VICTOR
I had not planned to stay the full twenty minutes.
That is the part nobody standing on that wall understood and Rowan, smart as he was, would spend the next three days trying to figure out.
He would pick through every word I put through that radio, every second of the withdrawal, every detail of how my men walked when they left, and he would build a theory about what had changed. He would be wrong. Nothing changed. Everything went exactly the way I intended it to go from the moment I drove that car onto the grass this morning.
I did not come here for Freya.
Freya was a conversation I needed to have eventually and a problem I needed to solve eventually but not today. Today was a test. Today I needed to know how a twenty-six-year-old acting Alpha performed under pressure with no father, no Ryker, and the wrong gate to watch. Rowan performed well. Better than his father at that age, which I noted and intended to use later.
