Chapter 67 NADIA

Chapter 67 NADIA

His name was Theo Walsh. He was twenty-four years old, had worked as a video analyst for the Crestfall Fangs for seven months, and had been capturing game footage for the team while trying to get access to private information.

He was not an experienced operative. He was someone who had been recruited when he was young and pointed in a direction he’d never questioned, which I understood better than I wanted to.

Dex brought him in quietly, not to the authorities or the council, but to a room with Zane, Coach Reeves, and me. He was given water and everywhere descended into the kind of silence that was meant to unnerve him and make him spill everything.

He broke in eleven minutes. He was scared. He was twenty-four. I watched him and thought about what I was doing at twenty-four, but I had to push that out of my mind before I could keep listening.

I wasn’t so different. I just had better training on how to hold myself together while doing something important.

He didn't know the full thing. He knew he had been told to capture footage and upload it. He knew the upload destination, but he didn't know who controlled the rest beyond a contact name he was given, a name that wasn’t Marcus or anyone else we had identified.

It was a new name. There was a third person behind the one we had been tracking.

After the meeting, I thought about the name as I sat in the parking lot for a moment, just sitting, letting everything else happen around me.

I hadn't done this in a long time—just sat somewhere without a task, a role, or a direction to face. It felt strange and then, after a moment, it felt like something I should do more often.

Then the weight of everything settled on me. I was deep into a situation I didn't anticipate, with a name I didn't recognize, just six weeks left to act, my wolf side no that was still trying to show out, and a man inside the building I was about to walk back into who was my fated mate and who I was maybe, actually in the process of choosing. Not being chosen by, but choosing. That difference mattered to me more than I expected it to.

I went back in and told Zane about the name. He said, "We'll find them."

"I know," I replied. I didn't say out loud what I was thinking, which was that I wasn’t afraid of it.

I thought I would be more afraid as the layers got deeper. Instead, I felt something very similar to calm because I’d stopped pretending we had a smaller problem than we did, and just faced the actual magnitude of the thing head on. I was genuinely a little surprised to find I preferred it this way.

“What did you do with Theo?" I asked.

“He's going to help us,” Zane replied.

“You didn't send him away."

“He's twenty-four and someone used him. Does that sound familiar?"

I looked at him. He looked at me back. Neither of us said anything else.

ZANE

There was one conversation I hadn't had with anyone. I couldn’t do that yet because I didn’t want to sound like someone who had forgotten how to trust his own judgment, and I couldn't afford to look like that to the people I was leading through this.

The doubt wasn’t about Nadia. I had resolved that. I wasn’t carrying any doubt about her anymore. What I was carrying was the doubt about myself, specifically about the degree to which our mate bond was influencing my decisions.

I had made a series of choices in the past six weeks that I believed were correct, and for the good of the pack. I also made them while in an unmated bond with a woman who was sent to destroy my pack. I couldn't fully separate those two things, and the inability to separate them was what I kept thinking about at two in the morning when the entire building was quiet and there was nothing to hold

me back from my own thoughts.

I told Coach Reeves about it on a Tuesday because he was the only person in my life who would tell me the truth about any situation without flinching.

I laid it out plainly, saying, "I need to know if you think the mate bond is making me sloppy."

Coach Reeves looked at me for a long time. Then he asked, "What was the riskiest decision you made that you want me to evaluate?"

“Letting her stay after I found out."

"What did you think about her after you made that decision?"

“That she had already stopped and she’d chosen this."

"Was that decision wrong?" he questioned.

“No,” was my simple reply.

"Then the mate bond gave you the sensitivity to read her correctly. That's not sloppy. That's the bond working the way it's supposed to." He paused. "The question you should actually be asking is whether you trust your own judgment. Because that's what this is about."

I was quiet for a moment. Coach Reeves stood up and said, on his way out, "She testified against her own father for this pack. She hasn’t flinched once. You didn’t misread that." Then he left.

I sat in the quiet for a moment longer, the certainty slowly, solidly reassembling itself in my chest. I got up.

Then I went to find the woman who walked into my pack all those weeks ago, meaning to destroy it. The woman who had spent every day since then proving, in detail, that she was wrong about everything and right about the one thing that mattered more.