Chapter 30

Dani arrived Saturday morning, overnight bag in one hand, deep suspicion written all over her face the second she stepped out of her car and got a good look at the compound's gate.

"Okay," she said, staring up at twelve feet of iron like it might start talking to her. "This is either a cult or a cartel, and I need you to tell me which one before I walk through that gate."

"Neither," Ivy said, hugging her tight. "It's actually so much stranger than either of those."

She told her everything on the back porch that afternoon, Rowan napping upstairs, Kade sitting close but letting Ivy carry the story herself. The clinic. The change. The full moon and the bond and the succession fight and the Ashgrove reveal, all of it, laid out plain the way she wished someone had laid it out for her, three weeks before her whole life turned into something out of a folktale.

Dani didn't say anything for a long time after Ivy finished. She just stared at the roses, jaw working, processing in the particular quiet way she'd always had since college.

"So the guy from the hospital parking lot last year," Dani said finally. "The one you called 'someone from work.' That was actually a literal werewolf."

"Yes."

"And you married him."

"Also yes."

"And your baby is half wolf, half some secret second werewolf bloodline that got wiped off the map sixty years ago."

"That's the short version, yeah."

Dani was quiet another moment, then let out a laugh that sounded somewhere between disbelief and hysteria. "I've spent a year thinking you just landed a rich, weird boyfriend who was really private about his family money. This is so much worse and so much cooler than that."

"You're not scared?"

"I'm terrified," Dani said honestly. "But I've also known you since we were nineteen, and I trust you more than I trust my own judgment most days. If you say it's safe, I believe you enough to stick around and find out."

Kade leaned forward, voice careful. "I need to ask you something serious, Dani, now that you know all of it. A journalist is already looking into this pack. Into land records, hospital transfers, things that could expose all of it if she connects the pieces publicly. I need to know you're not going to be a piece she can use, even by accident."

"I already told her I didn't know anything," Dani said. "I meant it then. I mean it more now."

"She may come back to you. People like that usually do."

"Then I'll tell her the same nothing I told her the first time." Dani's jaw set, stubborn in a way Ivy remembered fondly from a dozen college arguments. "I didn't survive four years as your roommate without learning how to keep a secret, Ivy. This is just a bigger one than usual."

They spent the evening working out a plan, the four of them — Ivy, Kade, Dani, and Rhys, who'd driven in once he heard Dani had actually been told the truth.

"Best approach with a journalist this deep in," Rhys said, spreading printouts across the kitchen table, "isn't to scare her off. It's to give her a story that satisfies the itch without confirming what she actually suspects. Land disputes. Private security. A wealthy, reclusive family protecting its privacy a little too aggressively. All true enough to hold up, none of it touching the actual truth."

"You want to feed her a cover story."

"I want to give her something to publish that isn't us," Rhys said. "Every good reporter needs a story to justify a year of work. Give her one that's real enough to satisfy her editor and boring enough that nobody reads past the headline."

"And if she doesn't take the bait?" Ivy asked.

Rhys's expression sobered. "Then we're back to harder conversations. I'd rather not get there."

Kade's phone buzzed on the table, and Ivy watched his face change the second he read the screen.

"What is it?"

"Text from the front gate security." He turned the phone around so she could see it. "A woman just requested a meeting with 'the property owner.' Says her name's Sarah Chen. Says she's a journalist working on a story about land use in the county, and she'd love five minutes of anyone's time."

The kitchen went very quiet.

"She's here," Dani said. "Right now. At the actual gate."

"She's here," Kade confirmed, already standing, already reaching for his jacket like a man walking into a fight he hadn't fully prepared for. "Which means we're doing this a lot sooner than any of us planned."