Caleb Is So Excited

POV: Maya

I didn't care anymore where Nathaniel had taken Elise.

All I cared about was Caleb.

I needed proof, something colder and more certain than a dying woman's memory. A memory could be argued with. Proof couldn't.

I still remembered that night at the hunting lodge. Edmund had called me himself, his voice tight with the worry only a grandfather feels for a grandson who drinks too much when he thinks no one important is watching. He'd asked me to bring Nathaniel home before the pack saw their Alpha-in-waiting stumbling drunk through the halls. I went. Things got out of hand. I woke the next morning beside a man I believed, without a shred of doubt, was my husband.

That night was how Caleb came to be. Or so I'd thought for six years.

Edmund had been thrilled when I told him. He pushed the mating forward, tied me to Nathaniel with a ceremony and a bond-mark before either of us had time to really think it through. Blackstorm was already the strongest pack in the country, and Nathaniel, as Alpha-in-waiting, was treated like royalty wherever he went. He was always gone, off on pack business that stretched into weeks, striking deals in rooms I was never allowed into. We were together so rarely that whatever bond was supposed to grow between us never got the chance.

To keep the pack's business away from the whispers about a Luna married in haste, I'd agreed to keep the full mating quiet. I poured everything I had left into being a dutiful wife and an even more dutiful mother. I did it out of gratitude as much as duty. Edmund was the reason I'd been welcomed back into a bloodline that could have shut its doors on me. He was the reason my mother's name still meant something in pack memory. I felt I owed him everything.

Now, staring at the paternity results spread across the kitchen table, I laughed. There was no humour in it at all.

The numbers didn't lie. Human science didn't care about pack politics, mate-bonds, or six years of dutiful love. Caleb was not Nathaniel's son. He never had been.

Which meant my whole mating, everything I'd built my life around, had been a lie from the start.

Six years of my life, poured into a man and a pack that were never fully mine. All of it for nothing.

Caleb leaned over my arm, studying the numbers with the same fierce focus he gave everything, then looked up at me.

"Mummy, it looks like my dad's someone else."

A fresh wave of quiet settled over me.

The test confirmed exactly what Elise had thrown at me while I bled out in a ditch in another life. Caleb wasn't Nathaniel's. So whose was he? My clearest memory of that night was waking beside a hungover, sleeping Nathaniel, certain to my bones that nothing about the night before had been anything but what it seemed.

Had I been deceived from the very start? Had it never been him at all?

Did Edmund know?

I wanted, more than almost anything, to march into his room and demand the truth. But three months ago he'd taken a bad fall on the pack house stairs, hit his head, and slipped into a coma the pack healers couldn't pull him out of. I remembered, with the same cold clarity I remembered everything from my last life, that he had roughly three months left before his body gave out. Once he was gone, Nathaniel's authority over Blackstorm would be absolute, unquestioned by anyone who'd ever cared enough about me to slow him down.

Edmund was the only wolf in that whole family who had ever looked at me and seen something worth protecting, rather than something worth using.

As for the rest of them...

What a joke.

I gripped the report until my knuckles went pale, forcing my breathing steady through sheer stubbornness.

Caleb, sensing the storm in me even without understanding its shape, looked up and asked quietly, "Mummy, what are we gonna do now?"

I looked down at his earnest, worried little face, and let my voice soften even as everything underneath it stayed hard as bone. "I'm divorcing Nathaniel."

Not this time would I let that blind, oblivious man keep pretending in front of me. Not this time would I let a scheming woman play the wounded innocent while she picked my family apart, piece by piece. I was done pretending anything about this life was owed to anyone but Caleb and myself. It was time to take it back.

Caleb broke into actual applause.

"Finally, Mummy! I always knew you deserved way better than him. He's not the only Alpha in the world, you know. You don't have to stay with someone that cold, even if he was my dad. Which he isn't. So really there's no reason at all."

I couldn't help the smile that broke through, even with the report still crushed in my fist. "Exactly."

His grin widened, sharp and a little wicked, in a way that reminded me, uncomfortably, of myself. "So are we gonna find my real dad?"

"We are." My voice came out firm, edged with something new and cold. "We have to."

"When we find him," Caleb asked, eyes bright with curiosity, "are we gonna make him be my dad for real?"

