Chapter seven

Damien's POV

Marcus found the room.

Third floor, east wing, a private boardroom the hotel kept for corporate events. He had a key inside four minutes, which told me he'd planned for this possibility before we arrived. I didn't ask how. With Marcus, some things were better left alone.

Aria walked in first. Lucas came in behind her and closed the door. I stood near the window and Marcus took the chair at the head of the table like he'd been sitting there his whole life.

Nobody spoke for a moment.

Then Aria put both hands flat on the table and looked at Marcus directly.

"You've known about Selene Ashworth."

"Yes," he said.

"How long?"

"Longer than I should have stayed quiet about it." He didn't look away from her. "I want to say I was protecting you by gathering more information first. That's partially true. The other part is that I wasn't certain how much Damien could handle at once, and I made a judgment call I'm no longer certain was right."

I looked at him. "You should have told me."

"Yes. I should have." He said it without defense. "I'm telling you now."

Aria sat down. "Then talk."

Marcus folded his hands.

"Selene Ashworth's family lost their pack dominance forty years ago when the Shadow council restructured pack territories. What they had built over three generations was redistributed across six packs, including ours. Selene was twelve years old when it happened. She has spent every year since engineering a reversal." He paused. "The Silvermoon bloodline is the only thing standing between her and that. A bonded white wolf and her mate hold a position in wolf law that supersedes council authority. Selene cannot consolidate what she wants if that bond exists and is recognized."

"So she broke it before it could form," Aria said.

"She tried. She planted Vanessa when Damien was nineteen. Seventeen years of positioning, waiting for the moment the bond would surface so she could destroy it cleanly." Marcus looked at me. "The rejection was supposed to be permanent. In most cases, a rejected mate leaves and doesn't come back. The bond degrades. The white wolf bloodline weakens without activation and eventually goes dormant again."

"But Aria didn't degrade," I said.

"No. She rebuilt. And named her company Silvermoon, which was either instinct or the bloodline finding its way home through her without her knowing it." He looked at Aria. "Either way, it told Selene the bond hadn't broken completely. That's why Voss is here. That's why she came herself."

Lucas pulled out his phone and set it on the table. A photograph. A woman at the gala entrance, champagne glass, composed smile.

"She's downstairs right now," he said. "She arrived forty minutes after we did."

I studied the photograph. Selene Ashworth looked like someone's polished aunt. Nothing about her read dangerous unless you knew what to look for. I was learning what to look for.

"What does she want tonight specifically?" I asked.

"To assess where the bond stands," Marcus said. "If it's too close to repair, she'll move to the next phase."

"Which is?"

He was quiet for a beat too long.

"One of you doesn't make it out of Seattle," he said.

The room went still.

Aria didn't react visibly. She looked at the photograph on the table and then at Marcus with the same focused calm she'd had all evening.

"She won't move tonight," Aria said. "Too many witnesses, too much exposure. She came to watch and calculate. We have time, but not much."

"Agreed," Lucas said.

I pulled out a chair and sat down across from Aria. "Then we use tonight. What do we have that she doesn't know we have?"

Lucas answered. "She doesn't know about our contact inside the Shadow Pack. She doesn't know Kai has been moved. She doesn't know Aria and I have had eyes on Voss for six weeks. And she doesn't know that this conversation is happening."

"She thinks Aria and I are still on opposite sides," I said.

"She's built her entire timeline on that assumption," Marcus said. "The moment you two present a unified front publicly, her leverage collapses. She loses the pressure point."

Aria looked at me across the table.

I knew what Marcus was suggesting before he said it. So did she. The slight tension around her eyes told me she'd already run the calculation and didn't love the answer.

"A public reconciliation," she said flatly.

"Not reconciliation," Marcus said carefully. "Recognition. You don't have to repair the bond tonight. But if you stand together publicly in that ballroom in front of three hundred witnesses including Selene, it sends a signal she cannot misread."

"It also paints a target on both of us," Aria said.

"You already have a target. This just changes the geometry."

She looked at me steadily. "If we do this, I need something from you first."

"Name it."

"Vanessa. She leaves Seattle by Monday. Whatever arrangement you have with her ends tonight, publicly, in a way that cannot be walked back. I won't stand next to you with her still in the picture."

"Done," I said.

Something shifted in her expression. She'd expected negotiation.

"That was fast," she said.

"It was already decided. I ended it this afternoon before the gala." I held her gaze. "I should have ended it three years ago."

Lucas looked between us and said nothing.

Marcus stood. "Then we go back down. Damien handles Vanessa. Aria, you position yourself where the room can see you clearly. We let Selene watch the thing she built fall apart in real time." He straightened his jacket. "Lucas, I need your contact's number before we leave this room."

Lucas nodded.

Aria stood and looked at me one more time.

"This is strategy," she said. "Nothing else."

"I know," I said.

She walked to the door.

She was right. It was strategy.

But when she pushed the door open and the hallway light caught her face, my wolf went completely quiet for the first time in three years.

Not grieving quiet.

Still.