LOGINShare
CHAPTER 6: THE PORTFOLIO
publish date:
2026-06-06 04:10:57I acquired the last seven Sterling Pack creditors during the second year of my life in the Free Cities.
The process moved more quickly than it had in the first year. At least, that was what every line of the acquisition plan Helga and I had mapped out suggested. We had spent the first week of the new year bent over the long oak table in the kitchen of the Aldris Lane townhouse, reviewing schedules, projections, and targets until late into the night. Word had traveled. By spring of my second year in the Free Cities, every Sterling Pack creditor in the region knew exactly who I was. They knew Ariadne Voss of Voss Capital was buying. They knew I offered fair prices. They knew I closed deals without wasting time. Most importantly, they knew the Sterling Pack loans sitting on their books were worth far more to me than they would ever be to anyone else. Three of the final seven creditors contacted me first. I never reached out. I waited. And they came. By autumn of my second year in the Free Cities, I controlled all fourteen Sterling Pack loans. Together, those loans carried a face value of two hundred and thirteen million Free Cities credits. According to the acquisition ledger Helga quietly maintained in the townhouse office the same ledger she had started the day I purchased Harren Capital’s loan I had spent one hundred and thirty-four million Free Cities credits to secure them all. The Voss family trust fund was nearly exhausted. Every quarterly statement told the same story. Only eleven million Free Cities credits remained. That balance wasn’t accidental. According to the trust documents, my grandmother, Eleanor Voss, had specifically required that amount to remain untouched forever to cover ongoing Voss family operating expenses. The eleven million wasn’t what mattered. The portfolio was. Two hundred and thirteen million credits in Sterling Pack debt. Every single credit held by one company. Voss Capital. Liraeth, First Free City. Registered owner and sole director: Ariadne Voss. Twenty-four years old. I issued the first formal notice of default on the morning of the first Monday of autumn in my second Free Cities year. The notice came through Voss Capital’s legal counsel. Aldren & Partners. A small three-lawyer firm in the Free Cities that my grandmother had quietly retained back in 2016. The document was forty-three pages long. Every page was packed with legal precision. It outlined the full balance of all fourteen Sterling Pack loans, the accumulated interest, the penalties resulting from missed payments, and a formal demand that the debt be repaid in full within ninety days. The total amount demanded in the notice came to two hundred and sixty-seven million Free Cities credits. According to the Sterling Pack financial records from 2024 records I had obtained alongside the creditor loans the pack’s annual revenue was thirty-one million credits. The Sterling Pack could not pay. Not within ninety days. Not within nine hundred. Not ever. Caelum Sterling’s reply arrived that same week on Thursday. It came through his legal representatives. Greyvane & Sons. A Northern Hollow law firm that had handled Sterling Pack legal affairs for sixty-one years. The response was only four pages. The first three pages contained exactly what any lawyer would expect. Requests for extensions. Appeals for renegotiation. References to Old Law and its protections regarding financial hardship affecting Alpha bloodlines within the Northern packs. Nothing unusual. The fourth page was different. Very different. It contained only a single paragraph. The paragraph read: We note that the current holder of the Sterling Pack debt portfolio is identified in the formal notice of default as Ariadne Voss, formerly of the Northern Hollow Voss noble line. The Sterling Pack requests clarification regarding whether this individual is the same Ariadne Voss who was previously engaged to Alpha Caelum Sterling and whose engagement was terminated in the spring of 2024. I read the paragraph once. Then again. I lowered the document onto my desk. The townhouse office was quiet. Late afternoon sunlight stretched across the polished floorboards, and the faint scent of paper, oak, and old red wine lingered in the room. I reached for the glass King Lysander had poured me three evenings earlier. A bottle from Liraeth. I still hadn’t finished it. I took a slow sip. The wine lingered on my tongue. Then I spoke into the silence of the empty office. “Yes, Mr. Greyvane.” I paused. A small smile touched my lips. “It is.”
