Chapter 26 026

Chapter 26 026
Chapter 26
Daphne's POV

He stayed for an hour.

Not to plan or strategise — there was nothing to plan yet, not with what little we had. He pulled the chair from near the window and sat down and I sat on the edge of the bed and we talked through what the letter had actually said, slowly and without rushing toward conclusions, the way you examine something fragile by turning it carefully in the light rather than pressing it to see if it holds.

The first question was the one I had already identified. How she knew where I was.

"Three possibilities," he said. He had the letter on his knee, unfolded, but he wasn't looking at it. He had read it enough times. "Someone in my pack told her. Someone connected to your father's house told her. Or she has been watching you long enough that your arrival here was simply the latest in a series of locations she has tracked."

All three of them were uncomfortable in different ways.

"The third one," I said. "If she's been watching me that long, why now. Why not before."

"She says she wasn't safe," he said.

"People say that," I said. "It explains everything and nothing simultaneously."

He looked at me. "You don't believe her."

"I don't know what I believe," I said. "I don't have enough information to believe or disbelieve anything. I just know that safe is a word people use when they want you to stop asking questions about the timeline."

He was quiet for a moment. "You're right," he said. Simply. No qualification.

I had not expected that. I had expected the measured counterargument, the version that kept all possibilities equally weighted until more evidence arrived. Instead he just agreed with me, which was its own kind of thing — a man with his authority and his resources defaulting to my read of the situation because I was the one who understood the emotional grammar of it better than he did.

"We need to know who delivered the letter," I said. "That's the actual starting point."

"Edgar is already finding out," he said.

I looked at him.

"You asked him before you came," I said.

"When Mrs. Dorothy told me you weren't coming to dinner I knew it wasn't a headache," he said. "I asked her if anything had arrived for you today. She told me about the letter before she told me anything else, which means she was already concerned about it." A pause. "I asked Edgar to find out who brought it to the gate before I came upstairs."

I absorbed this. He had moved before I showed him the letter. Had read the shape of the situation from Mrs. Dorothy's concern and acted on it with the particular efficiency of someone whose instincts and resources are well aligned. And had still come upstairs and knocked and asked if he could come in rather than arriving with information and taking over the room.

Both things were true of him simultaneously. That was what I was still learning.

"What will Edgar find," I said.

"I don't know," he said. "But whoever delivered it came to the gate during the midday delivery window, which means they knew our schedule. That's not nothing."

The lamp between us burned steadily. Outside the wind had come back, the same wind that had been working at the building all week, and it moved around the corners of the east wing with a low continuous sound that I had started to find, in spite of everything, almost familiar.

"There's something else," he said.

I waited.

He looked at the letter once more. "She writes that there are things about my pack you don't know. Not things about your bloodline. Things about my pack." He looked up. "That's a specific distinction."

I had noticed it too. Had been turning it over since the afternoon. "She's not warning me about myself," I said. "She's warning me about you. Or about something in your orbit."

"Yes," he said.

"Do you know what it might be," I said.

The quality of his silence shifted in a way I had learned to pay attention to. Not the thinking silence. Something else.

"There are things about this pack that not everyone who lives in it knows," he said carefully. "Structural things. Historical things. Things that were decided before I became Alpha and that I have been — " He stopped. Chose again. "Managing."

I looked at him steadily. "Managing how."

"Carefully," he said.

It was not an evasion exactly. It was a man deciding in real time how much to open, the way you open a door cautiously when you don't yet know the weight of what's on the other side. I recognised it because I had been doing it for three weeks.

"You don't have to tell me tonight," I said.

He looked at me with something that was almost surprise.

"I will tell you," he said. "I want you to know. I just need to — " He pressed two fingers briefly to the bridge of his nose in a gesture so human and unguarded that it landed somewhere tender in me. "There are people in this pack whose positions depend on certain things remaining as they are. If I tell you and you react in a way that changes how you move through this house, they will notice."

"You're protecting me by not telling me," I said.

He heard the echo in that. His expression moved.

"It's not the same," he said quietly.

"I know," I said. "I said it so you could hear it, not to accuse you."

He looked at me for a long moment in the lamplight. The wind moved around the building. Somewhere distant a door closed.

"My brother didn't die in a rogue attack," he said.

I was very still.

"That's what was reported," he said. "That's what the pack believes. That's what the council was told." His voice was even and it was costing him to keep it even. "Lucas was killed by someone inside this pack. I know who. I have known for four years." A pause. "And I have not been able to prove it in a way that won't destroy everything my father built, so I have been — "

"Managing it," I said softly.

"Yes," he said.

The lamp burned between us and the wind spoke against the walls and outside the room the house moved through its ordinary night routines entirely unaware of what had just been placed in the quiet air of the east wing bedroom.

I looked at him across the small space.

"Who," I said.

He held my gaze.

"That's what your mother may already know," he said. "And that is why I need to find her before she finds you first."