The drive back gave me too much to think about and not enough traffic to distract me from it.
Rhys Gray recognized the notary name. I'd watched his face when he read it and he'd gone very still in the specific way he went still when something landed that he hadn't expected and didn't want to show. He knew what it meant or he knew enough of it to matter, and instead of saying so, he'd asked for two days.
Two days.
I'd negotiated with lycan territorial representatives before. Three separate cases, two of them contentious, one of them that went to arbitration and took fourteen months. Lycans as a general rule led with power, direct and unambiguous.
Here is what we have, here is what we want, and here is what happens if we don't get it.
Straightforward. Manageable. You knew where you stood.
Rhys didn't do that. He led with patience, which was so much harder to get footing against. Every conversation I'd had with him felt like standing on a surface that looked solid and kept turning out to have more depth to it than I'd accounted for. I'd come in with a folder and a legal position and he'd sit across from me and listen like he had all the time in the world, and somehow I'd leave knowing less than I thought I did going in.
It was genuinely impressive. I also found it deeply irritating, which probably said something.
And then there was the thing I hadn't opened yet.
The photo on my desk. His face when he looked at it, that careful shift, the way he'd gone quiet for just a second too long before asking if those were my parents. He'd recognized something. I'd seen it and I was silent about it because I didn't have enough information to do anything useful with it yet.
Then there was the waiting room.
I had told him his eyes were blue. Not just blue, apparently. I'd said something about glaciers. Out loud. Directly to him.
I don't know why I said it like that. I don't talk like that.
And then I just stood there while he leaned in—
I stopped that line of thought immediately.
It hadn't even been a full kiss. It barely counted. A second, maybe less. Still enough that I'd felt it, enough that my body had decided to react like it was a much bigger deal than it actually was.
Which was unnecessary.
I could feel the heat creeping up again just thinking about it, which was also unnecessary.
I adjusted my grip on the wheel, took a steady breath, and turned the radio up a little. Focus on the road. That was something I could control.
Then my phone rang.
Unknown number, but different from the texts. This was a landline prefix, local to the Graymoor area. I pulled it toward me and answered on the second ring.
"Ms. Winters." A woman's voice immediately spoke from the other line. It sounded older and calm. "My name is Elder Maren. I sit on the Graymoor Pack council. I'd like to meet with you."
I straightened in my seat. "Elder Maren?"
"I won't keep you long, but I'd prefer to meet privately, not at the pack house and not with Rhys present."
I pulled off to the side of the road and stopped the car.
"Why privately?" I asked.
A brief pause because she went on to say, "Because what I want to tell you is true whether Rhys wants you to hear it or not. And I believe he would want you to hear it." Another pause. "He simply doesn't know that yet."
I looked at my reflection in the dark windshield. My own face looking back at me, slightly blurred by the glass.
An elder of the Graymoor Pack called me on a private landline, wanting to meet without Rhys knowing. A month ago I'd have called that a red flag and declined. But a week ago I didn't have a folder full of documents that didn't add up, a surveillance photo from a tree line, or a thirty-one-year-old deed that connected my family to a pack I'd never heard of until three weeks ago.
I also had an elder who'd stopped in a doorway and looked at me like she'd been expecting me for a long time.
"Is this the same Elder Maren who walked past the waiting room earlier today?" I asked.
"It is."
"You stopped and looked at me."
"I did."
"That look wasn't surprise."
"No," she said simply. "It wasn't."
"Were you expecting me?" I suddenly heard myself ask.
"You have a lot of questions," she said.
"Of course. What do you expect?"
Then I heard a small laugh coming from her from the other line. "Well, then, you better see me."
I looked at the dark road ahead of me. Traffic was thin out here. The tree line on both sides of the road was solid and black against the overcast sky, and Graymoor at night had that particular quality of quiet that I'd stopped being unsettled by and started just accepting as how things were here.
"Where?" I asked.
She gave me an address, slow and clear, the way someone gave an address to a person who was going to write it down. I typed it into my maps app while she spoke.
The result loaded. I looked at the pin on the screen. Looked at it again.
Not a house. Not a community building or a meeting hall or anywhere that made sense for a private conversation between two people who didn't know each other.
The pin sat exactly on the boundary line of my inherited parcel. And this elder wanted to meet me there, at night.