The Beta's Offer

"Thank you for coming," Dave said, standing as I entered, the picture of easy courtesy, gesturing toward the chair across from his desk like this was any ordinary meeting between two men who'd never once trusted each other. "Sit, please. I promise this won't take long."

I sat, keeping my spine straight, my hands folded carefully in my lap the way I'd learned to hold myself in rooms where I didn't yet know the shape of the danger.

"You've never asked to see me alone," I said. "In two years."

"No," he agreed. "I suppose I haven't."

He poured two glasses of something amber from a decanter on his desk, unhurried, and slid one across to me without asking whether I wanted it. I didn't touch it.

"How is he," Dave asked. "Rhys. Recovering well, I hear."

"He's improving," I said, careful, watching his face for any sign of what lay underneath the pleasantry.

"Remembering things," Dave said. It wasn't quite a question.

My whole body went still, my pulse ticking up despite every effort to keep my face neutral. "Small fragments. Nothing significant."

"Mm," Dave said, and took a slow sip from his own glass, unbothered, patient in a way that felt worse than if he'd pushed. "Fragments have a way of adding up, though, don't they. One detail here. One detail there. Before long a man remembers more than he lets on."

"Is there a reason you asked me here," I said, cutting through the circling, my nerves too raw tonight to play whatever game this was.

"I like you, Matteo," he said, setting his glass down, his expression softening into something that might have passed for genuine warmth if I hadn't already learned to distrust every version of warmth this pack offered me. "I want you to know that, before anything else. Whatever you think of me, I've never wished you harm."

"That's reassuring," I said, flat.

He smiled at that, small, almost approving. "You've gotten sharper. Two years ago you would have thanked me for saying that and meant it."

"Two years ago I didn't know better."

"No," he agreed. "I suppose you didn't."

He rose from his chair and walked slowly toward the window, hands clasped behind his back, looking out at the dark grounds beyond the glass.

"I want to talk to you about the night of the ambush," he said.

My stomach tightened. "What about it."

"You were inside during the attack," he said. "Sofia told you to stay away from the windows, I imagine. Told you to keep the staff safe. Sensible instructions."

"How do you know that."

"I make it my business to know things," he said, still facing the window, his voice mild, unbothered. "It's part of the job. Beta of the pack. Second-in-command. Someone has to keep track of the details everyone else is too busy to notice."

"Get to the point," I said.

He turned back to face me then, something shifting behind his eyes, calculation dressed up as concern. "The attack came from the western tree line. Did you know that. Not the northern border, where the strike force was originally spotted testing weeks before. Western."

"I don't see why that matters."

"It matters," Dave said, "because the western approach isn't the natural line of attack for a force moving down from where the rival pack has been probing. It's a diversion, or it's inside knowledge of exactly where our patrols would be thinnest that night. One or the other. Not both."

I sat very still, something cold uncoiling low in my stomach. "How would you know something that specific."

"I told you," he said. "I make it my business to know things."

"That's not an answer."

"No," he said, "it isn't."

He came back to the desk and sat down across from me again, closer now, his hands folded together in a posture that would have read as thoughtful on anyone else.

"I was there that night," he said. "Fighting alongside Rhys. I saw exactly how they moved, exactly which gaps in our line they exploited. Whoever planned that attack knew things about our patrol rotations that shouldn't have been possible for an outside force to know. Down to the hour. Down to which watch had been thinned that particular week."

"The patrol logs," I said slowly, the pieces sliding together in my chest with sickening speed. "The ones that were altered. Third week of last month."

Something flickered across Dave's face. Not surprise. Recognition. He hadn't expected me to say it outright, but he wasn't denying it either.

"You found those," he said.

"I found them before Rhys came back injured," I said, my voice steadier than I felt. "I heard you and him arguing about them. I heard you say, if he finds out I moved them, this ends both of us."

The room went very quiet.

"You've been busy," Dave said finally, something almost admiring in the words, though it did nothing to soften the dread building in my chest.

"What did you move, Dave," I said. "What did those altered logs actually change."

He was quiet for a long moment, studying me with an expression I couldn't read, weighing something behind those careful eyes.

"The patrol rotations for the western line," he said at last, "were supposed to be doubled that week. Standard precaution, given the incursions we'd already seen along the northern border. I thinned them instead. Quietly. Altered the reporting so the council wouldn't notice the discrepancy."

My blood ran cold. "You weakened our own defenses."

"I redirected resources," he said, careful with the phrasing, like the distinction mattered to him. "For reasons that had nothing to do with wanting anyone hurt."

