Chapter 111 Make Her Come to Him
THIRD POV (GRANDMASTER)
He had been patient for long enough.
Patience was a tool, not a virtue, something to be used strategically and set aside when it stopped serving a purpose. He had waited through planning sessions and setbacks and the slow, frustrating process of realizing that a direct approach would cost him more than it gained him.
Alpha Elijah’s defenses were not impenetrable, but they were thorough. Every external angle had been examined and dismissed. A frontal attack would fail. Any attack from the outside would fail.
Which meant the solution had to come from the inside.
He needed someone already woven into the edges of that world. Someone who had a thread, however thin, connecting them to the heart of the Alpha’s house. He had spent time on this, more than he liked to admit, sorting through options and discarding each one.
When he found Luke, he knew immediately.
The boy stood before him without fidgeting, without performing either confidence or fear. His face was still in a way that suggested he had learned very early how to make himself unreadable. He was young, but young could be shaped. Young could be aimed.
“Your name.”
“Luke.”
“You’ve had contact with the girl. Adriana.”
“A few times. She knows my face.”
That was the piece he needed. A familiar face had currency that a stranger’s face never could. It created an opening where there would otherwise be a wall.
“I need you inside that house,” the Grandmaster said. He kept his voice even. Instructional rather than commanding. “I don’t care what position you take or how you get it. Get through the door and stay there. Make yourself necessary. Can you do that?”
“Yes.”
No hesitation. No clarifying questions. The Grandmaster appreciated that.
He returned the boy’s soul to his body and sat for a moment in the quiet, turning the shape of the plan over in his mind. It was clean and simple. He’d spent a lot of time perfecting it.
All the elaborate approaches had failed him because they had too many points of failure. This had one requirement: a boy with a familiar face walking through a door.
He was satisfied.
Luke arrived at the gate of the Alpha’s estate at midmorning. The guards had the particular posture of men who had turned away enough people to stop taking the exercise seriously, relaxed, half-attentive, already composing their refusal before he finished approaching.
“Who are you here for?”
“The Alpha.”
They laughed.
“No appointment, no entry. Turn around.”
Luke considered this for approximately two seconds.
What happened after that was quiet and efficient. Neither guard saw it coming in the way that would have allowed them to prevent it. Luke stepped over both of them with the same unhurried steadiness and walked through the gate.
He didn’t know the layout of the estate. He moved by instinct and the general logic of large buildings, toward the sounds of activity, toward the architecture that suggested importance, through corridors that opened rather than narrowed. He found another set of guards outside a heavy set of doors and felt something close to impatience.
“I need to see the Alpha.”
“You don’t have an appointment.”
“I’m aware. Open the door.”
There was a quality to his voice that was different from what it had been a week ago, a month ago, something flat and certain and slightly too still. The guard held his gaze for a long moment and then reached back and knocked.
The door opened.
Elijah looked up from his desk.
He took in the details automatically, the way he always did. The slight dishevelment that suggested something physical had occurred to get here, the steadiness of the stance, the face he recognized from some peripheral encounter he hadn’t paid much attention to at the time. Something to do with Adriana. He couldn’t place the specifics.
“How exactly did you get in here?”
“I came through the gate.”
“The guards at the gate—”
“Are resting.”
Elijah looked at him for another moment. “What do you want?”
“A position in the house. I’m willing to start wherever you need.”
The silence that followed was a particular kind of silence. Elijah used it deliberately, to see what a person did inside it. Luke did nothing. He stood with his weight balanced and his hands loose at his sides and waited, and he still had not quite met Elijah’s eyes.
Elijah noticed that. He noticed everything, and he catalogued this one carefully.
They had turned away several applicants this week already. The house was understaffed and it was beginning to cause small but accumulating problems. And this one had walked through his guards, which was either extraordinarily reckless or genuinely impressive depending on how it was examined.
“Combat trained?”
“You can confirm with whoever’s at the gate.”
“Right.” Elijah drummed his fingers once on the desk. The feeling behind his sternum — that low, wordless alarm that had never once been wrong — was present and steady. He didn’t dismiss it. He also didn’t let it make the decision for him. Better to have this one inside where he could be watched than wandering around with unknown intentions and no oversight.
“You’ll start on trial. Prove your skills first, formally, with my Beta.” He leaned forward slightly. “Find her — ask anyone in the hall, they’ll point you toward her — and tell her I want to see her immediately.”
Luke bowed. The door closed behind him without a sound.
Elijah sat in the quiet and let the feeling settle. It wasn’t urgency. It wasn’t fear. It was a familiar weight of knowing something was wrong before he could prove it.
He was always right when he felt it.
In the coven, the Grandmaster permitted himself a moment of genuine pleasure. The thread was inside now. All he had to do was hold one end and wait for the tension to tell him what he needed to know.
Once he knew her movements, her patterns, her vulnerabilities and he understood the shape of her daily life within those walls, the rest would follow naturally. He couldn’t reach her inside the pack’s defenses.
But he didn’t need to.
He just needed to make her come to him.