Chapter Thirteen: The Business of Enemies

Adrian did not leave Millbrook the next morning, though he told himself, packing his bag at the small inn where he had taken a room, that he had no real reason left to stay. He had seen the shop. He had confirmed what Corwin's rumor had already told him. There was nothing more, he reasoned, that required his presence in this rain-soaked little town at the edge of nowhere.

He stayed anyway.

He told himself it was the matter of Hale Holdings, still unresolved, still gnawing at the edges of Black River's borders in ways he did not yet understand. That was true enough to hide behind. But the deeper truth, the one he turned over reluctantly in the quiet hours of the night, was that he had stood in a doorway the day before and felt, for the first time in a year, something other than the dull ache of guilt he had carried since the rejection.

He had felt hope. He did not know what to do with it.

He found Daniel Reyes the following afternoon, not by chance, but by careful inquiry at the inn, where the innkeeper had been more than happy to point out the well-dressed man who handled most of the property dealings in town.

"You are the one helping Elena Rose," Adrian said, finding Daniel at a table near the back of the tavern, a ledger open in front of him.

Daniel looked up, and whatever he saw in Adrian's face made his own expression cool considerably. "I am. And you are the Alpha who rejected her in front of his whole pack."

Word traveled fast, it seemed, even in a town this small. Adrian did not flinch from it, though something in his chest tightened at hearing it said so plainly, by a stranger who clearly held no warmth for him at all.

"I came about Hale Holdings," Adrian said. "Not about Elena."

"Did you." Daniel closed the ledger slowly, leaning back in his chair with the kind of careful, measuring look Adrian recognized from negotiations with rival packs. "Forgive me if I find that difficult to believe, given how long you stood outside her shop yesterday before you worked up the nerve to go in."

Adrian said nothing, because there was nothing honest he could say that would not prove Daniel's point.

"Sit down," Daniel said finally, gesturing to the chair across from him, his tone shifting into something more businesslike. "If you are genuinely here about Hale Holdings, then we have things to discuss. If you are here for some other reason, I suggest you think very carefully before you do anything that costs Elena more than she has already paid."

Adrian sat.

What followed was an hour of careful, wary cooperation between two men who did not trust each other and had very little reason to. Daniel laid out everything his notebook had gathered, the six properties, the pattern of small towns along a stretch of land that, Adrian realized with growing unease, ran almost directly between Black River territory and a region his pack had always considered too remote to matter.

"Show me a map," Adrian said.

Daniel produced one, worn and marked with small careful notes in his own neat hand. Adrian studied it for a long moment, tracing the string of towns Hale Holdings had targeted, and felt a cold understanding settle into his chest.

"They are not buying random buildings," he said slowly. "They are buying a corridor. Land that connects the southern territories to the old northern passes." He looked up at Daniel. "There has not been a road through those passes in over a century. Not since the old wars."

"Why would anyone want to reopen them now?"

Adrian did not answer right away, because the answer, when it came to him, was not one he wanted to say out loud in a tavern full of strangers. The old passes had been sealed for a reason. They led, according to pack legend older than Black River itself, to territory that had once belonged to bloodlines nobody living had ever seen, wolves and something older than wolves, sealed away behind old magic that most packs now dismissed as myth.

He thought, unwillingly, of the way Elena's scent had always eluded him. The way no wolf in Silver Moon Pack had ever been able to properly sense her, not since she was a child.

"I do not know yet," he said instead, because a theory built on old legends was not something he was ready to hand to a stranger. "But I intend to find out."

I learned of the meeting from Daniel himself, that evening, over a supper he insisted on bringing to the shop so I would not have to close early to eat.

"You spoke to him," I said, watching him unpack bread and cheese onto my counter with hands that were not quite as steady as usual.

"I did. He came to me first, which I will admit surprised me." Daniel set down the last of the food and looked at me with an expression I could not quite read. "He is not what I expected."

"What did you expect?"

"A man arrogant enough to reject a mate in front of his entire pack without a second thought." He shrugged, though the gesture looked less easy than it usually did. "Instead I found a man who looked like the rejection has been eating him alive for a year. I do not know what to do with that information, Elena, and I will tell you honestly, I do not particularly want to like it."

I did not know what to say to that, so I busied myself slicing the bread, my hands finding something familiar to do while my mind turned over everything Daniel had told me, about the corridor of towns, about the old sealed passes, about a theory Adrian had not been willing to say out loud.

"What do you think he wants?" I asked finally.

"Hale Holdings, or you?"

"Either. Both."

Daniel considered the question longer than I expected. "I think," he said slowly, "that a man does not ride three days south, alone, over a matter of pack business he could easily have sent someone else to handle, unless something else is pulling him there too." He met my eyes steadily. "I think you already know that, Elena. I think you have known it since he walked through your door yesterday."

I did not deny it, because there was no honest way to.

Outside, the rain had finally stopped, and the evening had turned quiet and still, the kind of stillness that feels like the air itself is waiting for something to happen.

I did not know yet what that something would be. I only knew, sitting there with Daniel's steady presence across the counter and Adrian's rain-soaked voice still echoing somewhere in the back of my mind, that the quiet life I had built for myself in Millbrook was about to change in ways I could not yet fully see coming.