Chapter Five

~Caden’s POV~

Four months.

Four months since she walked out of this building and I have done nothing but work, manage, control, and refuse to think about the precise way she looked when the bond broke — the colour that left her face, the sound she didn't quite manage to suppress.

I spin my phone slowly on my desk.

It's eleven at night and the Pack Hall is empty except for me and the security rotation downstairs.

Rhys, my Beta, has been on my case for weeks. He stopped pretending to be subtle about it approximately three weeks ago and graduated to blunt, bordering on insubordinate.

"She's gone," he'd told me last Tuesday, standing in this very doorway with his arms crossed and that particular look he reserves for when he thinks I'm being an idiot. "And whatever you think happened, you should have at least heard her side of it."

I'd told him to drop it.

He didn't. He never does.

I pull up the browser on my phone. Type Selene's name. Delete it. Put the phone face-down on the desk.

The problem — one of many, if I am being honest with a part of myself I rarely allow floor time — is that the doubts started almost immediately.

Not loudly. Quietly. In the way that really uncomfortable truths tend to arrive as small, inconvenient inconsistencies that don't quite line up.

Vivienne told me that Selene had orchestrated her disappearance three years ago. That it was Selene's money, funneled through our shared accounts, that had paid to keep her out of reach, out of the pack, out of my life, so that Selene could step into a role that should never have been hers.

I had checked the accounts. There had been transfers. Regular. Substantial.

It had seemed like confirmation.

But.

But.

There was no record of where those transfers went, and when I'd had my financial team trace the account, it had come back registered to a shell company I had never seen before. A company incorporated the same week Vivienne had initially left the pack.

Three days before Selene had even been presented to me as my fated mate.

I had filed it as coincidence. I was angry, and anger is excellent at filing things as coincidences.

I stand and move to the window.

Cresthaven spreads out below me, lights across the valley, the dark edge of the treeline where pack territory begins in earnest, the first pale suggestion of a moon rising at the edge of the hills.

She's out there somewhere.

Four months and not a single confirmed sighting. Her mother's house in Larkspur Lane empty, curtains drawn. Dr. Noel still at the hospital but unusually, consistently unavailable every time Vivienne has tried to reach her.

Vivienne.

I press two fingers against the bridge of my nose.

That's another problem I've been filing as coincidences.

Vivienne arrived back with a story that was perfectly, precisely calibrated to destroy every good thing I believed about Selene. It hit every pressure point, every insecurity, every moment over three years where I'd wondered, as all Alphas wonder, in the dark parts of themselves, whether a mate could be too good to be real.

And I had believed her.

I had taken the evidence she pointed me toward and I had believed her, and I had not, in the grief and fury of it, stopped to ask the more important question.

What did Vivienne have to gain?

Everything.

The answer arrives now with a quiet, devastating clarity.

She had everything to gain and I had given it to her willingly, wearing my own blindness like a weapon against myself.

There's a knock at the door.

"Come in."

Rhys enters. He's still in his jacket, which means he hasn't been home. He's been here, waiting for something. His expression tells me that something has arrived.

"Sit down, Caden."

"Tell me from there," I say.

He looks at me for a moment. Then he places a folder on the edge of my desk.

"Dr. Noel came to the Pack Hall today," he says carefully. "She was asking for clearance to access certain private patient transfer records for relocation purposes."

My eyes move to the folder.

"I shouldn't have it," Rhys says quietly. "It came from her bag when she set it down at the front desk. A page fell out. Nadia at the desk, you know how she is, she saw the name on the header."

"What name?" I ask.

Rhys says nothing. He nods at the folder.

I reach forward. Flip it open.

A single page. A medical transfer summary. Patient records to be forwarded to a clinic in a city three hours from here.

The patient name at the top reads S. Ashford.

Beneath it, the case summary.

My eyes move line by line.

The words arrive in pieces that my brain processes slowly, as if language has stopped working properly.

Twin gestation, fourteen weeks, high-risk classification. Ongoing monitoring required. Maternal health stable. Fetal heartbeats strong.

I stop.

I read it again.

Twin gestation.

Fourteen weeks.

I count backwards in silence. The numbers land exactly where I do not want them to land, and exactly where some ruthless, undeniable part of me already knows they do.

Fourteen weeks ago was before the rejection.

Before the divorce papers.

Before everything.

My hands are not quite steady as I set the page down.

"Caden—" Rhys begins.

"Get out," I say. My voice comes from somewhere distant. Somewhere I do not entirely recognise.

"Caden—"

"Get out, Rhys."

He goes.

The door closes.

I stand alone in the silence of my office, the page open on my desk, the numbers still running their terrible arithmetic in my head.

Fourteen weeks.

Twin gestation.

Ashford.

Selene.

She was pregnant.

She stood in this office four months ago, already carrying my children — twins — and she said nothing. She let me reject her. She let me break the bond and watched the pain of it tear through her and she still said nothing, and then she disappeared, and she has been gone for four months and—

My hand finds the desk for balance.

Somewhere behind the shock, something is tearing open. Something vast and irreparable.

She protected them from me.

She looked at me and decided I did not deserve to know.

And the worst part, the part that rises like ice water through my chest in the silence of this empty office,  is that I cannot tell her she was wrong.

I am staring at the single sheet in my hands, and for the first time in four months — for the first time, perhaps, in much longer — I understand with absolute, devastating clarity exactly what I have done.