Chapter 49 The Smell of Betrayal
Levi:
The next two days felt different. Lighter.
The penthouse lost its tense silence. The twins were napping in their room.
But even in the quiet, a low hum of purpose filled the air. From my study, I watched them.
Agnes and Aurora sat cross-legged in a wide, sun-drenched patch of the living room floor. A single candle burned between them.
"Feel its life," Agnes murmured. "Not the heat. The will behind the flame. The energy of its consumption."
Aurora’s eyes were closed, her brow furrowed in a concentration so pure it was almost painful to witness. Her hands rested on her knees, palms up, as if waiting to catch something intangible.
“Don’t command it,” Agnes chided softly, a note of infinite patience in her tone. “You are not its master, shouting orders. You are its partner. Whisper. Suggest. Your power is a gentle tide, not a hammer. Let it rise from that quiet place within you.”
I felt it through the bond. A subtle shift. Not fear. Not a reaction. A quiet, focused attention. She was learning to dip a toe into that deep well of power. Not to drown in it, but to feel its temperature.
It was working.
Across the room, Lucas worked. Satellite images of the Northern Cliffs estate glowed on his screens. Schematics. Heat signatures. It all splayed across the screens, intercut with architectural schematics and ghostly thermal signatures. The rhythmic click of his keyboard was a counterpoint to Agnes’s murmurs.
“It’s a fortress, Levi,” he said, not looking up from his work. “Layered defenses, a small army of guards, and terrain that favors the defender. But every fortress has a weak point. Ethan’s information is proving… remarkably good. The drainage systems are a blind spot in their patrol rotations on the eastern ridge. We can use it to build a map.”
Hope. It was a dangerous, heady thing. We were planning our strike. We were no longer just surviving.
We were hunting.
Koda stirred within me, not with his usual restless aggression, but with a focused, predatory patience. The scent of the chase was in the air.
My phone vibrated on the desk. The screen glowed with Jax’s name. A routine check-in, I assumed.
I answered, my voice low. “Report.”
His voice was wrong. Tight. Strained. "Alpha."
That one word broke the hope in the room.
Behind me, I felt the shift in the room’s energy as the focus broke.
“Say it,” I ordered, my voice dropping into the alpha command.
“Ethan is dead.”
The two words hung in the air. I saw Aurora flinch from the corner of my eye. She felt the jolt through our bond.
“How?” The word was a growl.
Koda was at the surface now, a silent, furious snarl in my mind. My vision sharpened, the colors in the room leaching out, edged in a predatory grey.
“Poison.” Jax’s tone was hollow, the sound of a man cataloging a profound failure. “In his food. Fast. Mercifully fast, I suppose. Our medic confirmed it… it's Wolfsbane-7.”
The world narrowed to a pinprick. Wolfsbane-7. A synthetic, military-grade derivative. No scent. No taste. Lethal to our kind within minutes. A tool for assassins. For cowards. For traitors who knew how to cover their tracks.
“Check our stock,” I growled, the order laced with a dawning, horrific suspicion.
A pause. I could hear his shame, a palpable force through the phone line. “I did. The moment I knew what it was. One vial is missing from the secure locker in your private armory.”
Confirmation. It landed like a physical blow, a cold, sharp blade twisted deep in my gut. This wasn’t the Council’s blunt, external force. This wasn’t a random attack. This was an inside job.
Someone with intimate knowledge of our movements, with access to the most secure areas of my territory, had done this. Someone I trusted.
“The sister?” I forced the question out, my jaw so tight it ached.
“Alive. Shaken, but unharmed. She… she didn’t eat from his plate. The target was specific. Singular.”
A cleanup. A silencing. Using my own resources. My own poison.
I ended the call. The silence in the penthouse was now a physical weight.
Aurora was on her feet. Agnes stood beside her, a hand on her arm. Both women stared at me.
"What's wrong?" Aurora's voice was barely a whisper..
“The defector is dead.” I let them land, saw the impact in the widening of Aurora’s eyes, the grim tightening of Lucas’s mouth. “Murdered. With poison from my personal armory.”
Aurora’s hand flew to her mouth, her eyes pools of pure horror. “One of… one of ours?”
The question was a plea, a desperate hope that she had misunderstood.
Lucas stood slowly, the movement deliberate, his face a grim mask of a soldier who has just seen the battlefield shift beneath his feet.
“Who has access?” he asked, his voice all business, but I could see the calculation already beginning behind his eyes.
“A short list,” I said, my voice dangerously quiet, the calm before the hurricane. “You. Jax. Rylan. Myself.”
The four of us. The unshakeable core of my power. My right hand, my spymaster, my head of security. My most trusted.
Agnes’s wise eyes were filled with a deep, weary sorrow. "The wolf you feed is not always the one that is on the heels," she murmured. “he enemy was never just at the gates, Alpha. They have been sitting at your hearth, sharing your meat.”
I looked at the candle still burning between their chairs. A simple, steady flame then i looked at them.
My gaze swept over them, over Lucas’s steadfast posture, over Agnes’s grim acceptance, and finally settled on Aurora.
She looked so young in that moment, so utterly shattered, the fragile calm she’d cultivated so carefully lying in pieces around her. She took a hesitant step toward me, her arms wrapped around herself as if for warmth.
Aurora took a step toward me. "Levi... who would do this?"
“That is the only question that matters now.” I met her gaze, then Lucas’s, my own expression granite. “The traitor is one of you three.”
The accusation hung in the air, brutal and unavoidable, poisoning the space between us.
Lucas didn’t flinch. He met my stare head-on, his loyalty a shield I could almost see.
“My loyalty is not in question.”
“Everyone’s loyalty is in question now,” I said flatly, the words tasting like ash. “That is the entire point of this. To sow distrust. To turn us against each other. To make us look at our closest allies and see a knife aimed at our throat.”
“What do we do?” she asked, her voice small.
“We find the viper in our nest,” I said, my voice dropping to a low, lethal promise. “We find them before they strike again. Before they get closer to you. Or to the twins.”
The mission to the Northern Cliffs was gone, the maps on Lucas’s screens now nothing more than meaningless patterns of light. The hope was ash.
There was only one mission now. One objective.
Hunt the snake in our own den.