Chapter 39 Kattie’s Next Move
Kattie’s POV
I did not sleep.
I sat at my desk until past two in the morning and worked through it. Not with panic. Not with grief. With the cold systematic attention I gave to everything that needed solving.
What had actually happened: Rhys had said the bond was not what we had been told. Publicly. In assembly. On record.
Most of the room had focused on the visible thing — Rhys choosing Bella. The emotional thing. The thing that would move through the corridors tomorrow like weather.
They had not focused on what happened if the bond was false.
If the bond was false, if that could be raised convincingly, then I was not the aggrieved fated mate of an Alpha choosing the wrong woman. I was something else entirely. The question of what I had done, and why, and how, would become very open.
I needed to move before that question found its feet.
I picked up my pen.
…
The lever was the alliance.
Rhys had taken a human wife to secure peace. The pack had accepted it — reluctantly, but accepted. What they had not accepted, and what the elders would not accept, was any suggestion that Moonstone’s security had been compromised in the process.
If I could move the pack’s attention from the bond question to the alliance question, if I could make last night’s public statement the beginning of a security inquiry rather than a romantic declaration…then the ground shifted entirely.
Not: did Rhys choose the wrong person.
But: was the alliance compromised from the beginning.
I wrote until the fire burned low. Then I read it back, adjusted two sentences, and set the pen down.
Clean. The cleanest thing I’d built yet.
…
I requested a private session with Elder Caius before the general assembly.
He received me at seven. His study was spare and cold in the way Caius himself was spare and cold—everything stripped to function, nothing kept that didn’t serve a purpose. He sat across the desk and looked at me with the measuring expression he gave to things he was still deciding about.
“I’m going to say something carefully,” I said. “Because I want you to hear it clearly.”
“Go ahead.”
“Last night Rhys questioned the validity of the bond in public assembly.” I held his gaze. “If the Alpha himself is saying the bond may not be what it appears — then Moon Goddess doctrine requires inquiry. Not just into the bond. Into everything attached to it.”
Caius was very still.
“Continue,” he said.
“The alliance was built on the premise that Bella came here as a legitimate bridge between two peoples,” I said. “If the Alpha now suggests the bond was manipulated — that something interfered with his recognition, then the question of who interfered, and how, and whether that interference was part of a larger design, becomes a council matter.” A pause. “An alliance-security matter.”
Caius looked at me.
“You’re saying the human woman may have come here with purpose,” he said.
“I’m saying that if we accept Rhys’s public statement, then someone created that situation. Someone interfered with the Alpha’s bond recognition.” I kept my voice completely even. “The council needs to determine who. And whether our alliance with the humans is what we believed it to be.”
The room was quiet.
“This is a serious claim,” Caius said.
“It’s a serious situation,” I said. “Which is why it needs to be handled before it becomes something the pack can’t contain.”
No anger in my voice. No desperation. Just someone bringing a problem to the appropriate authority because it was the responsible thing to do.
Caius leaned back slowly.
I watched him think. Watched him weigh the political cost of last night against the political cost of what I was now putting in front of him. He was a careful man. He had always been a careful man. That was exactly why I had come to him.
“I will convene the senior elders,” he said. “This afternoon.”
“Thank you.”
I stood.
“Kattie.” His voice stopped me at the door. “Is there anything else I should know before this convenes?”
I turned and met his eyes.
“Only that whatever is found,” I said, “I want it found honestly. Whatever that means for everyone involved.”
He held my gaze for a moment.
“Yes,” he said. “So do I.”
…
I walked back through the empty corridor and let myself exhale once.
The move redirected everything. From did Rhys choose the wrong person to was the alliance itself compromised. It put the investigation back onto Bella — not through my hands, but through official channels, with the full weight of the elder council behind it. Clean. Deniable. Exactly the kind of structure that didn’t break under examination because it wasn’t built on a lie.
It was built on a question.
And questions, in a pack like this one, had their own momentum.
Rhys would see it. He was not a man who missed things. But seeing it and stopping it were different, because defending Bella against a legitimate council inquiry meant appearing to ignore a genuine security threat to his own pack. And allowing the inquiry meant conceding ground he had spent last night publicly claiming.
There was no clean exit from that.
The risk was Bella.
She had been ahead of me twice. She would see this coming— not the specifics, maybe, but the shape of it. She would feel the ground shift and start looking for leverage.
But she had no wolf. No bond. No standing in the elder council. She had Rhys, and Rhys…whatever he had said last night, whatever that hall had witnessed, could not shield her from the council without fracturing his own authority.
She was intelligent. She was patient. She was, I had finally admitted to myself, considerably more than I had originally accounted for.
But intelligence without standing was a locked door with no key.
I walked back to my room and sat at my desk and looked at the morning light coming through the window.
For the first time in weeks, I felt ahead. The feeling was familiar.