Chapter 23 23

Chapter 23 23
Chapter Twenty-Three

June's POV

Sera trained me like she had something to prove.

Not against me. Alongside me, which was different. She moved through the morning warm-up with the efficiency of someone who had long since stopped finding exercise interesting and simply found it necessary, and she expected me to keep up without making an event of whether I managed it.

I managed it.

My body remembered more than I had expected. The footwork came back in pieces, muscle memory assembling itself from wherever it had been stored through three years of disuse. My wolf helped, Elara pressing warmth and steadiness into my limbs from the inside, more present and more willing than she had been in longer than I could properly calculate.

By the end of the first session I was breathing hard and my shoulders ached in a way that felt like progress rather than damage.

Sera handed me water and assessed me with her dark practical eyes. "You have a foundation. Someone built it properly when you were young."

"My father," I said.

She nodded once, filing that away. "We'll work mornings. An hour to start, building from there. I want to see how your wolf integrates with your movement before we do anything more complex."

"You mean whether I can shift."

"I mean whether you and Elara are working together or working separately." She tilted her head. "There's a difference. You can function either way but you're considerably stronger when it's together."

I thought about Elara as she was now versus Elara as she had been at the worst of it. The difference was not subtle.

"Together," I said. "We're getting there."

Sera almost smiled. "Good. See you tomorrow."

I went inside and found Cassian in the hallway coming from his study with a stack of documents under one arm. He looked at my flushed face and damp hair and the particular way I was holding my shoulders.

"How was it," he said.

"Necessary," I said, borrowing Sera's word.

Something in his expression warmed. He continued past me toward the kitchen and I followed, and we fell into the easy parallel of two people occupying the same space without requiring anything particular from each other.

Ryker found us there ten minutes later.

He came in with the look he wore when information was significant but not urgent, a specific quality of measured attention that I had learned to read over the past week. He set a document on the table between us.

"Adrian's filed a formal response to the expedited review," he said. "Through council channels. His legal representative is requesting June's statement be excluded from the registration proceedings on the grounds that it contains material relating to a separate council matter and therefore constitutes a conflict of interest."

I looked at the document. "He's trying to separate the two things."

"If he can get my statement excluded from the registration process, the mate claim review proceeds on narrower grounds," I said. "And the irregularities I documented get routed into a separate inquiry process that he has more time and influence to manage."

Ryker looked at me with what I was beginning to recognise as a particular form of respect. "Yes. Exactly."

I looked at Cassian. "Can he do it."

"He can request it," Cassian said. "Whether it succeeds depends on the council's interpretation of procedural relevance." He turned the document over and read the back. "But the request itself tells us something useful. He's more worried about the statement than about the registration."

"Because the registration is a personal matter between packs," I said. "The statement is a governance matter. It has wider reach."

"It puts other Alphas at risk," Cassian said. "The ones involved in the undisclosed agreements. They'll be pressuring him to contain it before it expands."

The kitchen was quiet for a moment.

"Then we make sure it expands before he can contain it," I said.

Both men looked at me.

"I want to submit a supplementary statement," I said. "Specifically about the other Alphas involved. Names, dates, the nature of their involvement. Everything I can recall." I kept my voice steady. "If Adrian's strategy is to separate and delay, our strategy should be to consolidate and widen. Make the scope too broad for procedural exclusion to contain."

Ryker looked at Cassian.

Cassian looked at me with the expression he wore when he was measuring something carefully. "It will make you the primary witness in a multi-pack governance inquiry. That's a significant position. It draws considerable attention."

"I know."

"Some of it unwelcome."

"I know that too." I held his gaze. "But the alternative is letting him define the boundaries of what gets examined and what doesn't. And I've spent three years letting him define boundaries." I shook my head once. "I'm done with that."

The morning light came through the kitchen window in a clean pale bar.

Cassian held my gaze for a long moment and I held his back and something moved between us that didn't require words. The particular recognition of two people who had arrived at the same place by different roads and found each other there.

"Alright," he said. "We draft the supplementary statement today."

Ryker nodded and left to prepare.

I sat down at the table and Cassian sat across from me and we began to work. Going through what I remembered, not just the broad irregularities I had outlined before but the specific details I had stored carefully without understanding at the time why I was storing them.

Names I had heard through half-open doors. Numbers that didn't match across documents I had seen on separate occasions. The specific date of the meeting where two visiting Alphas had agreed to a boundary adjustment that never appeared in any record.

I told it clearly and Cassian listened closely and outside the pack moved through its morning and the territory sat quiet and tended around us.

By the time Ryker returned with prepared documents the table between us was covered in notes.

I signed the supplementary statement with a steadiness in my hand that surprised me.

Then I sat back and felt the particular quality of having done a thing that could not be taken back.

It felt like the right kind of permanent.