Chapter 53 Inside Someone Else’s
Kattie’s POV
I was back at the manor by midday.
Nobody stopped me at the gate, which was either good or deliberately neutral. The guard on duty looked at me with an expression I couldn’t fully read — not cold, not welcoming, the face of someone waiting to be told what to think.
I went to my room and stayed there for an hour.
I was thinking about Ronan.
I started from the beginning. Not last week. Six months ago, before Bella arrived, before the formal alliance, before I had understood what the piece I was managing would actually require.
Ronan had been helpful in those early months.
Strategically helpful — the kind of useful that felt incidental at the time. Suggesting which servants might be willing to take direction. Offering information about Rhys’s behavior I hadn’t asked for but found useful. Mentioning, casually, that the healer’s records for the herb treatment period had a notable gap in authorization.
I had thought he was building an alliance with me because he recognized shared interest. I had managed that carefully, taking what was useful, giving nothing back.
Now I sat in my room and arranged everything he had offered in order, and looked at what it added up to.
He had known about the herb records before I went looking.
He had suggested the servant contacts who proved most useful.
He had interrupted my meeting with Rhys at the exact moment Rhys was starting to ask questions I couldn’t answer.
He had told me…. with the flat certainty of someone who had already verified something, that Bella was Rhys’s true fated mate and that something was blocking the bond. He had told me this specifically to alarm me into action.
I had thought he was being helpful.
I had thought his offer… his alliance, his protection, his promise of what came next, was opportunism.
I was beginning to understand it was something else entirely.
He needed me moving.
He needed me frightened and active and escalating, creating the kind of instability that allowed someone further back to advance. He had used my fear and my love and fifteen years of invested hope as a mechanism.
I had been his instrument.
The thought settled in my stomach like something cold and stayed there.
I went to my desk and pulled the record I’d left behind.
A copy I had made months ago out of habit — the same way I documented everything. Ronan at the outer fence in the dark. Two names. A designation that matched an outer-territory pack.
I had seen it at the time and filed it. Ronan had already explained it away as border logistics and I had believed him because I had been focused on everything else.
Now I looked at the designation again.
And recognized it.
The outer-territory pack that had been in territorial dispute with Moonstone for three years. The one Rhys had been managing carefully through diplomatic channels, keeping the tension controlled.
Those were the border wolves.
The date on my note was four months ago. Before the alliance. Before Bella. Before any of this had started.
Four months ago Ronan had been meeting Moonstone’s most dangerous external rival at the outer fence in the dark.
And I had documented it, filed it, and forgotten it existed because I was too focused on everything I was trying to manage to see what was managing me.
I sat at the desk with the note in my hands.
The succession challenge. The speed of its filing. The border wolves moving at the exact moment the pack was internally divided.
I thought I was controlling the situation.
I was standing inside someone else’s.
Every move I had made in the past months — every careful, measured, intelligent move, had been moving pieces on a board where Ronan had already set the edges. He needed the pack destabilized. He needed Rhys’s authority questioned. He needed exactly the kind of internal fracture that a faked bond and a forged letter and an elder challenge could produce.
And I had produced it for him.
With fifteen years of genuine love as my fuel.
I sat with that for a moment.
Just a moment.
Then I stood up.
I was not doing this to make things better for myself. I had moved past the point where things could be better for me — I understood that clearly, sitting in this room with this note, with the full shape of what I had done and what I had been used for sitting in my chest simultaneously.
But Ronan was not done.
The border wolves movement won't be a coincidence. It was a second front…political challenge plus military pressure, pack divided inside and threatened outside. The kind of two-front pressure that could break an Alpha’s authority permanently if it wasn’t met with full information.
Rhys was walking into it without knowing who had opened both doors.
I put the note in my jacket pocket.
And left my room.