Chapter 52: The Alpha Feels Stupid

Ryker's POV

I stood in the corridor outside the lab for eleven minutes and was privately furious at myself.

Not visibly, visibly I was standing with my back against the wall and my arms at my sides and my face in its usual arrangement, and Daren was three feet away giving me a situation report in clipped professional sentences that I was absorbing and filing while the fury ran underneath all of it at a temperature I was choosing not to examine directly.

I had almost believed it.

That was the part I kept returning to, not the document itself and not Max and not the specific mechanics of how a forgery gets into a lab in a palace with our security protocols, all of that was solvable and I was already solving it, but the ninety minutes, the specific ninety minutes between Cax reading the document out loud and Zephyr starting to dismantle it, during which something in my reasoning had treated the document as a real possibility and adjusted my understanding accordingly.

I stopped that thought before it completed itself because what came after it was something I was not going to examine in a corridor with Daren three feet away.

"The archive section," I said, cutting across whatever Daren was saying, "the one Max claimed."

"Destroyed in a fire seven years ago," Daren said without hesitation, "structural damage in the east vault, records confirm the loss, it's in our annual report to the Elder Council, it's public information."

"Public information," I said.

"Anyone with access to the council's annual reports would know about it."

"Anyone," I said, "or someone who specifically went looking."

Daren was quiet for a moment. "He would have needed to know which section to claim before he claimed it, which means he researched the archives before planting the document, which means the document was made after the research, which means," he paused, "this has been in preparation for a significant period."

"Yes," I said, "it has."

I pushed off the wall and started walking because standing still was no longer something I had patience for and moving helped me think in the clean forward way that being stationary didn't.

Daren walked beside me. "The employment record that didn't exist," he said, "the archive visit three weeks ago, the position he held near Ava at every significant event." A pause. "He's been inside this palace for two months and we didn't look hard enough."

"I didn't look hard enough," I said, because Daren had looked as hard as I had instructed him to look and the instruction had not been hard enough, and that distinction mattered and I was not going to put it somewhere it didn't belong. "I cleared the roster myself and I didn't look hard enough."

Daren said nothing, which was the correct response.

I walked to the war room and told the guard outside to bring Cax and Zephyr, and then I stood at the head of the table and looked at the map on the wall and thought about Max with the specific focused cold that I used when I was done being furious at myself and had moved into the more productive territory of being furious at the actual problem.

Cax came in first and read my face in the way he had been reading my face for thirty years and sat down without asking any of the questions that were clearly available to him.

Zephyr came in behind him and closed the door and leaned against the wall near the window, which was his preferred position in rooms where he was thinking about more than one thing simultaneously.

"Talk to me about the forgery," I said.

Cax put his hands flat on the table. "The document is technically exceptional, the seal is the best reproduction I've seen, whoever made it either had access to the original stamp or had detailed documentation of its specific imperfections." He looked at me. "That narrows the pool significantly."

"How significantly."

"Family archive, or someone with extended access to family archive materials." He paused. "Or someone who sourced the imperfection data from another document that carries the same seal, which would mean having access to one of our original founding documents outside the archive."

"Max had access to the archive," Zephyr said from the wall, "three weeks ago, before we were watching him carefully."

"He could have documented the seal then," Cax said.

"Which means the document was made after that visit," I said, "which gives us a production window of three weeks." I looked at Cax. "What does three weeks of work produce at this quality level."

"Someone with significant prior preparation," Cax said, "the language was too precise and the structure too correct for three weeks of research, he had the format before he had the seal, which means he built the forgery in components over a longer period and was waiting for the seal verification to complete it."

"He's been planning this specific move for months," Zephyr said, "the document was the endgame of something that started long before he arrived here."

"Call the briefing," I said to Daren, who had come in behind Zephyr and positioned himself by the door, "full security team, twenty minutes."

Daren went.

I looked at the map on the wall while Cax and Zephyr were quiet around me and thought about the game Max had been running and how long he had been running it and how much of what had happened in this palace over the past two months had been shaped by the moves of someone we had been treating as a minor administrative staff member with questionable employment records.

I was not accustomed to feeling stupid.

It was not a sensation that agreed with me and it was not improving as the evening progressed.

The security team assembled in fifteen minutes rather than twenty, which was either a response to the urgency in Daren's voice or the residual sharpness from the perimeter alarm, and I briefed them in twelve sentences and sent four of them to Max's assigned quarters in the east administrative wing to gather everything in the room before he could return to remove it.

They came back in nine minutes.

The team leader stopped in the doorway and his face told me what he was going to say before he said it.

"The room is empty," he said, "completely empty, no documents, no personal items, nothing, the room looks like it hasn't been occupied in weeks."

The table was quiet.

"He cleaned it," Cax said, not a question.

"While we were in the lab with Elara," I said, "while every senior person in this palace was occupied with one situation, he used the time to eliminate the other."

I walked to the team leader. "Anything at all in the room."

"One thing," he said, and held out a folded piece of paper.

I took it and opened it and read it once and the temperature of what I was feeling dropped from furious to something considerably colder and more focused.

The handwriting was precise and clean and I recognized it from the employment forms that didn't quite exist.

I'll see you at the council, Ryker. Bring Ava. This will be decided properly.