Chapter 9

The Truth About the Union.

Took two whole days before Kaelan let me anywhere near the investigation proper, two days of him posting a guard outside my door I hadn’t asked for and didn’t much argue with either, if I’m being honest, cause my side still ached something fierce every time I moved wrong, twisted the wrong way getting out of bed.

The third morning, he came to my room himself, a stack of papers tucked under his arm, and set them down on the table without much preamble at all.

“Records,” he said. “The debt agreement between your old pack and mine. Every version of it that exists in my archives, going back.”

“Why show me.”

“Because you notice things I don’t.” Said it plain, no flattery dressed up in it, just fact, same as most everything he ever told me straight out. “And because if somebody wanted you inside this house bad enough to send a man through your window, I want to know why. Starting with how you got here to begin with.”

So we went through it together, papers spread out across that table, and I’ll admit it felt strange, sitting across from him like an equal instead of standing before him like something waiting on being judged for existing.

Took a good while before anything jumped out at either of us. Most of it was the kind of dry legal language that made my eyes want to just slide right off the page and land someplace easier. But somewhere in the third stack, I found the original dispute records the grazing rights argument that started this whole mess to begin with and something about the dates sat wrong with me the second I looked close.

“This says the dispute started early spring,” I said, tracing the line with my finger. “But the debt settlement is the one that named me that’s dated barely six weeks after. Six weeks.”

Kaelan leaned over to look, close enough I caught the smell of leather and woodsmoke off him. “That’s fast. Disputes like that usually drag on for months. Sometimes longer than that, even.”

“And this part here,” I said, flipping to another page, “says the terms got finalized before the councils even met to formally review how the dispute came out. How’s that even possible? Shouldn’t the settlement come after they decide who’s in the right, not before?”

He went quite a long moment, jaw working the way it did when something wasn’t sitting easy in him. “Should. Unless somebody already knew how it’d end before it was ever properly argued out at all.”

That sent a cold little shiver right down my spine, sharp as anything. “You’re saying somebody rigged the outcome.”

“I’m saying somebody may have known the outcome,” he said, careful with it, “before it happened. Which isn’t quite the same thing. Isn’t much better either, mind you.”

Thought about Roran that whole rest of the afternoon, turning him over in my head the way I’d learned to turn over council members and their reasons for things. At the time, standing in that hall listening to him hand me away like a sack of grain nobody wanted, I’d thought him weak. Desperate. A man saving his own skin whatever the cost, same as he’d always been my whole life, honestly.

Now I wasn’t so sure weakness was the whole of it.

“He agreed awful fast,” I said, half to myself, half to Kaelan sitting there across from me. “Didn’t even try negotiating different terms. Didn’t ask for more time to think it over. Just agreed, like the shape of it was already decided long before he ever walked into that hall to announce it.”

“You think he knew something.”

“Think,” I said slowly, working it out even as the words were coming out my own mouth, “he might’ve been told what to agree to. Not by you. By somebody else entirely.”

Kaelan didn’t answer that right off. Just looked at the papers for a long while, something working behind his eyes I couldn’t quite read no matter how hard I tried.

The ring took longer to run down properly. Kaelan sent riders out quietly, careful not to tip anybody off to what he was after, and what came back a few days later only made things murkier instead of any clearer, which I hadn’t expected honestly.

The family belonged to old blood, older grudges, the kind of house that remembered every slight going back generations did have plenty of reason to want him weakened. Their standing in the territory had been shrinking for years, eclipsed bit by bit by Kaelan’s own growing influence, and there wasn’t any shortage of resentment simmering under all that noble politeness I’d seen at that first dinner, not once you knew to look for it.

But the ring itself, Kaelan told me, sitting across from me that evening with a look on his face I hadn’t seen off him yet something close to frustration mixed right in with the caution had been reported stolen from that family’s household nearly a month before the attack on me ever happened.

“Convenient,” I said.

“Too convenient.” He rubbed a hand over his jaw, tired-looking in a way I hadn’t seen on him before. “Either they’re lying about the theft to cover up their own hand in it, or somebody wanted me looking straight at them instead of looking somewhere else entirely.”

“So we still don’t know.”

“No.” He met my eyes, steady. “We don’t. Not yet.”

It was the last document that changed everything, far as I was concerned. Buried near the bottom of that whole archive, dated weeks before the dispute even officially got started, some private correspondence between two parties Kaelan wouldn’t name outright, discussing terms for a political marriage. Terms that named an Omega bride, plain as anything. Terms that matched, near word for word, the very arrangement that ended up bringing me here to his door.

Weeks before the dispute even started.

I stared at that date so long the ink started going blurry on me.

“This was written before the fight over the grazing lands even happened,” I said, voice not quite steady anymore. “Before there was any debt at all to settle.”

Kaelan’s face had gone very still, still in a way that scared me a little. “Meaning somebody planned to put an Omega bride in my household before there was ever a reason to.”

“Meaning the debt wasn’t the reason,” I said, the whole cold shape of it finally settling down into my chest like a stone dropped in water. “Debt was just the excuse. Somebody wanted me here. Specifically me, or somebody like me, and they built the whole debt up around it after, just to make it look natural, make it look like bad luck instead of a plan.”

I felt sick with it, if I’m honest about the whole thing. My whole life I’d believed I didn’t matter enough for anybody to notice me, let alone plan around me. Being invisible had been my armor near my whole life, the one thing that kept me safe when nothing else did. Now I had to sit there and consider that somebody had seen me or seen what I could be used for, which wasn’t quite the same as being seen at all long before I ever set foot in this territory. That I hadn’t been unlucky. Hadn’t been some accident of bad math like I’d always figured.

I’d been chosen.

“Why me,” I said, quiet, mostly just to myself at that point. “What could I possibly have that anybody needs bad enough to plan all this.”
Kaelan didn’t have an answer for that one. Neither did I, not one that made any kind of sense.

He was quiet a long while after that, staring down at that letter like it might go and rearrange itself into something less troubling if he just looked hard enough at it.

“Need to ask you something,” he said finally. “And I need you to understand right off, I’m not accusing you of nothing. I don’t believe you knew any of this going in. But I’ve got to ask for it regardless.”

“Ask it, then.”

“Does anyone in your old pack ever mention me? Before the debt. Before any of this business.” Eyes steady on mine, careful, searching my face close. “Anybody at all suggesting a marriage to me specifically might be useful to somebody, for some reason.”

“No.” Said it fast, meant it with everything I had in me. “Kaelan, I swear it to you, I had no idea who you even were till Roran said your name out loud in that hall. Didn’t know your face. Didn’t know one single thing about you.”

“I believe you.” Said it quick, firm, like he needed me hearing it clear and not doubting it. “I do believe you. But somebody wanted you here, Elira. Wanted it bad enough to plan for it before there was ever a debt around to hide the whole thing behind.”

Quiet again, a moment, and when he spoke next his voice had gone low, almost unwilling, like the words cost him something real to get out.

“What if you were never meant to be my mate,” he said. “What if you were meant to be my weakness instead.”

I sat there with that question just hanging there in the air between the two of us, candlelight flickering low over all those papers spread across the table, and felt the whole ground I’d been standing on since I got to this territory go and shift right out from under me one more time.