The Lycan Prince.
I sat with that for a moment. The wind moved through the trees above us, and the brand on my wrist throbbed its steady, patient rhythm, and I looked at Nixon—really looked at him—and tried to reconcile the boy I remembered with the man crouching in front of me now.
I'd held his hand in a field once. He'd been shaking so hard his teeth rattled, his skin gray from the wolfsbane, and I'd counted his breaths because I didn't know what else to do. Fourteen years old and terrified. I'd stayed until morning because I couldn't leave someone dying in the rain.
That boy was the Lycan Prince.
And he was looking at me like I was the only fixed point in a spinning room.
I felt it then. The pull. It started low in my sternum, a warm, insistent tug, like a hook set deep in bone. His scent wrapped around me again—cedar smoke and dark amber—and my body recognized something my mind hadn't caught up to yet. The mate bond. I knew what it was. I'd read about it, trained beside wolves who'd felt it, watched Barrett wait for it with the patience of a man who knew it was coming for him.
It was coming for me. Right now. In a clearing in neutral territory, barefoot and bond-severed and still smelling faintly of my own burned skin.
I was too raw for this. Too hollowed out. Too furious at everything that had led to this exact moment to sit with what the bond meant. I could feel it humming between us like a second heartbeat, but I filed it away behind everything else—behind the rogue mark, behind Barrett's voice through the wall, behind four lying wolves and a hall full of silent ones—and I picked up the pen.
"Then let's use that," I said.
Something moved across Nixon's face. Relief, maybe. Or something older and more patient than relief. He exhaled slowly and opened the folio flat against the ground, and we got to work.
We stayed in that clearing until the stars were fully out. I talked. He wrote. My voice stayed steady because it had to—tactical, specific, chronological. Five years of pack intelligence, laid out in the order a tribunal would need it. Nixon asked clean questions, the kind that didn't editorialize, and every time his hand brushed mine reaching for a page, I felt the pull again and ignored it again, and we kept going.
---
Over the next two days, I mapped the damage.
I visited every allied pack I had standing with. Not to beg. To measure. I needed to know exactly how far Alessandra's contamination had spread, and the answer was: everywhere.
Greywood shut their gate without a shirt. Ashfen's Beta didn't move from the doorway. Coldrun, whose eastern flank I'd personally held during a rogue incursion eighteen months ago, sent a juvenile wolf to tell me the Alpha was unavailable. Three more packs, three more closed doors, each one a data point I wrote down in the notebook Nixon had left in my coat pocket.
I catalogued them without feeling. Which packs had been present at Blackridge and said nothing. Which Alphas had accepted Alessandra's fraudulent Luna status without question, making themselves legally complicit. Which territories were now exposed if the tribunal went public. By the time I was done, I had two pages of names and a very clear picture of how far Barrett's cowardice had rippled outward.
I found Nixon at the edge of the last territory's boundary line. He was leaning against a tree, hands in his pockets, watching the road. He'd been following at a distance all day—close enough to intervene if something went wrong, far enough back that I couldn't accuse him of hovering. I handed him the notebook without preamble.
He read through it. His expression didn't change, but his jaw tightened on the second page.
"These are your pressure points," I said. "When we file, we cc all of them. Every Alpha who stood in that hall and watched gets a copy of the petition. They'll either cooperate or explain to the Council why they didn't."
Nixon looked up from the notebook. He looked at me for a beat longer than necessary. His wolf was doing something behind his eyes—I could see it, that particular stillness that meant something large and contained was working very hard to stay that way.
"Silas will have safehouses near each of these territories," he said.
---
Silas Thorne was not what I expected.
He was compact, quiet, with the kind of face that didn't give you anything to read. He was already at the safehouse when we arrived—a plain two-story building with sealed windows and a reinforced door that looked like nothing from the outside and felt, on the inside, like something built to withstand a siege. He had papers spread across the dining table in three distinct groups, weighted at the corners with coffee mugs.
He didn't ask how I was. He pulled out a chair and said, "Sit. I'll walk you through what we have."
I sat.
Alessandra's supply records were in the first group. A wolfsbane supplier operating out of a human pharmaceutical front, six years of irregular purchases that spiked every time Ironveil had a kitchen rotation. The second group was a gap in the Blackridge security archive—forty minutes of footage, deleted, but the deletion itself logged with a timestamp that put it three hours after the summit. The third group was a paper trail: Ironveil pack funds, moving in small increments through a Silvercrest shell account, payments that lined up almost perfectly with the dates of the four planted witnesses.
Almost perfectly. Not quite.
I leaned over the table. "The kitchen rotation at Ironveil ran on a twelve-day cycle," I said. "Barrett changed it after the rogue incursion in year two. The supply spikes won't match a standard schedule. You need to cross-reference against the modified rotation, not the original."
Silas looked up from his notes. "You have the modified schedule?"
"I wrote it," I said. "I can reconstruct it from memory."
He slid a legal pad across the table without a word and uncapped a second pen.
I started writing. And somewhere behind me, I heard Nixon settle into a chair, quiet and steady, and the cedar-and-amber scent of him settled around the room like it had always belonged there.
I kept writing.
