Chapter 6

What Beckett Knew:

Damon found Beckett in the training yard, running drills with two of the younger pack members like it was any other Tuesday, like the ground hadn’t just shifted under both their lives without Beckett even knowing it yet.

He waited until the drill ended. Watching Beckett clap one of the kids on the shoulder, say something that made him laugh, easy and unbothered, a man who had no idea he was about to be asked a question he couldn’t take back.

“Walk with me,” Damon said.

Beckett caught something in his tone immediately  five years later as his Beta had taught him to read Damon the way other men read weather. His easy expression didn’t quite drop, but it tightened at the edges. “Everything okay?”

“Just walk with me.”

They went past the training yard, out toward the tree line where the noise of the packhouse thinned to nothing, and Damon didn’t say anything until he was sure they were alone.

“The letters you brought me,” he said finally. “Five years ago. The correspondence between Elena and the Ashcombe scout.”

Something flickered across Beckett’s face, there and gone so fast that if Damon hadn’t spent five years learning to watch for exactly that kind of flicker, he might have missed it. “What about them?”

“I want to know where you got them.”

“I told you at the time. A source inside her circle. They asked to stay anonymous.”

“I know what you told me.” Damon kept his voice level, though it cost him something to do it. “I’m asking again, because I just spent an hour with the original file, and the dates don’t work, Beckett. The letters are dated two days before the meeting they describe. Somebody built evidence for something that hadn’t happened yet.”

Beckett didn’t answer right away. That, more than anything, was the answer.

“I trusted you,” Damon said, quieter now, and somehow that was worse than if he’d shouted it. “I trusted you with the worst decision of my life, and I need to know if I had a reason to.”

“Damon”

“Don’t.” He held up a hand. “Don’t tell me it’s complicated. Don’t tell me you didn’t know. I’ve known you since we were kids. I know exactly what your face does when you’re about to lie to me, and it’s doing it right now.”

Beckett’s jaw worked. For a long moment he looked like a man standing at the edge of something, deciding whether to jump or step back, and Damon watched him decide.

“I didn’t fake the letters,” Beckett said finally. “I want you to know that first. I believed them when I brought them to you. I still don’t know for certain they were fake, you’re telling me the dates are wrong, and maybe they are, but I didn’t check them closely enough at the time to catch that, and neither did you.”

“That’s not an answer. Who gave them to you?”

Beckett looked away, out toward the tree line, the same way Elena had watched Damon do on her porch two days before, like the trees were easier to confess to than a face. “Renata.”

The name landed in Damon’s chest like a stone dropped down a well, and it took a long moment before he heard it hit bottom.

“She came to me the week before the ceremony,” Beckett went on, steadier now that the worst of it was out. “Said she’d gotten the letters from someone who didn’t want to be named, someone worried about coming forward directly to you because of how close you and Elena were. She said she trusted the source. I trusted her. It never occurred to me she’d have a reason to hand me something false.”

“Why would it,” Damon said, and his voice had gone somewhere flat and cold that Beckett had heard maybe twice in the whole time he’d known him. “She’s been standing at my side for five years telling me it was over. Telling me to let it go. Telling me not to unsettle the pack over a woman who’s already gone.”

“Damon, I didn’t know”

“I’m not finished being angry at you yet, so don’t ask me to hurry up and forgive you.” He said it without heat, which somehow made it land harder than if he’d shouted. “You brought me evidence you didn’t check closely enough to trust, and I acted on it in front of the whole pack because I trusted you blindly enough not to check it either. We did that. Both of us. To her.”

Beckett had the grace not to argue with that.

“I want everything you remember,” Damon said. “Every conversation with Renata about this. Every detail, no matter how small it feels. And I want it today.”

“You’re going to confront her.”

“Not yet.” Damon’s eyes had gone somewhere distant, working through something Beckett couldn’t follow. “Not until I understand how far this goes. Elena’s father was asking questions about this before he died. Renata handed you fabricated evidence five years ago and has spent five years making sure I never looked at it twice. That’s not one bad decision made in a hurry. That’s a pattern. And I want to know the whole shape of it before I put a name to any part of it out loud.”

Elena found Prisca at the edge of the market square, at a stall selling dried herbs that smelled like her childhood in a way that almost distracted her from why she’d come.

Prisca recognized her before Elena said anything. Her whole body went stiff, the particular stillness of someone deciding, in real time, whether running would look worse than staying.

“Elena.” Careful. Neutral. “I heard you were back.”

“I need to ask you about something,” Elena said. “Five years ago. You gave a statement. About seeing me at the border with an Ashcombe scout.”

Prisca’s hands, which had been sorting a bundle of dried lavender, went still on the table. “That was a long time ago.”

“It was a lie.”

“I don’t know what you’re”

“I was never at the border, Prisca. I never met anyone from Ashcombe in my life. You told a room full of people you saw me do something that never happened, and it cost me everything.” Elena kept her voice low, level, though it took everything in her to keep it that way. “I’m not here to make a scene. I’m here because I need to know who asked you to say it.”

Prisca’s eyes darted past her, toward the square, toward anyone who might be listening, and Elena understood in that look that she wasn’t wrong, that there was a name sitting behind Prisca’s teeth, and that she was terrified of what would happen if it got out.

“I can’t,” Prisca said, barely above a whisper. “You don’t understand what she’s capable of. What will she do if she thinks I said anything.” 

She. 

Not a confirmation. Not quite. But close enough that Elena felt the ground tilt slightly under her feet, the same way it had on the porch when Damon said Beckett’s name to another piece sliding into a shape she was starting, with a kind of sick clarity, to recognize.

“Renata,” Elena said, and watched Prisca’s face confirm it without a single word leaving her mouth.

“I never said that,” Prisca said quickly, already backing away from the stall, already reaching for the excuse of a customer who wasn’t actually there. “I have to get back to work, Elena. Please. Just leave it alone. For your own sake.”

She was gone before Elena could say anything else, disappearing into the market crowd with the particular speed of someone who’d been waiting five years for a conversation like this one and still wasn’t ready for it.

Elena stood there a long moment, market noise moving around her like water around a stone, and pulled out the notebook she’d started at her father’s desk. Under Beckett’s name, underlined once, she wrote a second name, and underneath that, the same question in different words.

Renata. What did she stand to gain?

Because a lie this careful, sustained this long, wasn’t jealousy. Jealousy didn’t forge dated correspondence and plant a second witness after the fact and then spend five years making sure nobody thought to check the math.

Jealousy wanted Damon. This wanted something else. Something bigger, buried, the way her father had written something buried in this pack a long time ago that certain people would do almost anything to keep buried still.

She closed the notebook and started walking back toward the house, already turning over the next question, and the one after that, because for the first time since she’d stepped off the plane, she understood she wasn’t just here to pack boxes.

She was here to finish what her father started.