Chapter eight

Aria's POV

Vanessa was standing near the champagne table when we walked back in.

She saw Damien first. Then she saw me beside him and something crossed her face so fast I almost missed it. Not surprise. Recalculation.

She was good. I'd give her that.

Damien didn't look at me when he said, "Give me three minutes."

I nodded and moved left toward a cluster of guests near the center of the room. Lucas materialized at my shoulder without being summoned. Marcus drifted to the right, casual, positioning himself where he could see both Vanessa and the entrance where Selene was still standing with her champagne and her careful smile.

I didn't watch Damien cross the room. I didn't need to.

I focused on Selene.

She was older in person than in the surveillance photographs. Late fifties, well maintained, the kind of woman who had learned to make stillness look like power. She hadn't moved from her position near the entrance since we'd come back down. She was holding her ground, which meant she was comfortable. She thought she knew how tonight was going to go.

I needed her to keep thinking that for another few minutes.

A man to my left introduced himself. Property development, Vancouver. I shook his hand, said the right things, smiled at the right moments. Lucas handled the follow-up beside me while I kept Selene in my peripheral vision.

Then I heard it.

Not loud. Not dramatic. But in a room where people were quietly performing for each other, a sudden silence in one corner travels.

I glanced over.

Damien was standing with Vanessa near the far wall. I couldn't hear the words but I didn't need to. Vanessa's composure had developed a crack. Small, visible only if you were looking for it, but there. She said something. He said something shorter. She looked down at the glass in her hand and then set it on a nearby table with the careful precision of a person controlling a very strong impulse.

Then she picked up her bag and walked toward the exit.

She passed within fifteen feet of me. Our eyes met for exactly one second.

She smiled. Not warmly. The kind of smile that was a promise.

Then she was gone.

I turned back to the Vancouver developer and finished the conversation.

Damien was beside me two minutes later. He didn't touch me. He stood at a proximity that read as deliberate to anyone watching, which was the point.

"Done," he said quietly.

"How did she take it?"

"Better than she should have." His voice was low. "Which concerns me more than anger would."

"She'll report to Selene tonight."

"Yes."

"Then we need to move before Selene adjusts."

I turned slightly so my body angled toward his. Not intimate. Just visible. The kind of positioning that read as aligned to anyone scanning the room from a distance. I felt the bond respond immediately, that low persistent pull, and ignored it with the practice of someone who had been ignoring it for three years.

"She's watching us right now," I said.

"I know."

"Marcus is moving toward her left. Lucas is covering the exit." I kept my voice level. "In about ninety seconds, enough people in this room will have noticed us standing together that it becomes the story of the evening. At that point, her narrative about the broken bond falls apart and she loses her leverage with whoever she's been reporting to."

"And then she becomes unpredictable," Damien said.

"She's already unpredictable. At least this way she's reacting to us instead of the other way around."

He was quiet for a moment.

"There's something else," he said. "Something I didn't say upstairs because I wasn't certain. I'm certain now."

I looked at him.

"Selene isn't working alone at the council level. She has at least one council member in her pocket. Which means any formal complaint we file goes through a compromised channel." He paused. "We can't use official pack structures to move against her. Whatever we do has to happen outside them."

"Lucas already assumed that."

"Your Lucas assumes a great deal."

"And he's usually right." I glanced toward where Marcus was now standing three people away from Selene, engaged in conversation with someone between them. "What's Marcus doing?"

"Listening. He has better hearing than anyone in this room suspects for a man his age."

I almost smiled.

Across the room, Selene's eyes found mine.

I held her gaze. Didn't look away. Didn't adjust my expression.

She tilted her head slightly, a motion so small most people would miss it, and then turned to the person beside her and said something that made them laugh.

She wasn't rattled. She was performing the same way I was, and she'd had forty years of practice.

But I saw the moment she registered Damien beside me and did the math. I saw it in the half second where her smile didn't quite reach her eyes before she rebuilt it. She had expected us to still be in separate corners of the room. She had expected Vanessa to be on Damien's arm and me to be isolated, another piece moving the way she'd arranged it.

We weren't moving the way she'd arranged it.

"She knows," I said.

"Yes."

"Good."

Lucas appeared at my left. "Marcus got something. Selene made a call twenty minutes ago. Voss is not in the building — he's outside. South entrance."

My chest tightened.

"Kai," I said.

"Petra has confirmed his location twice in the last hour. He's safe." Lucas's voice was steady. "But Voss being outside tells us she came with a contingency. If tonight didn't go her way, she had a next move ready."

I looked at Damien.

"She came prepared to escalate," he said.

"Then so did I." I reached into my clutch and handed Lucas a small drive. "Give that to your contact in the Shadow Pack tonight. Not tomorrow. Tonight."

Lucas took it without asking what was on it.

Damien looked at me.

"What's on the drive?" he asked.

"Everything Lucas has compiled on Selene for fourteen months. Financial records, pack movements, Vanessa's connection, Voss's contracts." I held his gaze. "And the name of her council contact."

He stared at me.

"You already knew about the council," he said.

"I told you," I said. "I came prepared."