Chapter 34 34

Chapter 34 34
Chapter 34
Daphne's POV

The meeting ended without ceremony.

Seren was escorted back to the east gate by the same two border wolves who had brought her in, and she went without argument, which told me she understood the terms of this — that today had been an opening and not a resolution, that trust of the kind required for anything beyond today was going to be built or not built over time and could not be claimed by a single honest conversation, however much honesty it had contained.

At the door she paused and looked back at me.

She did not say anything. She just looked, the way she had looked when she first came through the door — with that old pain moving briefly across the surface of her face before she managed it back under. Then she turned and went with the border wolves and the door closed behind her and she was gone.

I sat at the table for a moment in the quiet room.

Caspian was still near the window. He had not moved significantly since Edgar left, and there was something in the way he was standing that told me he needed a minute before the next thing, which was going to require a different kind of him than the meeting had. The meeting had required the Alpha. What came next was going to require the person underneath that, and the transition between the two was not instant, not for anyone.

I did not fill the silence.

After a while he turned from the window and looked at me and the expression on his face was the most undefended I had seen it. Not broken — nothing about him suggested broken, he was too fundamentally solid for that. But open in a way that had a cost visible in it. The cost of having the thing you knew confirmed by someone who had been watching it for four years. The cost of a name you had been carrying without allowing yourself to fully carry.

"Edgar will find the carrier in the supply chain today," he said. "We'll have corroboration of the documentation by tonight."

"And then," I said.

"And then we move," he said. "Carefully. In the right order." A pause. "Freya cannot know anything has changed before we're ready. She has resources inside this pack that I have been aware of and managing around. If she suspects the documentation exists she will move to discredit Seren before we can act."

"Can she do that," I said.

"She's been Beta of this pack for six years," he said. "She is trusted and she is capable and she has spent four years making herself indispensable to the people whose loyalty would matter in a challenge." He said it without bitterness, which was its own kind of thing to witness. "She has been preparing for this the way she prepares for everything. Thoroughly."

"She didn't prepare for my mother," I said.

Something moved in his expression. "No," he said. "She didn't."

I stood from the table and he crossed the room and we stood near each other in the way we had been standing near each other for weeks, close enough that the warmth of him was present, close enough that not reaching for him required a small conscious decision.

I did not make that decision.

I put my hand against his chest and felt him exhale — a long, slow release of something that had been held through the entire meeting with the discipline of a man who could not afford to let it show in a room with other people in it. His hand came up and covered mine against his chest and we stood like that for a moment in the empty meeting room with the fire going low and the document on the table and Freya's name still in the air.

"She was your closest person," I said.

"Yes," he said.

"And Lucas."

"Yes," he said again. Quieter.

I didn't say anything else. There was nothing to add that the silence didn't hold more honestly. I stood with my hand on his chest and felt his heartbeat under my palm, steady and real, and understood that what he needed right now was not analysis or forward planning or the next step in the sequence. What he needed was to be in a room with someone who knew everything and was still standing in front of him.

I could do that.

We stayed like that for longer than was strictly necessary.

Then he covered my hand with his and pressed it briefly, firmly, and stepped back and the Alpha returned to his face in the gradual way it returned when he had been somewhere else and was coming back to himself. I watched it happen without trying to stop it. That version of him was necessary. There was a great deal the next few days were going to require of it.

We went to find Edgar.

He was in the corridor outside the records room on the ground floor, which was where he went when he needed cross-referencing, and he looked up when we came around the corner with the expression of someone who had already found something and was deciding how to present it.

"The carrier," Caspian said.

"Confirmed," Edgar said. "A provisions handler named Willem. He has no idea. He has been passing the communications folded inside a regular order manifest for at least eight months. The person who gave them to him told him it was personal correspondence to a contact in the supply company." He paused. "He came to me himself this morning. He found something in the latest manifest that confused him and brought it to my attention without knowing what it was."

Caspian looked at him. "He's not complicit."

"No," Edgar said. "He's cooperative and distressed and currently in the east sitting room with tea he hasn't touched."

"Keep him comfortable," Caspian said. "He's not in trouble and he needs to know that. We'll need him to continue as normal for a few days."

Edgar nodded.

"There's something else," he said. He looked at me briefly and then back at Caspian. "The most recent message in the manifest. The one that confused Willem." He held out a single folded paper. "It went the other direction. Not from inside the pack outward. From Quintus inward. Arrived this morning."

Caspian took it and unfolded it.

I watched his face as he read it. Watched the stillness move through it, the particular quality that arrived when something was serious. He read it once and then again and then held it for a moment without speaking.

Then he held it out to me.

I took it and read it.

It was short. Four lines in the same encoded system Seren had described, with a handwritten translation below in what I recognised as Edgar's careful script.

The translation read: The bond must not be completed. Separate them before the full moon. If she cannot be removed, she must be silenced. Freya will know what to do.

I held the paper steadily.

The full moon was in four days.

I looked up at Caspian and found him already looking at me with an expression that had moved past the open vulnerability of the meeting room into something harder and more directed — the face of a man who had just been handed the clearest possible reason to stop managing and start acting.

"Four days," I said.

"Yes," he said.

I folded the paper with the same care I had used on every document that had passed through my hands in the last week and held it and thought about the full moon and Quintus and Freya somewhere in this compound going about her morning and the bond that was apparently worth ending a life over.

"Then we have four days to finish it," I said.

He looked at me steadily.

"Three," he said. "We need a day's margin."

I nodded.

Edgar was already moving.