Chapter six

Damien's POV

I watched her process it.

Aria didn't panic. She didn't demand explanations or fill the silence with questions. She stood with her hand still on the door handle and looked at me the way someone looks at a map they're realizing has been wrong the whole time.

"Sit down," she said finally.

Not a request. I sat.

She stayed standing, which I suspected was deliberate.

"Tell me everything you know. Start from the beginning and don't leave anything out to protect me."

So I did.

I told her about the cameras — how I'd found them two weeks after she left, hidden in the ventilation housing above my desk and behind the bookshelf panel. Professional installation. Not something Vanessa had done alone. I told her how I'd had my security team sweep the entire floor and found three more in the conference room adjacent to my office, all of them active.

I told her how I'd confronted Vanessa and she had smiled — not denied it, not explained it, just smiled — and said, "You were always going to make the wrong choice, Damien. I simply made sure the right people were watching when you did."

I had not understood that then. I was beginning to now.

"Who are the right people?" Aria asked.

"I don't have a name yet. What I have is a pattern." I leaned forward. "Three years ago, the rejection. Two years ago, your company starts winning contracts in markets where Cross Industries had been unopposed for a decade. Eighteen months ago, someone starts acquiring our eastern development debt in small pieces through shell companies. And six months ago, a man named Gregor Voss approached two of my board members privately and suggested I was losing my grip on the Shadow Pack."

She was quiet.

"Gregor Voss," she said. "That name means something."

"He's an enforcer. Old family, no pack allegiance. He hires out to whoever pays. But he doesn't work for money — he works for access." I looked at her. "He's been asking questions about you specifically. Your schedule, your building's security, whether Kai has a regular routine."

That landed. I saw it in the way she straightened.

"He mentioned Kai by name?"

"Yes."

She was silent for three seconds. Then she pulled out her phone and typed something fast. Lucas, I assumed. She put the phone away and looked at me with an expression that had gone very still and very clear.

"What else?"

"My grandfather believes whoever arranged your kidnapping twenty-five years ago has been monitoring your life since you resurfaced. Your company name — Silvermoon Enterprises — would have flagged every alert they had. They've known where you are for at least two years."

"And they waited."

"They were waiting for something specific." I paused. "Marcus thinks it's connected to the prophecy. There's an old text — pre-pack, before the Shadow council existed — about a white wolf born once in a thousand years. It says she either completes the bond she was made for or she fractures it permanently. If she fractures it, the bloodline ends with her. No heir, no continuation of the line."

Aria looked at me for a long moment.

"You're telling me someone has been engineering my life to make sure I never completed the bond."

"Yes."

"And Vanessa was part of it."

"I believe she was placed in my life specifically to ensure I'd reject you. She knew about fated mates. She knew what you were before either of us did."

Aria laughed — short, humorless. "She played you perfectly."

"Yes." There was no point denying it. "She did."

The terrace was quiet. Inside the ballroom, the event was still going, the faint sound of music and conversation pressing through the glass doors.

"The adoption," Aria said. Her voice was careful now in a way it hadn't been. "Kai's paperwork. It took seven months and every contact Lucas had. We kept hitting walls that shouldn't have been there."

"Someone was trying to stop it."

"Why would they care about Kai?"

"Because of what Kai is." I held her gaze. "My grandfather spent the last year researching. The child you found on that sidewalk — the circumstances of his abandonment, where he was found, his age — Marcus believes he isn't random."

She went very still.

"Say it," she said quietly.

"We think he's a catalyst. There are bloodlines in wolf history that appear specifically when a major shift is coming. Children who carry something dormant — something that activates in proximity to a white wolf." I kept my voice level. "He may not have ended up on that sidewalk by accident."

The silence stretched.

"He's four years old," she said.

"I know."

"He calls me mama."

"I know that too." I stood slowly. "I'm not saying he isn't yours. I'm saying someone put him in your path deliberately, and we need to know who and why before they decide to collect him."

Her jaw tightened.

"No one is collecting my son."

"Then we need to work together. Because you have pieces I don't and I have pieces you don't, and whoever is running this has been playing a long game that neither of us can dismantle alone."

She looked at me for a long time.

"This changes nothing between us," she said. "Personally."

"I know."

"I'm agreeing to share information. That's all."

"That's enough. For now."

She moved toward the door, then stopped.

"The cameras in your office," she said, without turning around. "What happened to Vanessa after you found them?"

"She's still at the gala. Somewhere in that room."

Aria turned her head slightly.

"She's been watching us out here this whole time, hasn't she."

It wasn't a question.

I looked past her toward the glass doors. The light inside was warm and golden. Somewhere in the crowd beyond it, a figure stood slightly apart from the rest, facing the terrace.

"Yes," I said.

Aria pushed the door open.

"Good," she said. "Let her watch."