I did not sleep that night either.
I made coffee at four in the morning and stood at the kitchen window, watching the dark yard. The mug warmed my hands. The house was quiet. Holden was still upstairs, breathing evenly, the way a man breathes when his conscience does not interrupt him.
I drank the coffee. I set the mug in the sink. I went to work.
The intermediary I used was a wolf who'd done off-books delivery work for the pack years ago. He owed me nothing and remembered me as fair. I asked him for one thing: a meeting place outside any territory I or Holden had ever set foot in. He gave me an address two hours north, a roadside diner just past the county line.
I drove there alone the next morning. I told Holden I had a fitting in the city. He kissed my forehead and told me to drive safe.
Dex was already in the back booth when I arrived. He was younger than I expected. Lean, dark-eyed, jacket too thin for the weather. He didn't stand. He didn't smile. He just slid a coffee across the table toward me, like we did this every week.
"You're on time," he said.
"I always am."
I sat. I placed a single folded page on the table between us. The Cedarfall Security Consulting discrepancies. Nothing else.
He didn't open it. "Tell me what you want."
"Full paper trail on the entity behind those payments. Whoever owns the receiving accounts. Whatever property they touched. I want a pregnancy timeline for a woman named Mia Hollis, dated seven years back, and I want paternity confirmation on her son."
His expression didn't move. "DNA on a kid."
"Cleanly. He's seven. I don't want him to know you were ever there."
"That's harder."
"I'm aware."
He finally picked up the folded page. Glanced at the numbers. His mouth did something — not a smile, not quite. Recognition. He'd seen ledgers like this before.
"How long do I have?"
"Two weeks."
That got a reaction. A slow blink. "Tight."
"I'm not asking for tight. I'm telling you."
He studied me for a moment. I let him. I had nothing on my face he could read, and I think that bothered him more than the timeline.
"Half up front," he said.
"Already in the account you sent me."
He nodded once. Slid the page into his jacket. Stood.
"You're not going to ask me why," I said.
"No." He pulled a few bills from his wallet for the coffee that neither of us had touched. "People who hire me already know why. They just need someone to make it real."
He left.
I sat in the booth a while longer. Then I drove home.
That night, I packed a bag.
I didn't pack much. A few changes of clothes. My handwritten ledgers. My laptop. The small wooden box from my dresser that held my mother's earrings and nothing else I cared about. I zipped it closed in the closet, behind a row of dresses, where Holden wouldn't notice.
The next morning, while he was on his run, I carried it down the corridor toward the training annex.
The guest quarters there were spartan — a single bed, a desk, a window that overlooked the sparring grounds. Warriors used them when they were rotated in from outlying patrols. No one was using them now.
Marcus was coming up the corridor from the opposite direction, a clipboard under his arm.
He saw me. He saw the duffel.
He didn't ask.
His eyes moved — bag, my face, the door I was approaching — and his jaw did a slow, controlled thing. Tightened, then loosened. He gave me a single nod. The kind of nod a Beta gives when he is filing something away to act on later, without needing instructions.
"Luna," he said.
"Marcus."
That was all.
He kept walking. I unlocked the door, set the bag on the bed, and stood for a moment in the unfamiliar quiet. I could not have slept another night in the room where Holden had held me through the miscarriage. I knew it the way you know not to put your hand back on a stove.
Thirteen days later, Dex called.
We met in a parking lot ten miles outside Ironveil territory, behind a closed garden center. He handed me a thick envelope through my driver's window and did not get out of his car.
"Preliminary," he said. "Final's coming. You'll want to read it sitting down."
Then he drove off.
I didn't go home. I parked under a tree at the back of the lot and opened the envelope on the steering wheel.
Five million dollars. The number was almost abstract until I saw it broken down — eighteen months here, two years there, a single transfer of nine hundred thousand the spring we lost the pup. Sergio's shell. A purchase deed for the Cedarfall house under an entity that did not exist outside of paperwork. A monthly transfer to Mia that was larger than what most of my warriors earned in a year.
I kept turning pages.
The medical record was near the back. A confirmation of pregnancy, dated, stamped, unambiguous. I knew the month before I looked at the day. I made myself look at the day anyway.
The same week.
The same week I lay in our bed and bled and Holden held my hand and told me the Moon Goddess had a plan.
I flipped one more page.
A travel log. His travel log. A car service receipt. Holden, forty-eight hours after he sat with me in that bedroom, driven to a house in Cedarfall and back the same night.
I put both hands flat on the paper.
I did not move. The car was quiet. A bird landed on the hood, hopped twice, flew off. My hands stayed flat.
Somewhere very deep, in a place that had been dark for seven years, Sable opened her eyes.
*We do not break,* she said. Her voice was low, and steady, and entirely her own. *We dismantle.*
I closed the envelope. Set it on the passenger seat. Started the engine.
I had eight days until the Banquet.