Chapter 29 Control
Kattie’s POV
I had a system.
That was what I kept coming back to. Everything I had done had been part of a system, careful, layered, each piece connected to the next in a way that accounted for most outcomes. I had built it over months. Tested it. Adjusted for variables.
The system was supposed to hold.
I sat at my desk in the late afternoon and went over it again.
Rhys was pulling back. That was the piece everything else had been built around preventing, and it was happening anyway. Not dramatically. He wasn’t confronting me, wasn’t making accusations, wasn’t doing anything I could respond to directly. He was just becoming slightly more absent. Choosing paths I wasn’t on. Keeping conversations short.
The kind of withdrawal that looked like nothing from the outside and felt like everything from the inside.
I knew this man. I had always known him better than he knew himself.
And right now he was moving away from me, and toward something he hadn’t named yet.
“You’re thinking too loudly, my lady.”
I looked up.
Sena, one of the senior she-wolves, was standing in the doorway. The closest thing I had to a confidante in this pack, not because I fully trusted her, but because her interests aligned with mine closely enough that she was useful.
“I’m fine,” I said. It took a fraction more effort than it should have.
“You’ve reread that page four times.” She came in and closed the door behind her. “What’s happening?”
I set the paper down. “The pack is hesitating.”
“Some of them,” she said carefully. “Not all.”
“Enough to matter.” I turned to face her. “Rhys hasn’t made any movement toward honoring the bond. The elders gave him a deadline and he stood in front of the entire pack and asked for more time like it was a reasonable request.” I kept my voice level. “He would never have done that six months ago.”
Sena was quiet for a moment. “She got into his head somehow.”
“She’s human,” I said. The word came out flat. Not with contempt, I was past that. More like the exasperated precision of someone correcting an equation. “She has no wolf, no bond, no standing in this pack. She has been here for a handful of weeks. And somehow…” I stopped.
Somehow it was working.
Whatever she was doing, the quiet presence, the careful words in the hall, the way she moved through this place without asking for permission or apology, it was landing. On the pack. On Rhys.
I needed to think clearly about that.
“The theft didn’t hold,” Sena said.
“No.” I folded my hands on the desk. “She was smarter than I expected. I won’t make that mistake again.”
“So what’s the next move?”
I had been working through this since the inspection. Since I’d stood in that corridor and heard Rhys’s voice through the half-open door, rough at the edges in a way it had never been with me.
The next move had to be different. Bigger. Something that didn’t give her room to redirect or reframe. Something that touched the thing the pack cared about most.
“The alliance,” I said quietly.
Sena looked at me. “That’s—”
“Dangerous, yes.” I held her gaze. “But if there is any reason — any credible reason — to believe she is a risk to the alliance rather than a support for it, the pack won’t hesitate. Rhys won’t have a choice.” I kept my voice very even. “She came here as a political arrangement. If she becomes a political liability, no amount of perception shifts saves her.”
Sena was quiet.
“What kind of reason?” she asked carefully.
“Communication with outside parties,” I said. “Information that should have stayed within pack borders. The credible, documented impression that she has been feeding things back to the human side that could compromise Moonstone’s position.”
The room was very still.
“Kattie.” Sena’s voice had changed. “If that’s wrong…”
“I know what I’m doing,” I said.
She looked at me for a long moment. I held her gaze without flinching, because flinching was not something I could afford to do right now. Not in front of anyone. Not even myself.
“Alright,” she said finally, quietly.
I turned back to the desk.
I was not managing anymore. I knew that. The system I had built was still standing, but I was holding it upright now instead of just maintaining it, and that required a different kind of effort.
I had spent fifteen years waiting for the right moment.
I was not going to lose it to someone who had been here for barely five weeks.
Discrediting Bella was no longer enough.
She had to be removed.