Chapter 6: The Signature

I read the document four times before I let myself believe what it said.

The first time I read it fast, the way you read something when your eyes are moving quicker than your brain is willing to follow. The words landed but did not settle. I folded it back up and sat against the wall and told myself I had misread the name. That it was similar to his name but not his name. That my mind was doing what minds do under prolonged stress, finding familiar shapes in random information, building meaning out of nothing because meaning feels safer than chaos.

The second time I read it slowly.

It still said Marcus Holt.

The third time I was looking for anything that could give me an alternative explanation. A different Marcus. A forged signature on the payment document itself, the whole thing a layer deeper than I had understood, someone framing Marcus the way Marcus had framed me. I held the paper at an angle to catch the dim light coming through the gap near the roof and I studied the signature the way I had studied every other detail in that room for seventeen days, looking for a weakness, looking for a way out.

The handwriting was his. I knew Marcus’s handwriting. I had seen it on pack documents, on formal correspondence, on the notes he passed to Damon during long elder meetings when something needed to be communicated quietly. The particular way he formed the capital M was wide at the top and narrower at the base. The H leaned slightly left. The way the letters in Holt connected without lifting the pen.

It was him.

The fourth time I read it I was not looking for an alternative anymore. I was just sitting with the weight of it. Letting it be true because refusing to let it be true was a luxury I could not afford.

Marcus Holt. Beta of Silver Moon Pack. The man who had served beside Damon’s father before Damon was old enough to lead. The man who had sat across from me at a hundred pack dinners and asked about my work with the healers and remembered the names of every family I mentioned. The man who had stood next to Damon at our mating ceremony with his hand on Damon’s shoulder and his eyes bright.

I had trusted him.

Not the way I trusted Damon, not with everything, but with the specific trust you give to someone who has earned it slowly over years through consistent small acts of reliability. I had trusted him the way you trust the ground under your feet. You do not think about it. You just walk.

And the whole time he had been something else entirely underneath.

I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth and sat in the dark and gave myself exactly one minute to feel how much that hurt. One minute. Then I folded the paper very carefully and pushed it into the lining of my boot where I had made a small tear in the seam three days earlier for exactly this kind of purpose.

Then I started thinking about what to do with what I knew.

Marcus had money. That was the first practical thought that followed the emotional one. Vanessa was the visible face of this, the jealousy and the manoeuvring and the deliberate cruelty, but Vanessa did not have the resources to fund what had been done to me. The rogue camp alone required sustained payment. The forged documents required someone skilled and that kind of skill costs something. The body, the staged evidence, the extended operation across mountain territory. All of it had a cost that Vanessa, comfortable as she was as the Beta’s daughter, could not have covered alone.

Marcus had covered it.

Which meant this had never been only about Vanessa’s obsession. There was a second motive underneath the obvious one and I needed to understand it before I understood anything else.

Why did Marcus want me gone badly enough to pay for all of this?

I was still turning that question over when I heard footsteps outside the door.

The footsteps were wrong.

I had been in that room long enough to know the rhythm of the guards. The heavy even pace of the older one who did the morning food delivery. The slightly uneven gait of the younger one who took the evening rotation. These footsteps were neither. Quieter. More deliberate. The kind of walk that was paying attention to itself.

I was on my feet before I had consciously decided to stand.

The bolt on the door slid back.

I had just enough time to register that I had been sitting with the document in my hands and had not yet put it in my boot before the door opened.

The guard who stepped in was not one of the two I knew.

He was younger than either of them. Not young exactly, maybe late twenties, with a lean angular face and the kind of eyes that moved around a room quickly before settling. He was dressed like the others but he stood differently. Less like a rogue and more like someone performing being a rogue, which was a distinction that landed in my gut before my brain fully processed it.

He looked at the document in my hands.

I did not hide it. There was no point. He had already seen it and any movement I made now would only tell him how much I did not want him to have seen it.

We looked at each other for a moment that stretched longer than it should have.

I expected him to take it from me. Or call for the others. Or do any of the things a guard does when a prisoner has something they should not have?

He did none of those things.

He stepped inside and pulled the door mostly closed behind him. Not fully. Just enough to muffle what he was about to say. He looked at the document once more and then he looked at me and when he spoke his voice was low and completely level, the voice of someone delivering information rather than having a conversation.

“If you want to live,” he said, “stop looking at Marcus Holt.”

I did not move.

“He is not the one you are supposed to fear.”

The silence after that was very loud.

He held my gaze for two more seconds. Then he stepped back out. The bolt slid into place with a sound that felt heavier than it had before.

I stood in the middle of that room with the document in my hands and his words sitting in the air where he had left them and I understood, with a cold clarity that moved from my head down through my whole body, that whatever I thought I had figured out about who was behind this, I had only found the first layer.

Somewhere underneath Marcus Holt was something worse.

And it was waiting.