Chapter 27 028

Chapter 27 028
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Carmen

The date was set for two weeks out.

Xavier told me over dinner, casually, between Bruno's third attempt to explain why his approach route had been tactically superior during the extraction and Rosaria's pointed intervention about the bread going cold. He said it the way he said most things to me now, directly and without wrapping it in anything softer than it was, and I appreciated that and told him so and he looked slightly uncomfortable with the appreciation in the way he always did, which I had decided was something I would spend considerable time addressing.

I spent the next two weeks preparing in the only way I knew how.

I learned everything.

Fabrizio, who had returned for the strategic meetings and had taken to arriving on Tuesdays and leaving on Thursdays and occupying the guest room with the quiet permanence of someone who had decided a commute was beneath him, proved invaluable. He had decades of intelligence on every significant pack and their leadership, organized in his mind with the same precision as everything else he did, and he was generous with it in the particular way of someone who enjoyed being asked the right questions.

Ares of Blood Moon was sixty-three years old and had been Alpha for thirty-one of them. He had taken the position from his own father in a challenge that the official record described as a formal succession and three separate sources Fabrizio trusted described as something considerably less formal. He had three children, Pablo dead, Hannibal returned, and a daughter named Sorel who had left the pack at nineteen and not come back, which Fabrizio noted with the particular emphasis he used when something mattered more than it appeared.

"Why did she leave," I said.

"She didn't agree with her father's methods." Fabrizio turned a page. "She was reportedly close to a human pack member who disappeared under circumstances that were never investigated."

I looked at the table.

"He's done this before," I said. "Specifically."

"The trafficking network that runs through his border territory didn't grow there by accident," Fabrizio said. "We have no direct evidence of his involvement. We have a great deal of circumstantial evidence and a border that was consistently undermaintained in very specific locations."

I sat with that for a moment.

"Does Xavier know this."

"Xavier suspects it. I'm in the process of confirming." He closed the folder and looked at me. "This meeting is not just about you and your history in that pack. It's about whether Ares can be pressured into closing the remaining border routes or whether he needs to be removed as a variable entirely."

"Removed," I said carefully.

"Politically," Fabrizio said, with the expression of someone who wanted to be clear about that and also wanted me to understand that politically covered significant ground.

I went to Xavier that evening.

He was at his desk going over the border maps, which he did most evenings now with the systematic focus of someone who understood that the trafficking network was a hydra and you had to be smarter than the problem. He looked up when I came in and pushed the chair beside him out with his foot, a gesture so habitual already that I registered it as ease before I registered it as anything else.

I sat and told him what Fabrizio had told me. He listened without interrupting, which was how he listened to things that mattered, completely, holding his response until I was finished.

"The daughter," he said. "Sorel."

"You knew."

"I knew she left. I didn't know the reason." He looked at the map. "Fabrizio is thorough."

"He said he's still confirming the direct connection."

"He's been confirming it for six months. He has enough." Xavier leaned back. "Ares is coming to the meeting with leverage he thinks I don't know he has. Your history in that pack, your parents' status, what you were considered to be." He looked at me. "He's going to try to use it."

"I know."

"It won't work."

"I know that too." I paused. "But I want to be in the room."

He was quiet for a moment. Not the quiet of someone deciding whether to refuse me but the quiet of someone working through the specifics.

"Ares will try to destabilize you," he said.

"He's been trying to destabilize me my entire life without knowing that's what he was doing," I said. "I'm harder to destabilize than I look."

The corner of his mouth moved. "I'm aware of that."

"I know the way he operates," I said. "I've watched it since I was a child. He performs strength for the room before he addresses the person. He needs the audience to be on his side before he makes his point. If you take that away early he loses his footing."

Xavier looked at me steadily. "How do you take it away."

"Don't give him a room," I said. "Small meeting. Four people maximum. He'll bring his Beta, you bring Bruno. That's it." I paused. "And let me speak first."

He looked at me for a long moment. Apollo moved behind his eyes, that brief golden shift.

"You've been thinking about this for two weeks," he said.

"I've been thinking about Ares my whole life," I said. "I just finally have somewhere to stand."

He reached out and tucked the piece of hair behind my ear that was always escaping, which he did without thinking now, automatically, and I leaned slightly into it the same way.

"You'll be in the room," he said. "You speak when you want to speak." His voice was certain. "And if he says anything about what you were in that pack I will end the meeting immediately."

"Don't end it," I said. "Let me handle it."

He looked like he wanted to argue. He didn't argue. That was one of the things I had come to understand about Xavier, that the wanting to protect and the willingness to trust were not opposites in him, he held both simultaneously and chose the trust when it mattered.

"Alright," he said.

I looked at the map. Our fingers were almost touching on the table and outside the wind was moving through the pines and in two weeks Ares was coming and I was going to be in the room.

I found I was not afraid.

I found I was ready.