Chapter 166 Fast Move
ELIJAH
Carver moved faster than I had anticipated.
I had expected him to take the council meeting as his foundation and build carefully from there. Gather support of the other members, document concerns, construct a case that was difficult to dismiss on procedural grounds. That was his pattern. He was not a man who acted impulsively and I had calibrated my response to his pace accordingly.
What I had not accounted for was that he had begun building before the council meeting. The meeting had not been his opening move. It had been his first public move, which was different.
“Carver has been meeting privately with six of the twelve council members,” Hazel told me on a Thursday morning, eight days after the nursery incident, while we were going over border patrol rotations.
Hazel used her most neutral voice for things that required me to hear them clearly rather than react to them immediately. “Not formal meetings. Informal ones. Dinners, walks, the kind of contact that doesn’t generate records.”
“When did this start?”
“From what I can piece together, the day after the nursery incident. Possibly the same evening.”
While I was holding my wife on the floor of a destroyed room and she was asking me what was wrong with her, Carver had already been making calls.
“What’s his pitch?” I asked.
“Concern,” Hazel said, with the slight edge she put on words she found dishonest. “He’s framing it entirely as concern for the pack and the children. Our stability. He’s been very careful not to say anything that could be characterized as an attack on Adriana personally. He keeps it structural. The Luna’s powers are uncontrolled. An uncontrolled power in the pack leadership position is an unacceptable risk. The Alpha is understandably compromised by his personal relationship with the Luna and therefore cannot be relied upon to assess this objectively.”
“He’s saying I’m too close to see it clearly.”
“Implying it. He’s also been talking to pack members directly. He has targeted the ones who were most visibly frightened on the day of the incident. People whose children were in the east wing. People who felt the house shake and were genuinely scared.”
Carver was not stupid. Going after the people who had been frightened meant going after people whose fear was real and legitimate. Their concerns couldn’t be dismissed as political maneuvering even if the person mobilizing them was doing exactly that.
“Has he done anything formally yet?”
“Not yet. But we’re expecting him to table a motion at the next full council session. Something requiring the Luna to step back from active duties pending a formal review of her stability.”
The word review sounded bureaucratic, when it was in fact an attack.
“He won’t get the votes for that.”
“He might not need to. If he tables the motion and it’s even debated, it becomes part of the record. And a formal debate about whether the Luna is stable enough to hold her position is its own kind of damage regardless of the outcome.”
I let out a heavy breath.
Adriana was at training. She had been at training every morning this week and every morning I watched her come back from it slightly more wrung out than she went in and slightly more controlled than she had been the day before. The progress was real. It was slower than either of us would have chosen and it was costing her significantly, but they were moving forward, at least.
The last thing she needed was to be fighting a political case while fighting this.
“I don’t want her to know about this yet,” I said.
Hazel was quiet for a moment. I knew she didn’t agree with me but she didn’t voice it.
“She’s going to find out,” she said.
“I know. I just want to understand what we’re dealing with before I add it to what she’s already carrying. Give me a few days to map Carver’s support properly and figure out the best way to handle it.”
Hazel nodded, still with the slight reservation in her face.
“I’ll keep monitoring,” she said. After a few moments of silence, she cleared her throat. “Elijah I want to say something and I need you to hear it.”
“Is everything okay?” my brows furrowed, my brain already coming up with a few disastrous options.
“Adriana has never once responded well to being protected from information about her own life. You know that. Every time someone has made decisions about what she should and shouldn’t know, it has cost something.” She held my gaze. “I understand why you want to protect her right now. I want to protect her too. But there’s a version of this where she finds out you knew and didn’t tell her and that becomes its own problem on top of everything else.”
“I hear you,” I said.
“Good.” She picked up the patrol rotation papers. “For what it’s worth, I think she can handle it. She’s handled worse.”
She was right. She was also right that Adriana had never responded well to protective withholding, which was a quality I shared and which had caused us difficulty before. I knew this.
I still decided to wait a few days.
I spent those doing what I said I would. I identified which council members he had reached and which ones were genuinely persuadable versus which ones were being polite in private meetings and would hold their position when it mattered. I spoke to three of them directly, casually, about matters that were not Adriana and listened to how they spoke about the situation unprompted.
I also watched my wife.
She was working with a discipline that I found genuinely remarkable given everything she was doing it on. She was running on insufficient sleep and the physical demands of nursing twins and the emotional weight of what had happened in the nursery and the daily effort of training that the sisters acknowledged was more intensive than anything Adriana had done before. And she was doing it without complaint and without asking me to fix it, which was both something I admired and something that made me want to fix it even more.
Carver submitted a formal written request to the council secretary for a special session, citing concerns about pack safety and leadership stability. The request used careful, neutral language that was technically about process and structurally about Adriana. It went into the council record the moment it was filed.
I read it in my office and had to remind myself to be calm and not give him what he wanted, which was a reaction.
I went to find Adriana after that.
She was coming out of the makeshift nursery with Liam on one arm and Junior on the other. She looked up when she heard me and smiled.
I reached for Liam, asking if there was no one to help her and why she was stressing herself.
From the far end of the hallway, Leo appeared running, nearly colliding with a maid, calling my name about something related to a training drill he wanted my opinion on.
The moment dissolved.
That evening after the boys were down and Leo was in his room and the house had gone quiet, I sat beside her on the bed and started to say it. But she fell asleep against my shoulder before I got through the first sentence.
I looked at her sleeping face. It would be cruel to wake her up after the kind of day she had. So I let her sleep.
The world wouldn’t end if I waited one more day.