"When we find him," I said, tightening my grip on the report until the paper creased, something dangerous settling behind my eyes, "he's going to have a great deal to answer for."

Whether it had been a deliberate scheme of Elise's making, or some cruel accident dressed up as one, I meant to settle the score with the wolf from that hunting lodge six years ago. Dead or alive, he wasn't going to rest easy until I understood exactly what part he'd played in the lie I'd built my whole second life around.

ADRIAN

A convoy of black SUVs pulled away from the checkpoint, gliding smooth and unhurried through Blackstorm's outer district.

"Mr. Rosewood, here's the preliminary file on the region's leading bloodlines and business interests." Bruce Brooks handed a thick dossier back to me without looking up from his tablet. "Since word got out about Cosmos Group's expansion here, every family with money and standing has been circling, trying to get a foot in the door. Cole Industries looks like the strongest local contender, if we're forced to pick a partner. Their CEO, Nathaniel Cole, has been especially persistent about securing a meeting. He'll likely hear about your arrival soon enough, if he hasn't already."

"Hmm." I didn't look up from the financial reports in front of me.

Bruce knew that syllable well enough by now not to push further.

A phone rang, sharp in the quiet of the car. Bruce checked the caller ID and answered at once, his posture straightening. "What is it." A pause. "Understood."

He turned back to me, his expression careful. "Sir, base reports Mr. Caesar attempted another breach of our internal systems."

Mr. Caesar. The ghost in the machine, as the underworld had taken to calling him, though ghost implied something less irritating than what he actually was.

Three months ago, this same hacker had slipped past defences my own people swore were unbreakable, siphoned off a hundred million from one of my private accounts, and rather than keep a single coin of it, donated the whole sum to human disaster relief, crediting Shadow publicly for the gift. A mockery, deliberate and precise, aimed straight at an organisation that answered to no one but the Lycan throne itself. Shadow had put a considerable bounty on his head. Three months on, we had nothing.

Now he'd surfaced again, and against my better judgement, my interest sharpened along with my irritation.

"Did you trace the signal this time," I asked, my voice flat.

"We're trying. The connection lasted seconds. We upgraded the system after the last breach, added a counter-tracking module just for this." Bruce's voice carried real tension now. "He's exceptionally sharp, whoever he is. Caught the trace almost the moment we opened it and cut the connection clean." He hesitated. "There's something else. This time he was inside the outer layer of the Genetic Database."

Something in me went very still.

The Genetic Database held bloodline records for influential wolves and Lycans across the country, records that were never meant to see daylight outside Shadow's own vaults. A successful breach wouldn't just embarrass us. It would put every name on that registry at risk, and shatter, publicly, the idea that Shadow's protection meant anything at all.

"Intensify the search," I said, and my voice came out colder than I meant it to, cold enough that Bruce's jaw tightened. "I don't care what it costs or how it's done. Find him."

"Yes, Mr. Rosewood." Bruce didn't meet my eyes. He relayed the order and ended the call, and I turned back to the window, to the quiet, sunlit streets of a territory I'd come to expand my business into and nothing more, telling myself the woman I'd nearly knocked over on a street corner an hour ago had absolutely nothing to do with the restlessness still sitting low and unresolved beneath my ribs.

CALEB

At the pack house, in the room my mother thought I used only for games, I sat in front of my screen with my fingers moving faster than anyone watching would expect from a boy my age.

The lines of data scrolling past would have meant nothing to most people. To me they were as easy to read as a picture book.

I'd been at this for hours already, quiet about it the way I was quiet about most things that mattered. Now that the test had confirmed what Elise had all but promised, that Nathaniel wasn't my real father, I'd decided I wasn't going to wait around for grown-ups and their slow, careful methods to find out who was.

I was good at this. Better than good. In certain corners of the world I didn't tell my mother about, wolves and worse than wolves knew me only as Mr. Caesar, and none of them had ever managed to catch so much as a glimpse of my actual face.

If the ordinary records held nothing, and they hadn't, then there was exactly one place left worth trying: the deepest, most heavily guarded bloodline vault in existence, buried behind layers of security nobody my age was supposed to be able to touch, let alone crack.

Getting into it would be the fastest, most direct way to give my mum the answer she needed.

I cracked my knuckles, pulled up the next layer of the system, and got back to work.