Latest chapter
The Luna He Threw Away Chapter 44: The Letter Never Sent
The letter carried a date from four generations before my grandmother well over a hundred years ago. It had been written by a Voss woman named Cordelia Voss. It had never been delivered. Reading it in the pale, colorless light of dawn, I understood exactly why.Some truths are too dangerous to send out into the world. So you write them down. You place them in the family record so they don’t disappear, and you leave them behind for someone who might one day need them. My grandmother had done the same thing with the sealed letter she left me in the Halversford shop. It was a very Voss habit to hide truth carefully, patiently, sometimes for a century, until the moment it finally mattered.This was what Cordelia Voss had learned. What she had written. What she had chosen never to send:The child the House of Morrigane lost six hundred years ago the half-blood child whose death shattered the house and gave birth to the oath had not been a monster. Had not been some cursed thing that ruined
The Luna He Threw Away Chapter 43: The Blood-Oath
The House of Morrigane sent no one.That was the first sign. The first clear difference.Vared had welcomed me into his stone hall and allowed truth to be shown. Thane had dispatched his son into my drawing room, willing to bargain for survival. They were different men, different houses but they had both done the same fundamental thing. They had spoken. They had opened a door, even if only a crack, enough for negotiation to slip through.Morrigane opened nothing.No crack. No whisper. No acknowledgment that a door even existed.For six days after Thane left my drawing room in defeat, I reached for the House of Morrigane through every path Seraphina Dane could find. Every contact. Every old tie. Every hidden channel.And every single one came back empty.Not refusal.Silence.Morrigane did not decline negotiation. It behaved as though negotiation itself was an absurdity—something beneath notice, something that simply did not exist."They won’t answer," Seraphina said at last.We stood
The Luna He Threw Away Chapter 42: The House That Lost to a Banker
Thane came to see me on the third day. I had been waiting for it. A house like theirs, proud and humiliated, always chooses between two paths. It either strikes back in anger or comes forward to bargain. Rage belongs to the proud. Strategy belongs to the smart. Thane, for all its faults, had always been smart and a smart house that loses its standing comes looking for terms. They didn’t send a warrior. That part was finished, and we all knew it. They sent a negotiator. He was a Lycan with silver eyes and the quiet steadiness of someone used to measured words. Middle-aged. Controlled. Polite in that distant, careful way that said everything without saying too much. The kind of courtesy worn by someone whose house had just been publicly embarrassed and refused to make it worse. Alaric Thane. A blood member. Not a servant. That alone told me how deeply the empty estate had cut. I received him in the east drawing room. Seraphina Dane sat beside me on purpose. A judge of the Moon Co
The Luna He Threw Away Chapter 41: The Witnesses
If you want to disgrace a great house before the old world, you must first make sure the old world is watching. That was the most difficult piece of the plan. And the one Lysander had the least patience for. Drawing Thane’s strength out to an empty estate? That part was simple. But arranging things so the other high houses would see it happen without Thane ever suspecting they were being observed that was something else entirely. A humiliation unseen isn’t humiliation at all. It’s just wasted effort. I needed witnesses. Real ones. Houses the old country would trust without question. I had three strings to pull. The first was Corwin Vared. He had refused me. Refused to raise his house in my defense. But a man like him honest, rigid, devout once shown something undeniable, cannot unsee it. Truth burrows into men like him and stays. Seraphina agreed with me: if Vared was told where to look, on the right night, he would come. Not for me. Never for me. But to confirm, with his own eyes
The Luna He Threw Away Chapter 40: The Ground She Chose
There’s a rule that lives in every kind of war money, power, blood. My grandmother had scribbled it in the margin of an old Voss ledger, her handwriting thin and sharp: Never fight on ground your enemy picked. And if you can’t avoid the fight, claim the ground first then let them think it was theirs. I had picked the country estate. Thane believed they had. That was everything. That was the edge. A massive one. But an advantage is only as strong as what you build on top of it, and I had a choice in front of me that wasn’t simple. Thane was sending real force to that house. They thought my child was there. When they came, they wouldn’t hesitate. They would come ready to break doors, spill blood, burn whatever stood in their way. So the question mattered. What would be waiting for them? The easiest answer was the King. Lysander wanted that answer. Of course he did. He was the last Lycan, the strongest creature left in the wolf territories, and every instinct in him leaned toward
The Luna He Threw Away Chapter 39: Feeding the Channel
Feeding a channel isn’t about telling lies.That’s the first mistake amateurs make they shove falsehoods down the line and assume whoever’s listening will swallow them whole. But a house like Thane doesn’t operate on blind trust. They test everything. They verify, compare, and dissect. The moment a source starts delivering nothing but neat, convenient lies is the moment suspicion sparks. And once Thane begins to suspect Bertrand is compromised, the line goes dead.And with it, my only clear view into the core of their house.So I didn’t lie to Bertrand Aldermoor.I chose something far more difficult. Older. Sharper.I told him the truth.Not all of it. Never all. But enough carefully selected truths. Real numbers. Real strategies. Genuine movements of money and household decisions. Every detail accurate. Every piece something Thane could confirm if they looked closely. I let that channel flow clean for two full weeks, untouched by deception, so everything Bertrand passed on would alig
You may also like
Mated to the Alpha Twins
Jane Doe4.3M viewsThe Alpha King's Hated Slave
Kiss Leilani1.3M viewsAccidental Surrogate for Alpha
Caroline Above Story1.7M viewsThe Alpha King's Daughter
Jane Doe768.8K viewsTHE TRUE LUNA IS A FATSO!
Sunkissed213 viewsThe Alpha’s Contract Mate
Reedah 111 viewsThe Rejected Omega Who Was Always Meant To Be Queen
Beeluv131 viewsThe Alpha's Plump Mistake
G.V.STELLARIS126 views
