Chapter 49 Four Days
Thomas was back in twelve minutes.
Lucian was still in the corridor when he returned, standing near the wall with his arms folded, away from the flow of wolves filtering back toward the chamber.
Thomas stopped in front of him and dropped his voice.
"Elena is in the eastern training grounds. Running drills with the third rotation."
Lucian's eyes moved to his face. "Behaving?"
"Normally. No contact attempts. No deviation from her assigned schedule." Thomas paused. "She looks relaxed."
That was the part that mattered.
A person who knew they had been identified did not look relaxed. They looked careful, or they disappeared.
Elena was doing neither.
"She doesn't know," Lucian said.
"No." Thomas glanced briefly toward the chamber doors. "Which means she doesn't know James's journal survived him."
Lucian said nothing for a moment.
Then he pushed off the wall. "Get the journal. My office. Now."
The chamber would reconvene in twenty minutes.
They had less than that.
Thomas laid the journal on the desk. Lucian stood across from him. The office was quiet, the noise of the corridor muffled behind the closed door.
They had been through every page. Found Elena's name, her movements, enough to work with. They had closed it satisfied.
What they had not found was this.
Thomas ran his thumb slowly along the inside back cover and felt the edge before he saw it.
A single sheet, folded in half and pressed flush against the binding, sitting level with the page beneath it. Invisible unless your fingers caught it by accident.
James had hidden it inside his own journal.
Thomas unfolded it carefully and set it flat on the desk.
It was a sketch. Rough, drawn quickly, the lines uneven but deliberate. The eastern training grounds, rendered in James's cramped hand. Three points marked with small crosses, spaced across the terrain. A narrow path connecting two of them, running along the tree line.
Numbers beside each cross. Distances, maybe. Or timing.
And at the bottom of the page, underlined twice.
A date.
The Full Moon Run.
Neither of them spoke.
Lucian leaned forward, hands braced on the edge of the desk, and studied the sketch.
Four days. The Full Moon Run was four days out.
Thomas straightened slowly.
"He knew," he said. "He didn't just identify her. He mapped the extraction route." His voice dropped slightly. "He died trying to get this out in time."
Lucian did not respond immediately.
He looked at the sketch. At the uneven lines, the cramped handwriting, the two underlines beneath the date pressed hard enough to score the paper.
James had sat somewhere alone, knowing what he had found, knowing what it meant if anyone discovered him, and he had drawn this anyway. Carefully. Completely. As though he understood he might not get another chance to finish it.
"He knew he was running out of time," Lucian said quietly.
It was not a question.
Thomas looked down at the page. His jaw worked once before he spoke.
"He was a good Delta."
"Yes." Lucian straightened. "He was."
A beat passed between them, brief and wordless, the kind that did not need filling.
Then Lucian traced the three marked points with one finger.
"Eastern perimeter," he said. "Tree line access. Two of these cross into neutral territory if you move fast enough."
"Extraction points," Thomas confirmed. "She gets Liam to any one of these during the chaos of the run and she's in neutral ground before we can cut her off."
His jaw tightened. "The run puts every senior wolf in the field. Pulls half the perimeter guard into escort formation."
"It's the one night the interior is thin."
"Yes."
Lucian set the sketch down.
Thomas looked at him. "She thinks she still has four days. She's going to keep moving normally right up until the Run."
The room held that for a moment.
Four days of watching her walk through training, eat in the common hall, nod at wolves she planned to betray.
"We could pull her now," Thomas said. It wasn't a recommendation. He was laying it on the table.
"On what grounds?" Lucian said. "A sketch from a dead man's journal? She'll say she never saw it. Her people will say James fabricated it."
"The journal has his name on it."
"It has a sketch with no signature and a date that hasn't passed yet." Lucian shook his head. "We move on her now and Silas has grounds to call it unlawful detention. He will use it. Especially after this morning."
Thomas was quiet.
"She's calm because she thinks she's invisible," Lucian said. "And invisible means predictable."
He looked at the three crosses on the sketch. The path along the tree line. The date at the bottom.
Everything James had died to leave behind.
"We know the route," Lucian said. "We know the night. We know every point she's planning to move through." He picked up the sketch and folded it once. "The only thing she doesn't know is that we know."
Thomas watched him.
"If we move too early we lose her network," Lucian continued. "We get Elena and Silas pulls everyone else before we can trace them."
"But if we wait , "
"We control the ground." Lucian set the folded sketch down. "We place our people at every extraction point before the run starts. We let her move. We let her believe it's working." He met Thomas's eyes. "And then we close it."
Thomas held his gaze for a long moment.
"She'll have Liam with her at some point during that window," he said quietly. "That's the risk."
"I know."
"If anything goes wrong , "
"I know, Thomas."
The room went still.
Thomas looked down at the journal. At the hidden page that had waited through James's death to say what it needed to say.
He exhaled slowly.
"Then we let her."
Lucian folded the sketch.
“And we close it.”
Thomas didn’t move.
“If we’re not already too late.”