Semua Bab My Alpha, My Verdict : Bab 11 - Bab 20

ELI'S POVThe preliminary hearing was on a Thursday.Judge Mott's courtroom was the kind of room that had been designed to make people feel the weight of what was happening in it, high ceilings, good acoustics, the particular silence of a space that had absorbed a lot of consequential language over the years. I'd been in it twice before. I knew where the light hit the plaintiff's table and I knew Mott's habit of watching the gallery when she wanted to think without being watched thinking.Drea and I arrived forty minutes early. We set up, we reviewed, we did the quiet pre-hearing ritual we'd developed over three years of working together — she handles the physical documents, I handle the room. I walk it, I find the angles, I figure out where the pressure points are before anyone else arrives.Draven's team came in at twenty minutes before. Four attorneys, which was two more than necessary and therefore a performance. The lead was a man named Harwick — I'd faced him before, two years a

ELI'S POVDrea had the Aldrich records by seven in the morning.I was already at my desk when she forwarded them, still in the clothes I'd slept in because I'd fallen asleep at my desk, which happened during heavy case periods and which I'd stopped being embarrassed about.The records were clean on the surface, contractor license, board-adjacent work history, nothing that would flag in a standard review. But Drea had gone deeper. Aldrich's contracting fees over the past eight months showed three payments from a shell entity that traced back, after two layers, to a holding company registered in Reina Cross's territory.She was paying him. Not through the board. Privately.I forwarded it to Kieran with one line: "Drea found the money. It's Reina. Full records attached."His reply came in four minutes: *I'll handle Aldrich directly. Can you have Drea document the payment chain formally before the hearing?*I typed back: *Already in progress.*Then I got up, changed, made coffee, and sat

ELI'S POVCole called me on Friday morning.Not Kieran. Cole directly, which meant it was something Kieran knew about but had decided needed a different delivery."Reina's Beta didn't wait for my call," Cole said. "She reached out to me last night. Reina wants a meeting. Not Aldrich, not the treaty, she wants to sit down with Kieran before the hearing.""When.""She's proposing Monday. Neutral ground, her choice of location.""Her choice of location isn't neutral ground.""I know. I told them that. They came back with the governance board's regional office, which is technically nobody's territory."I thought about it. The governance board's regional office was Draven's professional home, which made it not neutral in a different way. But refusing the meeting entirely gave Reina the ability to say she'd tried to resolve things peacefully and been shut out, which was the kind of narrative that played well in pack politics."Kieran needs to go," I said. "But not alone and not without a cl

ELI'S POVThe conditional declaration filed at nine Wednesday morning.Drea sent me the confirmation and I read it twice and then set my phone face down and went back to the final hearing prep because there was nothing useful I could do with the feeling that arrived when I saw Kieran's name on a public record supporting the treaty I'd spent three years building.By noon three northeastern territorial Alphas had issued statements of tentative support. By two o'clock a fourth had followed. Draven's office had called Harwick, who had called our firm, and the message relayed back was that the board was requesting a pre-hearing conference with both lead counsels.Drea leaned in my doorway. "Mott's clerk says the judge is aware of the request and has declined to order it.""Good.""Draven's going to walk into that courtroom tomorrow knowing he's already lost the procedural ground.""He knows. He's known since the declaration went in this morning." I looked at the prep materials on my desk.

ELI'S POVI didn't tell Drea about the corridor.She was waiting with the car and she looked at my face when I got in and whatever she saw there made her not ask, which was the specific gift of someone who knows you well enough to read the room.We drove back to the firm. We debriefed the hearing professionally and efficiently and by five o'clock the post-hearing filings were drafted and the client notifications were sent and the fourteen-day execution countdown was documented in the case file.Then Drea went home and I sat in my office alone with the quiet.My hand remembered the angle of his jaw. The warmth of it. The way he'd gone completely still, like something that had been braced for a long time had finally stopped needing to be.I hadn't planned it. That was the part I kept coming back to. I was not a person who did unplanned things, especially not in public corridors outside active courtrooms, especially not with someone whose territory was still technically a signatory party