Chapter 32

The pack's legal counsel confirmed it within an hour — a junior associate, new to the firm handling the Ashgrove land transfers, had needed a placeholder name for the shell company and pulled it straight from a briefing document without understanding what the word actually meant to anyone involved.

"An honest mistake," Kade said, pacing the length of his study while Ivy sat curled in the armchair by the window, Rowan asleep against her shoulder. "That's almost worse than sabotage. At least sabotage would mean someone was paying close enough attention to be dangerous on purpose."

"Careless mistakes are dangerous too," Odalys said from the doorway, where she'd arrived within the hour of getting Kade's call, expression grim. "Perhaps more dangerous. Sabotage can be traced to a motive. This was simply bad luck wearing the shape of a bureaucratic form."

"Can we fix it? Rename the company, bury the old filing?"

"We can try," Rhys said, laptop open on the desk, already three tabs deep into county records. "But Sarah Chen's already seen the name. Renaming the paperwork now doesn't erase what's in her notes."

Ivy shifted Rowan gently, thinking. "What if we stopped trying to hide from her, and tried something else instead."

"Like what?"

"Like what we did with Dani." She looked up at Kade, steady despite the fear still sitting cold in her chest. "We didn't out-maneuver Dani into silence. We told her the truth and trusted her to handle it responsibly. Sarah's clearly principled. She said it herself — she wants the truth, whatever shape it takes. What if the shape we gave her wasn't a lie, but also wasn't the whole truth? A version careful enough to protect us, honest enough that she doesn't feel like she's being managed."

"That's an enormous risk," Odalys said. "Trusting one human friend with a secret is different from trusting a professional journalist whose entire job is publishing what she finds."

"Everything about this month has been an enormous risk," Ivy said. "I'd rather choose which risk I'm taking instead of getting cornered into the worst version of it."

Kade studied her a long moment, something considering behind his amber eyes. "What would that conversation even look like?"

"I don't know yet." Ivy stood, careful not to wake Rowan, crossing to stand beside him at the window. "But I think it starts with actually calling her, instead of waiting to see what she does next."

The call came before Ivy could make one of her own.

Rhys's phone buzzed hard against the desk, and he answered it fast, expression shifting from calm to alarmed in the space of a single sentence.

"She published something," he said, turning the laptop screen toward the room. "Just now. A blog post, not the main paper yet, but it's live."

Ivy crossed the room fast, heart hammering, and read over his shoulder.

The headline alone made her stomach drop. Strange Sightings and Stranger Land Deals: What's Really Happening on the Voss Estate?

It wasn't the full truth. Sarah hadn't written the word werewolf, hadn't claimed anything supernatural outright. But she'd laid out the pattern plainly enough for any curious reader to start connecting dots themselves — the land purchases, the hospital transfers, two witness accounts of an unusual silhouette in the trees, and a shell company with a name that "sounds almost mythological, for a real estate holding."

"It's not exposure," Rhys said carefully. "Not yet. It's an invitation for other people to start asking the same questions she's asking."

"Which is almost worse," Kade said, jaw tight, reading over Ivy's other shoulder now. "One reporter, we could manage. A curious internet full of amateur investigators picking apart every detail she left them—"

His phone buzzed again. Then again. Then a third time in quick succession.

"Council members," he said, reading the screen. "All of them. Asking the same question at once."

"What question?"

Kade looked up, something grim settling into his face.

"Whether it's time," he said, "to finally have the conversation this pack's been avoiding for four hundred years. Whether hiding is even still possible, in a world this connected. Or whether the only way forward now is to stop hiding at all."