Chapter 72 NADIA

Chapter 72 NADIA
I didn't tell anyone about the meeting.

I picked the location myself, a coffee shop in a part of the city that neither the hunters nor the pack had any real reason to be in. I picked a neutral ground more by accident than by plan. I got there forty minutes early, took a corner seat with a clear line of sight to the door, and ordered something I knew I wouldn’t drink.

Then I began to watch the door.

When Elena walked in, she wasn't alone.

The woman with her was older, maybe sixty, with silver hair, practical clothes, and a coat that was too warm for the weather. She sat down across from me before Elena introduced her, and I noticed that. People who normally sat before they were invited to were either completely at ease or completely in charge. In this case, I was pretty sure it was both.

"Carter," the woman said, like it was a first name, though I didn't think it was.

She said she'd been aware of Marcus Cole's operation for eleven years, and she'd been actively working to dismantle it for eight. Then she looked across the table at me and said, calmly, "Elena works for me. Not the other way around."

I kept my face neutral as usual. Inside, I was recalculating every conversation I'd had with Elena, thinking about every piece of information she'd given me, and every thing she'd seemed to know that I hadn't figured out how she knew.

Carter slid a photograph across the table without any lead-up.

It was a woman, mid-thirties, laughing at something off-camera. She had dark curly hair and green eyes. She looked relaxed in the picture in a way that made it seem like it was taken on a normal day, and nothing important was happening.

I had never seen a picture of this woman in my life. But I knew who she was. I knew the second I looked at her.

"Lena Cole," Carter said. "Born a wolf. She moved into human life when she was twenty-one. She married Marcus when she was twenty-four. She had you when she was twenty-seven." She paused. "Marcus didn't just know she was a werewolf when they got married. He married her because she was. He needed a child who was half werewolf, and he needed Lena to believe she was loved while he waited for you to arrive."

The coffee shop was warm. Someone two tables over was laughing about something on their phone. There was music playing low on the speakers. Everything around me was completely ordinary.

"What was he building?" I said.

"You," Carter said. "He was building you. But not just you." She looked at me steadily. "There's a network of young people, Nadia. Children born to werewolves were raised as hunters. He's been running it for twenty years. When the time comes, he plans to reveal all of you publicly as proof that the supernatural world is dangerous even to its own. Proof that werewolves will bring half-human children into their world and weaponize them."

I didn't move.

"He's been trying to pass it off as exposure," she continued. "Kind of like a great reveal. But what he's actually building is a story. And you and the others like you are all evidence."

I asked the only question that mattered right then. "How many of us are there?"

Carter opened a folder and slid it across to me. I looked at the list and started counting names. I got to eight before I made myself stop.

My name wasn't at the top. It was fourth on the list, which meant three others had already been deployed before me. There were three people like me—half werewolves, raised as hunters, trained,
tested, and sent in—and I hadn't known any of them existed.

Marcus had been running this longer and more carefully than I had ever thought. I'd thought I knew the operation. I thought I was close to figuring everything out. But I was one piece of something much bigger, and he'd made sure none of the pieces ever saw the whole picture.

I took out my phone and took pictures of every single page in the folder. Carter let me do it without a word.

When I stood to leave, she said one more thing.

"Be careful about how much you tell the Alpha." She wasn't threatening me. She was just saying it plainly. "He needs to trust you. If he finds out you've been holding things back again, it won't matter what side you're on."

I walked out of the coffee shop into the afternoon air and stood on the sidewalk for a moment.

I had every single one of the names in my pocket, a dead woman's picture in my head, and a text from a blocked number I still hadn't told anyone about.

And Carter was right. I knew she was right. But she was also asking me to make a calculation about what to tell Zane and when, and I'd already made that calculation once before and nearly broken everything.

I wasn't making it again.