Chapter 4

Seraphina's private plane landed in Seattle the next afternoon.

She did not come herself. She sent her younger brother Rowan, two lawyers, and a doctor who knew old wolfsbane injuries.

Rowan was quieter than I expected. He read the agreement through and did not open with a promise to fix it. He asked whether there were emails, cameras, or witnesses from the day I signed. "You can sue over how this signature was obtained," he said, "but litigation takes time. The fastest route is to pay the penalty first so you're free to work immediately, then use the evidence to claw it back."

"I'll pay the penalty back."

"Seraphina says that money becomes your equity stake in the new company. You're not taking charity. You're coming in with projects and with skill."

I looked up at him. He did not offer pity for the state I was in and he did not tell me everything would be fine. He just laid out every risk in plain terms. It was the first time in days that I could breathe.

For the next three days I stopped responding to anything online and filled in the evidence piece by piece.

Ninety-nine card receipts. Access logs. Parking records for Damian's car. The exact times the store cameras were switched off. Hotel photos. Prenatal records. And the messages he sent me at those same hours.

March twelfth, ten at night, Damian's car entered the Bayview parking garage. That same night at 10:07, he texted back, "Pack business. Don't start."

April ninth, he took Clara to a hotel. That same afternoon he sent me a photo of his desk and said he was clearing my backlog for me.

The most complete record came from the day of Clara's prenatal appointment. The hospital system showed Damian signing as the child's father. Half an hour later he texted me, "Everything's fine at home. I'm helping look after your silly little sister's shop too. Have I been good? Miss you."

I stared at that line for a long time, then dropped it into the evidence folder and did not reply.

The scent left on the ninety-ninth dress could only support the rest. What mattered were verifiable times, payments, access logs, and footage.

Building management also recovered two deleted audio files from inside the store. The first was the conversation I had heard the night I got back. The second was from a month earlier.

On the recording, Clara asked, "If she finds out, is she really not going to go to Silverbank?"

Damian answered, "The non-compete carries my Alpha mark. She can't afford the money and she can't take the backlash."

"But she's good at this. What if she finds a way?"

Clara laughed. "Once the non-compete has her boxed in, she can know everything and still have no choice but to keep working for us."

The recording ended there.

Rowan lifted the headphones off me. "That's enough to prove the signature was obtained by deception."

"Not enough." I opened five years of Blackpine project files. What I needed to prove was not that they had betrayed me. It was that while they betrayed me, they were setting up to keep everything I had built.

A few longtime employees quietly sent me original drafts, authorization emails, and client correspondence. The first version of every one of Blackpine's seven biggest projects had come off my personal computer, and the major clients had stated in writing that they wanted me leading the work.

Meanwhile Clara posted another video. She hinted that my old wolfsbane injury had left me unable to have children, which made me unfit to be Luna. Damian did not correct her. He had Blackpine's PR account share the video.

Rowan watched it and asked, "Do you want to make your medical history public?"

"No."

"Then we don't." He went through my old medical records and told me I was not without a wolf. The poisoning in my childhood had never been fully treated. With rehabilitation I might still shift. "But you don't have to become a wolf first to earn the right to prove anything."

I closed the file. For twenty-three years everyone had treated my inability to shift as my defect. Damian and Clara had even assumed that as long as they held that over me, I would never dare leave.

I stopped explaining. I laid the ninety-nine receipts out by date and copied the recording onto three separate drives. On the screen, Clara's laugh came again.

"Once the non-compete has her boxed in, she can know everything and still have no choice but to keep working for us."