"Reasons like what."

He didn't answer that directly. He just looked at me, something almost sad moving behind his eyes now, buried under all that careful control.

"You should understand something about loyalty," he said instead. "Real loyalty. Not the kind that gets performed for cameras at a gala, the kind that gets written into ceremonial vows and forgotten the moment the doors close. I mean the kind that costs you everything and asks nothing back."

"Is that what this is," I said. "Loyalty. Weakening our own patrol lines the same week a rival pack chose to strike."

"The timing wasn't a coincidence," Dave said, quiet.

I felt the floor tilt slightly beneath me, my whole body going rigid with a dread too large to hold steady. "What are you saying."

"I'm saying," Dave said, leaning forward now, his voice dropping lower, more careful, "that the western line was thinned on purpose, and the attack came through the exact gap I created, on the exact night I knew our own forces would be stretched thinnest responding to it."

The room around me seemed to shrink, the walls pressing in, every ordinary sound of the estate outside the window suddenly distant and unreal.

"You knew," I said, my voice barely above a whisper. "You knew the attack was coming."

Dave didn't answer. He just watched me, steady, unblinking, letting the silence stretch long enough that I understood it wasn't a denial. It was confirmation dressed up as restraint.

"You planned this," I said, my pulse hammering now, the full shape of it arriving all at once, cold and sickening. "You didn't just cover up a mistake. You created the opening. You let them through. Rhys nearly died because of what you did."

"I didn't want him dead," Dave said, and for the first time since I'd walked into this room, something raw cracked through his careful composure. "That was never the plan. I needed him weakened. I needed something to change, some crack in the foundation of everything that's kept things exactly the way they are for two years. I didn't account for how close it would come."

"How close it would come," I repeated, my voice shaking now with something closer to fury than fear. "He almost died, Dave. He was on a table fighting for his life because of a choice you made."

"I know," Dave said, quiet, and for the first time in this entire conversation, I believed something he said without reservation. "I've thought about very little else since that night."

"Why," I said, my hands curling into fists in my lap. "Why would you do this. What could possibly be worth risking his life for."

Dave looked at me for a long moment, something calculating and something genuinely pained warring behind his expression, and I understood, with a cold and total certainty, that whatever answer he was about to give me wasn't going to be the whole truth. It was going to be exactly as much truth as he'd decided I was allowed to have.

"Some debts don't resolve themselves quietly," he said instead of answering directly. "Some silences cost more the longer they're kept. I imagine you understand something about that better than most people in this compound right now, given what you're currently choosing not to tell your own husband."

My breath caught. "That's not the same thing."

"Isn't it," Dave said, something almost gentle in his voice again, the warmth from earlier in the conversation returning like it had never left, which was somehow more unsettling than any threat could have been. "We're both keeping people we care about from a truth that would change everything if it came out. I simply started mine a little earlier than you started yours."

I sat there, stunned into silence, the full weight of what he'd just admitted pressing down on my chest like a physical thing. He had orchestrated an attack on his own Alpha. He had nearly gotten Rhys killed, on purpose, for reasons he wasn't willing to name, and he was sitting across from me now, calm and unbothered, comparing his betrayal to my careful, guilty silence like they belonged in the same category of sin.

"You should go," Dave said finally, standing, the meeting apparently concluded on his terms, the way everything in this room had unfolded on his terms from the moment I'd walked in. "I only wanted you to understand the full picture. What you do with it now is entirely up to you."

"You're not even worried I'll tell him," I said, standing too, my legs unsteady beneath me. "You just confessed to nearly getting him killed, and you're not even worried I'll walk straight to his room and tell him everything."

"No," Dave said, something almost sad in his voice now, quiet and certain. "I'm not worried about that at all."

"Why not."

He looked at me, steady, unblinking, and something in his expression made the hair on the back of my neck rise before he'd even said another word.

"Because you and I both know," he said, "that the moment you tell him what I did, he's going to ask you how you knew to come looking. And that conversation leads somewhere you're not ready to go either."

I stood there, frozen, the trap of it closing slowly around me, every careful lie I'd told over the last week suddenly tangled together with the far larger, far more dangerous truth Dave had just handed me.

"You planned this too," I said slowly, understanding arriving cold and complete. "Not just the ambush. This conversation. You knew exactly what you were doing, telling me all of this."

Dave didn't deny it. He didn't need to.

He just watched me understand it, calm and patient, the way you watch something inevitable finally arrive.