Chapter 7

The Woman Behind the Betrayal.

Marcus called me back into his office two days after the intercepted message crossed our border. A new stack of papers sat waiting on the desk, thinner than the last one. He did not sit down before he started talking.

“I know who the source is.” He pulled a chair out for me with his boot, not looking up yet. “Someone close to Corwin. Close enough to know things Corwin himself only half suspects.”

“What did they send you?”

“Records tracing the woman who stood beside Damian the night he rejected you.” He slid the top page toward me. “Her name is Seraphine. Daughter of Alpha Voss, from Duskmere territory.”

I stared at the name. I had heard it before, somewhere, in passing conversation I never thought mattered at the time. A dinner, maybe, or a council session where the name got mentioned once and moved past without weight attached to it.

“She was not just a political guest that night,” Marcus said. “My source traced correspondence between her and Damian going back nearly two years. Letters. Meetings arranged under other names. She has been involved with him the entire time, long before anyone started negotiating a new Luna.”

Two years. My thumb pressed hard against the edge of the desk, and I did not answer right away. Six years of marriage, and a third of it apparently spent on someone else entirely.

Outside, someone lit the first torch along the training yard fence. I watched it catch instead of looking at Marcus.

“Two years,” I said finally. “He was mated to me for six. He spent a third of that time with her.”

“I am sorry.” Marcus said it plainly, no performance in it, which somehow made it worse. He did not reach for me, and I was grateful for that more than I expected to be.

I thought about every late council meeting Damian claimed kept him away from our quarters. Every trip to the eastern border he insisted only he could handle personally. I had believed every excuse because I trusted the man giving it to me, because six years of marriage did not seem like something a person threw away for nothing.

I had been wrong about what he was willing to throw away.

“That is why I was never the traitor,” I said, understanding arriving slower than it should have. “I was the obstacle. He did not need evidence against me because I actually did something. He needed evidence because I was standing in the way of what he actually wanted.”

“That tracks with everything else my source has found.” Marcus set another page in front of me. “This one is worse.”

I read it twice before the meaning fully landed. Trade manifests. Territory maps marked with annotations in handwriting I recognized instantly, because I had watched that handwriting sign documents beside mine for six years.

“He has been sending Duskmere information,” I said slowly. “Real information. Not fabricated evidence built to frame someone. Actual intelligence about Redthorn’s territory.”

“Border patrol routes. Grain reserves. Council voting patterns.” Marcus’s jaw tightened as he spoke. “The same categories of information he accused you of leaking to Ashgrove. He has been sending them to Duskmere instead, in exchange for Voss backing his claim to expand Redthorn’s influence across the eastern territories.”

“He built a case against me using the exact crime he was committing himself.”

“It fits a pattern.” Marcus leaned back, watching my face carefully now. “A man desperate enough for power sometimes needs someone to blame before anyone starts asking why the information keeps leaking in the first place. You made a convenient answer. Devoted. Trusted. Nobody would think to look past you toward him.”

I thought of Corwin standing in that hall, folder in hand, refusing to meet my eyes while he read out evidence I now understood he might have believed was real. I thought of every pack member who turned away from me that night, certain they were watching a traitor exposed rather than a woman being sacrificed for her mate’s ambition.

“He used me to cover his own crime,” I said. “And it worked. Nobody at Redthorn will ever question him. Why would they. He is the Alpha who caught a traitor.”

“Not everyone believes it anymore.” Marcus’s voice dropped slightly. “My source would not be sending this if they still trusted him completely.”

I looked at the papers spread across the desk, all of it laid out in careful, damning order. Enough to prove I never sold a single secret to anyone. Enough to prove exactly who did.

“I want to see the source,” I said. “Whoever this is. I want to know why they are risking everything to send you this.”

“That is not how it works. Not yet.” Marcus gathered the papers back together, careful with them, like they were worth more than paper should be worth. “My source contacts me directly. Trusts almost no one else. I am not going to push that trust before we understand exactly how deep this runs.”

I did not argue the point. My jaw tightened around the words I wanted to say instead, and I let them stay there.

Petra brought supper to the office an hour later. She set it down fast, her eyes catching on the papers at the edge of the desk before she looked away and left again. Marcus kept writing. He did not look up once.

That evening, alone in the small room Marcus had given me, a folded note appeared beneath my door sometime after the candles burned low. No footsteps in the hall beforehand. No sound at all, in fact, that I noticed. I opened it with hands that were not quite steady, half expecting another threat from Redthorn.

The handwriting was not a threat. Careful. Plain on purpose, the kind somebody uses when they do not want it recognized later.

“Your former mate isn’t trying to silence you because you know what he did. He’s afraid of what you will discover next.”