All Chapters of Midnight Debt: Never His, Always His: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

REINAI was in the training room by five twenty- three, before Damian.I heard his footsteps in the corridor at five twenty-eight and he came in to find me already stretching, which I did with great deliberateness so he would know I had been there first.He looked at me. Looked at the clock on the wall. Said nothing.But something at the corner of his mouth moved."Right," he said, dropping his bag. "We start from the beginning. Show me your stance."I showed him my stance.He looked at it the way a builder looks at a wall someone else put up, assessing, finding the problems and already planning the work. Then he walked around me slowly. Tapped my left foot. My right elbow. The angle of my shoulders."Your left side is open," he said. "Every time. Anyone who knows what they're doing goes there first.""I know. I'm working on it.""Work faster." He stepped back. "Again."We went for a whole ninety minutes.It was not pleasant.Damian trained the way he did everything else, efficiently

ZADENI had the file on Sofia Castillo since the second week.Not because I was told to. Because I had checked Reinas intake information the night after the wedding.I was alone in my office at two in the morning, going through the debt settlement papers like I did with everything.That's when I found her sister.She was seventeen and in her year of high school.She lived with her father in the house Reina had left.The sister had no income except what Reina sent from the bakery.I read that file for longer than I needed to.Then I closed it and went to bed.The next morning I had Damian open a background monitoring file on Sofia CastilloI said it's protocol for immediate family of people close, to our pack "He wrote it down without saying anything.I knew he did not believe me and to be honest I did not believe myself either.The scholarship was pretty straightforward.The university program Sofia had applied to had funding from a business foundation my company works with.Sofia Ca

SOFIAI had been in the house for two days and I had already made a list in my head. The way my sister Reina does it.She organizes things and builds a picture from all the little pieces. She taught me how to do that without realizing it, just by being herself and growing up with me. She always says to pay attention and remember the details. People show you who they are all the time you just have to watch them.So. The listThings I figured out in two days:One. The pack did not fully accept Reina yet but they were getting there. You could see it in the way they looked at her. It was not cold like Lena told me it used to be. Like they had already made up their minds about her and were quietly changing their opinions.Two. Lena was the best person in this house and maybe one of the best people I ever met. I wanted to be her friend forever starting right now.Three. Zaden Cole looked at my sister Reina about every forty-five seconds when they were in the same room. He thought nobody not

ZADENDamian came to my office at seven.I looked up from the eastern alliance review I had been staring at for the better part of an hour."She's with me," he said.Reina walked in behind him.I looked at her. She looked at me. Her expression was the focused, not tense, just present. The one I had learned meant she had already done considerable work and was here to deliver the result of it."Sit down," I said.She sat. Damian sat beside her. Which was itself a statement. Damian's chair was usually to my right, not across from me beside someone else."Tell me," I said.Damian told me.He went through it, Callum's confirmed handwriting on the note, the communication logs, the two encrypted channels running to the same destination. Then he looked at Reina and nodded.She took it from there.She laid out Tobias. Sofia's account of the phone call. Her own observations, the questions, the access to operational information he shouldn't have, the corridor outside my private study. The arriva

ZADENI heard it at eleven forty-three.It wasn't a sound really. It was like a missing sound.The garden at night has its kind of quiet. I got used to it over the weeks. I would stand at my office window staring out more than I should have.This was different. The silence felt off. Something was wrong, with how quiet it was.My wolf was already moving before I decided to.I was out of my office and through the house in under a minute. The east corridor, the back passage, the garden entrance. Moving fast with the focus of a man who has stopped questioning his wolf's instincts on this specific subject.I came through the garden entrance and saw them.Two figures at the far wall. They are not part of my pack. I know every person in my pack by the way they move and these two people are moving in a completely different way. They are being very careful and deliberate, with a kind of energy that you can tell they have been taught to use when they are sneaking into a place, like this.Blackt