Chapter 17 What Must Be Done
Kattie’s POV
Patience is a skill most people misunderstand.
That was the thing nobody gave me credit for. Years of it. Years of standing beside Rhys, supporting him, waiting while he ruled and fought and bled for this pack. Years of watching other she-wolves fail where I didn’t.
I had waited through all of it.
And then a human walked in wearing a dress that didn’t even fit properly, and suddenly everything I had built, every careful year of it, was sitting on unstable ground.
I stood at my window and watched Bella cross the lower grounds.
She wasn’t doing anything interesting. Just walking with her head slightly down. Even that irritated me. She moved through this pack like she was trying to understand it rather than survive it, and somehow the pack noticed. The pup had sat on her feet.
I pressed my fingers against the window ledge.
That had been the first real sign that things were moving in a direction I hadn’t planned for. Animals felt things that wolves sometimes talked themselves out of. The fact that Bryn, who growled at half the senior warriors and had bitten Elder Caius twice, had walked across an open field and parked himself on this human girl’s shoes was not something I could explain away comfortably.
I also couldn’t explain the way Rhys had been moving through this manor lately.
He thought I hadn’t noticed. He was very good at not being noticed when he chose to be. But I had known Rhys since we were children, and I knew the difference between a man who happened to be somewhere and a man who had decided to be somewhere.
He had been deciding.
And the direction he kept choosing was the same general direction as her.
I turned away from the window.
The logical part of me, the part that had planned this carefully, that had gone to the lengths I had gone to, that had held everything together for months, knew that patience was still the right approach. Rhys’s confusion would not resolve itself quickly. The bond he felt toward me was real enough to him.
But real enough and certain were two different things.
And Bella, simply by existing here and being harder to dismiss than I had expected, was pushing him toward asking questions I didn’t want him to ask.
I needed her credibility gone.
Not her. Just her credibility. Her standing in this pack, what little she had managed to build. I needed the pack to look at her and see someone who didn’t belong here, not because she was human, but because she had proven it herself.
I sat down at my desk.
The house inspection was in four days. The warden moved room by room, methodically, checking the manor’s valuables against the household record. Routine, quarterly, nobody thought much about it.
Four days was enough.
The servants were easy. Not all of them, I wasn’t careless, but the right ones. The ones already uncertain about Bella’s presence, who had heard enough from the right people to believe she probably didn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. A quiet word here. A small favor there. The kind of arrangement that didn’t need to be spelled out because both parties already understood what was being asked.
It wasn’t manipulation. It was management.
There were things in this manor that would look very bad in a particular room. Things missing from Rhys’s private shelf, from Elder Mara’s collection, from the royal guest quarters that hadn’t been used in months. Small enough to place easily. Significant enough that finding them would be impossible to overlook.
The timing had to be right. The warden needed to reach the room naturally, without being directed to it. It had to look like discovery, not setup.
I could manage that.
I was very good at managing things that needed to look like something other than what they were.
I picked up my pen and went back to the letter I had been writing, because the rest of my day needed to look exactly like every other day. That was the other part of it. You never let the surface change.
Bella had four days of walking those grounds unbothered.
After the inspection, this pack would have a much clearer picture of exactly who she was.
Or at least, who I needed them to think she was.
Four days was more than enough to end this.