The pack house felt different in the days following Emma's funeral. The walls seemed to echo with her absence, every corner holding memories that now cut like glass. Luke moved through our home like a ghost, his grief genuine but hollow—the remorse of a man who had lost something he'd never properly valued while he had it.
I found myself in Beta Marcus's office three days after we'd laid our daughter to rest, my hands steady as I placed a steaming cup of coffee before him. The dark circles under his eyes mirrored my own, but where mine held a cold, calculating fury, his showed only exhaustion and growing concern.
"Isabella," he said carefully, "are you certain you want to review these communication logs? It might be... difficult."
I settled into the chair across from his desk, my spine straight, my voice level. "I need to know, Marcus. I need to understand exactly how my daughter died alone while her father was elsewhere."
He hesitated, then pulled up the pack's internal communication system on his computer. The screen flickered to life, displaying weeks of mind-link records, emergency protocols, and priority alerts. What I saw there made my blood run cold.
Message after message showed a clear pattern. Every time Emma had needed something—a scraped knee during training, a fever in the middle of the night, even simple requests for her father's attention—the communications had been mysteriously delayed or rerouted through secondary channels. Meanwhile, Nathan's every minor concern had been flagged as urgent, sent directly to Luke with priority alerts.
"Look at this," I whispered, pointing to an entry from two weeks before Emma's death. "Emma fell from the climbing tree during pup training. The alert was sent to Luke at 2:47 PM. But see this timestamp? It wasn't delivered to his mind-link until 6:23 PM. Four hours later."
Marcus leaned forward, his frown deepening. "That's... that's not normal protocol. Emergency alerts should be instantaneous."
"Now look at this." I scrolled down to an entry from the same day. "Nathan complained of a stomachache at 3:15 PM. The alert reached Luke's mind-link at 3:16 PM. One minute."
We continued scrolling, and the pattern became undeniable. Emma's needs were consistently deprioritized, delayed, or buried in routine communications. Nathan's every whimper was treated as a crisis requiring immediate Alpha intervention.
"Someone's been manipulating the communication system," Marcus said, his voice tight with anger. "This level of systematic interference... it would require administrative access."
I felt something cold and sharp settle in my chest. "Who has administrative access besides you and Luke?"
"Only pack family members and... oh." His face went pale. "Zoey was granted temporary access when she arrived. Luke said she needed it to coordinate Nathan's medical appointments and schooling."
The pieces clicked into place with horrifying clarity. Every delayed message, every missed opportunity for Luke to be there for Emma—it had all been orchestrated. Zoey hadn't just stolen my mate's attention; she had systematically erased my daughter from his awareness.
"The day Emma died," I said, my voice barely above a whisper. "Show me the emergency alert."
Marcus's hands trembled slightly as he pulled up the fatal communication. There it was—Gamma Reynolds' frantic alert about the rogue attack, timestamped at 2:33 PM. But the delivery log showed something that made my vision blur with rage.
"Blocked," I read aloud. "Alert blocked by administrative override at 2:34 PM. Reason: Non-critical training exercise."
My daughter had died because Zoey Carr had decided her emergency wasn't worth interrupting Luke's attention to Nathan's routine check-up.
"Isabella," Marcus said softly, "what do you want to do with this information?"
I stood slowly, my decision crystallizing with the cold certainty of winter frost. Emma's funeral had been yesterday. Luke had sobbed over her grave, promising to be a better father, never knowing that his chance had been stolen by the woman he'd chosen to protect.
"I want copies of everything," I said. "Every blocked message, every delayed alert, every piece of evidence that shows how Zoey manipulated the system."
"Are you going to confront Luke?"
I walked to the window, looking out at the pack grounds where Emma would never play again. "Eventually. But first, I'm going to do something else."
Marcus waited, sensing the shift in my demeanor—the transformation from grieving mother to something far more dangerous.
"I'm going to reject the mate bond," I said simply. "And I'm going to make sure Luke signs the papers himself."
