Chapter 8

The Enemy Within.

Marcus dropped a stack of papers on the war room table two mornings after the messenger arrived. No greeting. Just the thud of documents hitting wood.

“Contact inside your former pack sent these overnight.” He spread them with the flat of his hand. “Trade records. Supply movements. None of it matches what your mate told the regional council last spring.”

I picked up the top sheet. Read it twice before the numbers made sense.

“He’s reporting shortages that don’t exist.” I tapped the page. “Three deliveries logged as lost to raiders here. No raider activity anywhere near these routes that same month, according to the border reports. Somebody’s fabricating losses.”

“You caught that faster than my advisors did yesterday.”

“Your advisors are reading it like soldiers.” I set the sheet down, reached for the next one. Ink smudged under my thumb. “I spent six years reading a treasury somebody eventually wanted hidden from me too. This isn’t sloppiness. Somebody wanted these goods to vanish on paper while they went somewhere else.”

“Where, though. That’s the piece I can’t place yet.” He leaned over the table, studying the routes I’d marked. “Grain and coin don’t just disappear. Somebody’s receiving it on the other end.”

“Then we find the other end.” I pulled the regional map toward me and started marking the delivery points against dates. Three of them clustered near the same stretch of border, all within a week of each other. “There. Somebody’s moving these goods east, past the checkpoints, and logging them as losses to cover the gap.”

He studied where my finger rested. “That’s not a random drop point. That’s territory my father used to dispute with your mate’s grandfather, forty years back. Old grazing rights nobody’s touched since.”

“Which means somebody remembered it existed and decided it was useful again.”

We split the work without discussing it.

He cross-checked troop movements against shipment dates. I went after the grain and the coin instead, three ledgers that refused to line up, until close to midnight, when he stopped talking mid-sentence.

He’d found the same date I already circled an hour earlier.

He looked at it. Looked at me. Didn’t argue.

A month ago he would’ve argued.

“You should’ve been running intelligence for someone,” he said, watching me lay three pages side by side. “Not managing a household.”

“Nobody asked what I wanted to run.” Sharper than I meant it. He didn’t flinch. “I was good at being decorative. Nobody cared what else I might have been good at.”

He picked up a pen off the table. Turned it over twice in his fingers. Put it down without saying anything.

“I care,” he said, finally.

I didn’t answer that. Neither of us mentioned it again. We kept working, papers spread between us, but something in the room had changed shape, and I felt it the rest of the night without being able to point to when exactly it happened.

By Thursday I’d stopped waiting for permission before saying what I thought in front of his council. Answered a question aimed at him once, without meaning to. Nobody blinked at it. That surprised me more than it should have.

One evening, two hours into a stack of falsified border reports, I noticed he’d stopped reading. He was watching me instead.

“What.”

“Nothing.” He looked back down too fast.

“You were staring.”

A pause. Long enough I thought he might not answer.

“Six years with a man who never let you use half of what you’re capable of.” His jaw worked before he finished the thought. “That’s fear. Whatever he’d call it himself.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that. Let it sit instead of filling the gap, and he didn’t push either. He never pushed. Gave me room to talk or not talk, and most of the wolves I’d known my whole life had never once managed that.

He walked me back to my room that night instead of letting me go on my own like usual. Didn’t say much on the way there.

He stopped outside the door.

“I’ve started looking forward to these evenings.” Quiet, almost like he hadn’t planned to say it out loud. “More than I probably should.”

My pulse jumped. I kept my face as still as I could manage. “Marcus.”
“I’m not asking you for anything.” Fast, like he needed the words out before he changed his mind. “You spent six years with a man who taught you your worth started and ended with him. I won’t be the next person who makes you feel like you owe somebody something you’re not ready to give.”

“Then why say it at all.”

“Because not saying it isn’t honest either.”

He held my eyes a moment. Then he stepped back and left.

I stood in the hallway after his door shut. Long enough that the candle by my room burned down another finger’s width of wax before I finally went inside.

Sleep never came properly that night.

I gave up on it before the sun was fully up and walked toward the records room, wanting to check on the evidence folder we’d left locked away. The halls sat mostly dark. Kitchen staff clattering pots somewhere below, the only sound in the place.

The records room door stood open.

It shouldn’t have been. Marcus checked that lock himself. Every night. Twice.

I stopped in the hallway and listened.

A drawer slid shut inside. Quiet. Someone trying hard not to be heard.

My heart started going before I’d worked out why.

I pushed the door open, one hand still on the frame.

A man was bent over the desk, our folder already half inside his jacket, his other hand flat against the drawer he’d just closed. He turned fast at the sound of the door. For a second neither of us moved.

I knew his face before my mind caught up with the name.

Tomas. He’d served under my former mate for years, stationed at the eastern gate most nights, before he transferred out to another pack roughly a year before my rejection. I remembered him standing guard the night of a harvest celebration once. Remembered him nodding to me the way junior guards always did when I walked past.

“You,” I said. Barely above a whisper.

His eyes went wide. The folder slipped another inch loose in his grip.

“I can explain,” he started, backing toward the window instead of the door.

“Explain what. Why you’re stealing evidence at dawn, or why you’re even here.” I stepped further into the room, cutting off his path to the window. “You transferred out of his pack a year ago. Nobody transfers packs without permission from an Alpha. Whose permission did you actually get, Tomas.”

He didn’t answer. His eyes flicked past me toward the hallway, calculating.

“Don’t,” I said. “Marcus’s guards patrol this corridor every twenty minutes. You won’t make it past the gate.”

His shoulders dropped, just slightly, the fight going out of him before he’d even decided to give it up completely