Chapter Seven

What the Records Said

Lucas's POV

I should not have told her that yet.

I knew it the moment the words left my mouth too much, too fast, too soon. She was sitting across from me with glass at her feet and a look on her face that was not quite fear and not quite grief but something in between that was harder to watch than either.

I bent down and picked up the pieces of the broken glass without speaking. She watched me do it in silence. When I straightened, she was gripping the edge of the table with both hands like she needed something solid to hold on to.

"How do you know that?" she asked.

"My contact found a partial record that had not been destroyed. A single witness statement…handwritten, tucked into an unrelated file. It described a figure pulling a child out of the hall before the structure collapsed." I set the broken glass in the sink. "The description does not match any Ashveil pack member. The person was described as having silver hair."

She said nothing. But I watched something move behind her eyes. A slow and awful rearranging of everything she thought she knew.

"Silver hair is not common," she said finally.

"No," I agreed. "It is not."

I had Adam on it already. The witness who wrote that statement had left Ashveil territory within a week of the fire and had not been located since. The statement had been filed and buried and would have stayed buried if my contact had not been one of the most thorough people I had ever paid for information.

What I did not tell Emily yet was the rest of what the partial record contained. Not tonight. She had taken enough for one evening and I was already angry at myself for pushing this far.

Caius pressed forward inside me. He had been restless since the kitchen door opened and I got my first real look at her in the firelight, dark circles under her eyes, dress hanging loose on her thin frame, jaw set in that way she had braced herself for impact even when nothing was coming.

He wanted me to close the distance, to hold her. He was absolutely certain that physical closeness would help her, that the mate bond carried something calming in it, something stabilising, and that she would feel it even without her wolf awake enough to understand what it was.

I kept him back. She was not ready for that and I was not going to push her the way Caius wanted me to, Not tonight.

"Go to bed," I told her. "You need sleep more than answers right now."

She stood slowly, and was almost at the door when she stopped. "The person who pulled me out," she said, her back still to me. "They saved my life and then just left?"

"It appears so."

"Why would someone save a child from a fire and not stay?"

I did not have an answer for that. Not one I was willing to give her yet.

She nodded once and left. I listened to her footsteps go up the stairs and down the corridor and stopped when her door closed.

I stood in the empty kitchen for a long time after that.

The next morning I called a meeting with Adam and Yoana before Emily was awake. Yoana had the blood results on the table before I even sat down; pages of numbers, markers and genetic flags that she had been up half the night working through. She had not slept. I could tell by the particular sharpness in her eyes that came from too much coffee and something she was not sure how to say.

"Just tell me," I said.

Yoana set the top page in front of me. "Her blood carries the Founding Line marker. The Ashveil bloodline, the original one, the one that established the regional pack governance system. She is a direct heir." She paused. "Lucas. A direct heir means territorial rights over every pack in this region. Not just Ashveil, but every pack."

Adam went very inactive beside me.

"If someone knew what she was," I said slowly.

"They would want her dead or controlled," Yoana finished. "Yes."

I pushed back from the table and stood. The pieces were locking into place with a sickening weight. The fire, the binding, the destroyed records and the sixteen years of systematic breaking down of a girl who carried enough blood power to reshape the entire regional structure.

This was never about punishing her for something she did as a child.

This was about making sure she never became what she was born to be.

My phone buzzed on the table. Adam checked it first. His face went flat in the particular way it did when the news was bad.

"It's from our border patrol," he said. "Three Ashveil wolves crossed into our eastern tree line an hour ago." He looked up. "They were not alone, there were rogue wolves with them."

They had not come to negotiate.

They had come to find her.

The financial records on Adam's laptop were already pulling up by the time I had fully processed what he had said about the border breach. Three Ashveil wolves, two rogue wolves, eastern tree line. They had not come to fight, they had come to look. To confirm that Emily was here, that the transfer had happened, that she was where Aden's signed contract said she would be.

Which meant someone at Ashveil was reporting to someone beyond Aden. And that someone had moved within twelve hours of the contract being signed.

Caius was not restless about this. He was cold. The specific coldness that preceded the kind of decision that did not get reversed.

I called Adam in and we worked through the border patrol footage in silence. The five wolves had entered from a gap in the eastern perimeter that should have been covered. It had been covered until forty minutes before the crossing, when the border runner on that section had been called back to assist with a supply delivery. The timing was not coincidental. The crossing had been planned around Ironblood's specific patrol rotation.

Someone knew our rotation, not in general terms specifically. Which patrol ran which section and when. That was internal information. Information that could only have come from someone with consistent access to Ironblood's operational patterns over time.

I ran through the list of people who had that access, My own pack, the council's administrative system, which logged patrol declarations for territorial record purposes. Any Alpha who had conducted a formal cooperation meeting with Ironblood in the past year, during which patrol coordination was discussed.

Aden had not attended any such meeting. But his Beta had. Jayden had been present at a joint patrol coordination session eleven months ago. Standard inter-pack practice. Information shared in good faith between allied territories.

Jayden had filed that information away and had not been asked to give it back when the relationship between Ironblood and Ashveil changed.

I noted it and kept going through the footage. The five wolves had stood at the eastern tree line for approximately eight minutes before retreating. Long enough to confirm a visual on the packhouse and to potentially identify movement patterns within the grounds.

They had not tried to enter further. They had confirmed and left. This was intelligence gathering, not an attack. Which meant an attack would follow when whoever had sent them felt they had enough information to act on.

Emily needed to know all of this. Not the managed version, all of it. She had asked me for full honesty and I had agreed and I was going to keep that agreement even when the information was difficult.

I also needed George's testimony transmitted to the archive tonight. Whatever came next, the evidenc

e needed to be beyond reach before the situation escalated further.

I picked up the phone.