when someone had cleared them deliberately rather than because nothing was happening. No ambient noise from other parts of t







