Chapter 58 Crossed Intelligence
Kattie’s POV
I had been keeping records for eleven years.
Not because I expected to need them. Out of habit, the same way I had always catalogued things. Names, dates, exchanges that felt significant without my being able to explain why. Most of it was personal. Conversations with Rhys. Pack dynamics. Movement patterns.
Some of it was about Ronan.
I spread it out on the desk in chronological order and looked at it with the interpretation lens I should have applied months ago.
The first time Ronan had been helpful to me was eight months ago. He had mentioned, in passing, that the eastern checkpoint rotation was being reviewed for efficiency. Pack administration was his domain. The kind of information he mentioned naturally.
Nine days later, the Verath made their first small move at the eastern border.
I stared at the date.
The next item. Fourteen weeks ago — Ronan had suggested a particular servant for the herb supply room. Reliable, discreet, good at not asking questions. I had used her once, for the doubled dosage arrangement.
Three weeks after that, the second Verath test.
Each time Ronan had offered something… a suggestion, a piece of information, a contact — external pressure followed. Not immediately. With the specific delay of someone timing two separate mechanisms to intersect at a predetermined point.
I had thought he was opportunistic.
I had thought he saw my situation and decided to use it for his own advancement. I had thought I was managing the relationship, taking what was useful, keeping him at arm’s length.
I had been wrong about every part of that.
The last item was a copied message. Something I had photographed off a desk that wasn’t mine, months ago, during a period when I had been building my information base on everyone in the inner circle. I had photographed it and filed it without reading it carefully because the date and sender hadn’t meant anything at the time.
I read it now.
Addressed to an external contact. Unsigned. Short.
When the Alpha is divided internally, open the second front. The eastern approach is viable after the succession event. Do not move before.
Dated fourteen months ago.
Before Bella arrived. Before the alliance marriage. Before any of it.
I sat with that for a moment.
Fourteen months.
Ronan had been building toward this for over a year. The internal destabilization was not a response to the alliance marriage. The alliance marriage had been the opportunity, the convenient event he had recognized and begun accelerating the moment it was announced. The succession challenge, the border attack, the council fracture — none of it reactive. All of it scheduled.
And I had not been his ally.
I had been his mechanism.
Every move I had made — the herbs, the servants, the forged letter, the archive document, the meeting with Dowan — each one had served a purpose on Ronan’s board that I had been too focused on my own to see. He had needed Rhys’s authority questioned. He had needed the pack fractured. He had needed the succession doctrine activated.
I had built all of that for him with my own hands, believing I was working for myself.
I sat back.
The grief was there. I didn’t have time for it.
I thought about the border attack. The succession challenge filed the morning after my meeting with Dowan. The speed of it — too fast to be spontaneous, too precise to be coincidence. Ronan had let me deliver the information to Dowan because he needed it delivered, and I had done it believing I was making a desperate move of my own.
Believing I was still a player.
I had been a piece.
The question now was what I did with that.
I picked up the photographed message.
I thought about Rhys at twelve, serious and slightly awkward, genuinely terrible at accepting help from anyone. I thought about fifteen years of watching him from close enough to know every version of him — the ones nobody else saw, the ones he only showed in rooms where he thought he was alone.
I thought about the way he had looked at Bella in that hall.
And then I stopped thinking about it, because there was no version of that thought that helped me right now, and I had spent enough of my life on thoughts that didn’t help me.
I stood up. Put on my jacket. Picked up everything I had spread across the desk and put it in order.
And went to find Rhys.
Not for my sake.
When the second front opened — and based on what Sena had told me an hour ago, it had already opened, Rhys was going to face it without knowing who had unlocked the door.
That was the one thing I could still change.