The Alpha's Blind Spot

The packhouse held its breath in the afternoon.

Or maybe that was just Sera still, measured, invisible slipping out of her room like smoke through a cracked door.

The east corridor was empty.

It wouldn't stay that way.

She moved the way she had practiced for months.

Not quickly. Quick drew eyes.

She moved slowly, the way furniture moves which is to say, not at all, in the minds of anyone who passed her. A shadow drifting toward the kitchen. A ghost following the baseboards.

Two Omega girls rushed past with armloads of white ceremonial cloth, talking over each other about the altar flower arrangements. They didn't glance at her.

A warrior rounded the far corner, armored, purposeful.

Sera stepped into a shallow alcove and became part of the wall.

He passed without breaking stride.

She exhaled.

Eleven seconds. Right on schedule.

She had walked this route forty-three times in three years.

Never with purpose. Always with an excuse ready in her hands a folded cloth, a water pitcher, something domestic enough to explain her presence if anyone stopped her.

No one ever stopped her.

That was the beautiful, terrible thing about being invisible.

You could go almost anywhere.

The south stairwell was empty, the way she knew it would be at this hour. The ceremony prep had pulled every senior packhouse wolf toward the great hall or the outer grounds.

Caius's private office sat at the top of the second landing heavy oak door, iron handle, the faint smell of cedar and cold ambition that clung to everything he owned.

The lock was a coded panel. Four digits.

She had watched him enter it eleven times from various angles across two years. The sequence was burned into the back of her eyelids.

0-3-1-4.

His founding date. The day Ashveil Pack was formally declared under his leadership.

Of course it was.

Arrogance was its own kind of stupidity.

The panel beeped softly.

The door swung inward.

She stepped inside and pulled it shut behind her without a sound.

The office smelled exactly as she remembered from the one time she had been permitted inside summoned, two years ago, to witness the signing of a territory accord she was never meant to read.

She had read every word.

Dark shelves. A broad mahogany desk. Maps on the wall with territorial markers in red ink. And in the far left corner, behind a sliding panel she had noticed only because she had nothing better to do than study every room she was allowed to occupy

The safe.

Floor-mounted. Heavy steel. A second coded panel, this one a six-digit numeric.

She crossed to it without hesitating.

The pack's emergency assets were never discussed openly.

But she had listened to Treasurer Varn complain to Elder Macon in the east corridor—twice—about the difficulty of maintaining liquidity in untraceable coin reserves. She had listened to Caius bark at Varn about keeping the secondary account credentials in the office and not on the network.

She had been sitting against the wall in both instances.

Adjusting a loose hem on her sleeve.

Completely invisible.

The safe code took her two attempts.

The first combination Caius's mother's death year bracketed by his rank number—didn't work.

The second—his mother's death year bracketed by Sera's registration number, the one assigned when she was formally bonded to him as Luna

Click.

She stared at that for half a second longer than she should have.

Then she pushed the feeling down and focused.

Inside: a black leather ledger. A secondary credentials card for an offshore reserve account liquid, untraceable, the kind every major pack kept for emergencies that couldn't be explained to the High Council.

Beneath that, a slim emergency tablet. Pre-loaded. Air-gapped except for one encrypted transfer channel.

There you are.

She didn't take anything. Not yet.

She didn't need to.

She photographed the credentials with the small device she'd spent six weeks quietly assembling from discarded packhouse tech piece by piece, component by component, in the dark of her room after midnight.

Then she set the transfer instruction.

Timed. Precise. A delayed command to execute during the peak of the Harvest Ceremony, when every eye in the pack would be fixed on the altar.

When Caius would be looking at her through her preparing to say the words that would erase her.

While he spoke them

The accounts would already be moving.

She was replacing the ledger when she heard it.

Footsteps.

Not the light, hurried steps of an Omega running an errand.

Heavy. Deliberate. Pausing at intervals the way a person pauses when they're checking rooms.

Security sweep.

Her chest locked.

She had calculated the gap at twenty-two minutes. She had entered at the eighteen-minute mark. She should have had four minutes of clean corridor.

Someone had changed the rotation.

She sealed the safe in three seconds.

Slid the panel back into place.

Crossed to the office door and pressed her ear against the wood.

Breathing. Just outside. The low grunt of someone adjusting their belt holster.

Directly on the other side.

The side window.

She had noted it in passing a dozen times casement style, second floor, overlooking the kitchen garden below. A drop. Not a comfortable one.

She was across the room before she'd consciously decided to move.

The latch released without protest.

She slipped through, hung for one suspended second by her fingertips

 and dropped.

She landed in the herb garden in a low crouch, knees absorbing the impact, one hand flat in the dirt.

Above her, the window swung gently on its hinges.

Inside the office, she heard the door open.

A pause.

Boots on floorboards.

Then nothing. Footsteps retreating. Satisfied.

Sera stayed crouched in the garden for a full ten seconds, her heartbeat thundering in her ears the only sound she allowed herself in that moment.

Then she smoothed her dress.

Stood.

Picked a sprig of rosemary from the nearest bush, because she needed something to hold.

And walked calmly back toward the packhouse door like a woman who had simply stepped outside for air.

Nobody saw her.

Nobody ever saw her.

Five hours until the ceremony.

The timer in her chest ticked on.