Chapter 75 What Foss Knew
Rhys’s POV
They put Foss in the small room off the east corridor — not a holding cell, nothing that formal. Just a room with a chair and a table and no windows, which was enough of a message on its own.
I went alone.
Dane had offered to come. I’d said no. Not because I didn’t trust him, but because some conversations changed shape when there were witnesses. Foss had been in this pack long enough to know that.
He was sitting when I came in, hands folded on the table, looking at nothing in particular. Not the posture of a man planning his defense. He had the quieter stillness of someone who had already calculated where they stood and accepted the result.
I sat across from him and didn’t speak immediately.
He looked at me. “I’m not going to lie to you,” he said.
“I know,” I said. “That’s why I came alone.”
He exhaled through his nose — not quite a laugh, more like the sound of someone releasing something they had been holding. “Alright,” he said. “Ask.”
“How long?” I said.
“Twenty years,” he said. “Almost exactly.”
Twenty years. I had been seventeen when Foss was first invited to sit on the elder council. I had thought nothing of it. He had come with good credentials and solid references and no visible reason to be anything other than what he appeared to be.
“Who recruited you?” I asked.
“A man who has since died,” he said. “His name doesn’t matter anymore.”
“It might.”
“It won’t.” He looked at his hands. “The people he reported to are still active. Names further up don’t help you — they move people like pieces, not partners. Remove one piece and the board adjusts.”
I looked at him. “Tell me what it is. What you’re part of.”
He was quiet for a moment. Not reluctant — organizing.
“It’s not an organization in the way you’re thinking,” he said. “It doesn’t have a headquarters. There’s no single leader. It’s more like a set of agreements that have been passed down across generations.” He looked up. “People who believe that dominant Alpha bloodlines — the kind that stabilize over multiple generations, that become too strong to challenge — are a specific kind of problem.”
“A problem for whom?”
“For everyone else,” he said simply. “Strong bloodlines stop movement.”
“Movement?”
“Influence. Negotiation. Correction. Call it whatever word makes you comfortable.” He tilted his head slightly. “That’s uncomfortable for a certain kind of interest.”
I kept my face even. “What kind of interest?”
“The kind that has been comfortable managing things from a distance for forty years,” he said. “And wants to stay comfortable.”
“So the method is…”
“Every operation begins the same way.”
“With the Alpha.”
“No.” He looked at me directly.
“Not the Alpha himself. “With whoever makes the Alpha impossible to move.” A pause. “An Alpha with a sealed bond, especially one supported by…” He stopped.
I waited.
He shook his head slightly.
“Especially a bond with the right kind of mate,” he said, choosing words more carefully now. “That’s a different situation entirely.”
“Ronan,” I said. “How long has he been connected to this?”
“Eleven years,” Foss said. “He was approached after your father died. They were very precise about the timing — they knew you’d be vulnerable in that period. Establishing authority, adjusting to succession.” He paused. “They didn’t create Ronan’s ambition. They identified it. They found someone who already wanted what they needed him to want, and they made the path toward it easier.”
“Has this happened in other packs?”
“Yes.” No hesitation.
“How many?”
“Three that I know of.” He looked at his hands again. “You ever wonder why you don’t hear much about Ashvale anymore?”
The room was very quiet.
“There’s a reason.”
“The Continuance,” I said. “What do they actually want? Not the method — the end goal.”
Foss looked at me. Something shifted in his expression — not evasion, more like the face of someone about to say something they have been sitting with for a long time.
“That’s the wrong question,” he said.
I held his gaze. “Then tell me the right one.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“Why have they waited forty years?” he said.
The words landed and sat there.
I did not respond immediately. Something about the way he said it — not like he was asking, but like he was handing me something I needed to work out — made me keep my reaction off my face.
“You’re asking me to consider what they’ve been building toward,” I said.
“I’m asking you to consider why, after forty years of operations across multiple territories, Moonstone is where they accelerated.” He looked at me. “Why now. Why here? Why this pack specifically?”
I kept my eyes on him.
He did not say more. He had reached the edge of what he was going to give me — I could see it in the way he settled back in his chair, the specific stillness of someone who has put down what they’re carrying and has nothing left.
I stood.
“One more question,” I said. “Before I go.”
He waited.
“Ronan’s involvement,” I said. “Was the timing connected to something specific in Moonstone? Something that preceded his recruitment?”
Foss looked at me for a long moment.
“They started preparing for Moonstone,” he said quietly, “long before Ronan.”
“Your father would’ve seen it sooner.” I did not let my face change.
“That wasn’t an insult,” he said.
I reached for the door, “Rhys.”
I turn.
“You’re asking when Ronan became part of this.”
Silence.
“You’re asking the wrong beginning.” A pause. “Moonstone was already being watched before Ronan turned out like this.”
I held the door and left.
…
I told Bella everything that evening.
Not in response to a question, not because she’d asked. I simply sat down across from her and told her what Foss had said, from the beginning.
She listened without interrupting. When I finished she was quiet for a moment, looking at the table rather than at me. Her hands were folded in her lap, but I could see the slight tension in her fingers — the kind you don’t notice unless you’ve been watching someone long enough.
“When you found out someone had been doing this to you,” she said finally. “The herbs, the bond interference, all of it — for months, without you knowing. What did you feel?”
I thought about it. Not the immediate answer — the real one.
“Like I had been running a race I didn’t know I was in,” I said. “And losing.”
She looked up.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly right.”
There was something in the way she said it that made me look at her more carefully. She wasn’t agreeing casually. She was recognizing something specific.
“Bella…”
“Not tonight,” she said. Not dismissive. Just — not tonight. She held my gaze. “Tell me what you think Foss’s last statement meant. They started preparing for Moonstone long before Ronan. Who started it? Before Ronan would mean...”
“Eleven years ago,” I said.
“How long before?”
“I don’t know yet.” I looked at her. “But I think the question Foss left me with — why Moonstone specifically, why now…. is connected to whatever the answer is.”
She was quiet again.
I stayed until she went to bed, or at least closed her eyes. I didn’t want to leave.