I'd been on the call for forty minutes and we were finally getting somewhere.
Six weeks of back-and-forth with the Veron Pack's legal rep over a boundary line that both sides knew was going to land exactly where I'd said it would in week two. That wasn't how these things worked, though. You had to let the other side feel like they'd made you earn it, or the agreement wouldn't hold. So I'd been earning it, on paper, for six weeks.
"The revised survey places the northern marker at—"
Callum walked in. I held up a finger without looking at him. He ignored it.
He always ignored it. Ten years as my Beta and the man had never once respected the finger.
He slid a piece of paper across the desk. Photocopy of a land deed.
"—the creek bed, which our client considers the natural boundary and therefore—"
I pulled it closer. Parcel number, family name, survey coordinates. Filed through Weston County records, which was already interesting because Weston was our territory and had been for years.
So why the hell is some random deed popping up now?
"Alpha, are you still—"
"I'll call you back," I said, and ended the call with Veron Pack's legal rep.
Callum leaned against the doorframe.
"Where'd this come from?"
"The county land office flagged it this morning." He nodded at the paper. "Parcel's on the sealed lot."
I went still.
"Say that again."
"Where the sealing happened, Rhys."
I looked at the coordinates. Looked at them again. Cross-referenced the survey markers in my head against the territory map I'd had memorized for ten years.
He was right.
It wasn't the contested outer edges where humans occasionally got ambitious and we had to remind them how territory worked. Not even the mid-range parcels that showed up in disputes every few years. It was the sealed lot. The one piece of land in the entire territory that we had never once let anyone near, human or lycan.
How the hell does a human get a deed to that specific piece of land? Out of everything inside this territory, out of every acre we hold, she walks into a county office with paperwork for that one?
"The family name means nothing to me," I said.
"Me either." Callum's jaw was set in a way I recognized. He was as unsettled as I was. "I had someone check. The chain of title is clean."
I'll be damned.
I sat with that for a second.
Thirty-one years. That was four years before my father's last territorial consolidation. Which meant if this was legitimate, it had been sitting inside our territory through every survey we'd ever run, every boundary review, every filing.
For thirty-one years, a human family had a deed to the most protected piece of ground in this territory, and not one person in this pack had caught it.
Someone put this here. This didn't just happen.
"A Ms. Elise Winters drove straight here from the county office," Callum said.
Neither of us said anything for a moment. If the documents were legitimate — and Callum's guy said they were legitimate — then we weren't dealing with a scam. We weren't dealing with some badly advised human with a forged stamp.
"The elders need to hear about this," I said.
"Already tried. Maren and Sorin are out of coverage. Petra's not picking up."
I stared at him. "All three of them?"
"All three."
Three of the oldest lycans in the western territory were collectively responsible for more pack knowledge than the rest of us put together, and not one of them could be reached by phone on the day a human woman showed up at my gate with a deed to the sealed lot.
I didn't know whether to find that suspicious or just deeply irritating. With the elders, it was usually both.
"How are they out of coverage?" I said. "Maren has a landline. That thing's older than half the pack. The last thing I heard is that damn thing still works—"
"Not picking up either."
"Where the hell is that old woman? I asked.
"Your guess is as good as mine, Rhys."
"Sorin?"
"Same."
I pushed back from the desk. The elders operated on their own timeline and always had, and they had never once felt the need to explain why. Most of the time, I respected that. Right now, it was making my jaw tight.
"Do you think they already know?" Callum asked.
The elders had a way of knowing things before they should. Not always and not about everything, but about pack matters with deep roots, about anything that connected back far enough—sometimes they just knew.
"Honestly?" I said. "I have no idea. With those three, I never do." I picked up the deed copy.
Callum nodded once. "And the woman? Ms. Winters. You want me to have someone meet her?"
"I'll go."
He looked at me for a second. "You'll go."
"That's what I said."
Someone had a damn legitimate piece of paper on a very important parcel sitting inside my territory and I wanted to look them in the eye before I decided what to do about it.
I took the deed copy and walked down the main hall.
I came around the corner and stopped.
The woman was standing at the open front door. She had her back to me— just for a second, looking out toward the grounds—and then she turned, and I got the full picture. Mid-twenties, dark coat, a folder pressed against her chest.
And then my chest cracked open.
Not literally. But that was what it felt like — a single low reverberation, deep and resonant, like a bell struck once in a closed room. I stood there. The feeling didn't pass. It got heavier. A pressure building behind my ribs, something pounding against the inside of my chest.
No.
I knew that feeling.
I had sealed that feeling away ten years ago and it had been quiet ever since—not a tremor, not a whisper, nothing—and this woman had walked through my front door and it had come roaring back in about four seconds flat.
My wolf, displaced, sealed, and silent for a decade, is not silent anymore.
What the—
She hadn't seen me yet.
"Shit," I said.