Semua Bab Wolfless Luna Rebirth: The Alpha King's Lethal Queen : Bab 71 - Bab 80

~Lyra's POV~We drove past the café twice before stopping.Torvi's habit, and a good one. The eastern commercial district was the kind of neighbourhood that operated late, restaurants, late-night pharmacies, the particular mix of people who had somewhere specific to be at eleven PM and weren't advertising it. The café was a small corner unit, one window, a handful of tables, the kind of place where nobody looked up when someone came in.I went in alone. Xavier went in two minutes later, found a table by the wall, ordered coffee, and did not look at me. Torvi arrived last and took the corner seat where she could watch the room and the street simultaneously.Vivienne was in the vehicle outside with her laptop running the monitoring feed.Jade was already there.She was in the back booth, and she looked nothing like the woman who had made herself comfortable in my family's sitting room and talked about fabric markets and Alpha Ball gossip. She looked like someone who had been sleeping in

~Lyra's POV~Ruel arrived exactly on time.That was the first thing I noticed. Not early, which would have been anxious. Not late, which would have been a power play. Exactly on time, which was the choice of someone who respected the meeting enough to be precise about it and didn't need the psychological leverage of either deviation.He was mid-forties, neat, nothing remarkable about his appearance. Medium height, plain clothing, the kind of face that wouldn't stay in your memory twenty minutes after he left the room. He carried nothing except a slim document wallet. No obvious weapons. Torvi scanned him twice, once at the door, once when he sat, and gave me a small nod on the second pass that meant clean.He accepted the water Xavier offered. He sat. He said: "Thank you for the time."Then he explained himself.He didn't do preamble. He didn't do social performance. He laid it out the way someone lays out a business proposal when they're confident in the numbers and don't need to sel

~Lyra's POV~We had four hours and we used all of them.The warrior redistribution was the first problem. Moving sixty-four wolves from a standard perimeter pattern to four specific quadrant positions without creating any visible external change was like rearranging furniture in the dark while someone watched the windows. Torvi ran concealment wards on the internal movement corridors as fast as she could layer them, she looked tired by the second hour, which was not something I had seen from her before.Ivan's trackers arrived at the eastern perimeter at three in the morning, two wolves in blue jackets exactly as he'd said, and Torvi verified them both in under four minutes. They were the unsettling kind of useful, they could feel the ward pressure as a physical sensation, describing the interference points like pain in their own skin, which gave us real-time updates on the reshaping that no technology could have provided.By four AM the setup looked like this: Torvi and I at the east

~Lyra's POV~Harlan arrived forty minutes after Vivienne said his name.We had sent Dane's two most senior warriors to collect him from Silvercrest quietly, no announcement, no formal detention order, just a request that he come to the estate for a meeting about a security matter. The kind of request that a senior advisor with nothing to hide would accept without question.He didn't ask a single question on the drive over.That was the first thing that told me something.He was sixty-two years old. Compact, grey-haired, the kind of face that belonged in a room reviewing spreadsheets, which was exactly what he had been doing for Silvercrest for fifteen years. Pack resource allocations, budget reviews, the administrative machinery that kept a territorial pack's finances functioning. Three grandchildren. No flags in any record anyone had ever pulled. Completely, thoroughly ordinary.He came into the operations room, looked at the people in it, Ivan, Seraphine in restraints, Xavier, me, P

~Lyra's POV~The thirty-day clock was the real weapon.I had understood that within ten minutes of Ivan's briefing. The frozen funds weren't designed to destroy the three alliance packs , they were designed to create a specific window of instability. Each pack's operational budget covered warrior salaries, medical services, border maintenance. The kind of spending that didn't stop when accounts were frozen, it just became impossible to pay for. Thirty days before real damage started appearing. Thirty days was also, precisely, the minimum processing time for a continental dispute resolution.Not a coincidence."She's not trying to remove my title," I had the statute pulled up on Vivienne's secondary screen and I had read it three times now. "She knows she can't. The challenge is too technical, too narrow. She's trying to tie us up for thirty days while the frozen funds create instability in three alliance packs that are already watching the Nightshade situation with one eye.""And in t