Three elders in one room meant something had moved from "we're looking into it" to "sit down, this is happening now."
I'd seen it twice in ten years. Once, when the Veron Pack made a genuine coordinated push on the northern border, we had about four days to respond before it turned into something that couldn't be walked back. And once, three years ago, when the seal showed a hairline strain that lasted six days and then settled, and the only people who knew about it were me and the three people currently arranging themselves across the table from me.
Both times it started exactly like this.
I sat down, kept my mouth shut, and waited.
Whatever it is, just say it. I've had a bad enough afternoon already.
My jaw was still aching from the border situation. I'd taken two painkillers in the car on the way over and they hadn't done much. Callum had, predictably, said something about it. Several somethings, actually, delivered in that patient tone of his that I found significantly more irritating than if he'd just shouted at me.
Maren spoke first. Her thread, her call.
"The Winters parcel didn't end up in human hands by accident," she said. No warmup, no easing into it. When Maren decided you needed to hear something, she just said the thing. "Someone filed a deliberate legal partition through Weston County records thirty-one years ago. The paperwork was clean—clean enough to survive three decades of our own territorial reviews without once flagging."
"Someone inside the pack," I said.
"Someone with inside knowledge, at minimum. Someone who knew which parcel to use, how to move it through Weston County specifically, and how to make it look like a routine filing." She let that sit for a second. "We found the notary stamp, the one on the older filing that Ms. Winters brought in."
I sat up slightly. "And?"
"We traced the firm. And then we traced the individual signatory." She folded her hands on the table, which was what she did when she was about to say something she'd been carrying for a while. "The name appears in our own administrative records from that period. Someone with full access to pack business, pack history, and pack decisions."
"Give me the name, Maren."
She gave it to me.
I looked at her.
That's—wait.
"That's not possible," I said.
Not because I didn't believe her. I believed her. Maren didn't call a three-elder meeting to float a theory. She called one when she was certain. I said it because the thing it actually meant needed a second to settle into my head properly, and my head was apparently moving slowly tonight.
"We verified it three times," Sorin said, which were the most words he'd volunteered all evening and confirmed that yes, this was absolutely as serious as it felt.
I leaned back. The name she'd given me belonged to someone who had been in my father's inner circle for the entire decade before Alpha Cain died. Not a peripheral figure, not some administrative footnote. Someone present at every significant pack decision during those years. Every territorial move, every alliance, every conversation that happened behind closed doors and never got written down.
Someone who would have known about the curse.
About the seal.
About everything.
"He knew about the bloodline," I said, more to myself than to them.
"He knew everything your father knew," Petra said. "Or close enough to it."
Which means my father knew. I didn't say that part out loud. I sat with it for a second because it was a heavy thing to sit with—the idea that my father had arranged for that specific parcel to end up in human hands thirty-one years ago, before the sealing, before any of it, and had never once mentioned it.
Why? What were you doing, old man? What were you setting up?
"He's been dead for years," I said.
"Yes," Petra said. "Which means he didn't arrange this alone."
I looked at her.
"Someone else knew," Maren said. "Someone who was part of whatever arrangement was made thirty-one years ago, who has been in this pack through every survey, every review, every filing since. Someone who has known about the Winters parcel the entire time and said nothing."
Someone who is still here. Still walking around my territory, sitting at my table, eating in my house.
"That's a very short list," I said.
"It is," she said. "And we're not ready to name anyone on it until we're as certain as we were about the first name."
I stood up. Couldn't sit anymore. Walked to the window and looked out at the grounds because I needed somewhere to put my eyes while my brain caught up with everything else.
Someone in my pack has been sitting on this for thirty-one years. Watching me run territorial reviews. Watching Elise show up with her folder. Sending her threatening texts. Taking photos of her from tree lines.
They sent her a threatening text. They took a photo of her on that property and sent it to her phone. Someone who knows the full history of that land decided the right move was to threaten her into leaving.
This didn't add up. Someone handed that land to a human, then turned around and scared Elise off? What the hell is that?
I ran it through again and got nowhere.
Either it's the same person playing both sides for some reason, or I'm looking at two different people stepping on each other's mess.
"When you have the name," I said, turning back from the window, "you call me. Immediately."
"We know," Maren said.
"I'm serious. What happened with the phones last time—"
"Rhys."
"All three of you, unreachable, for an entire—"
"Rhys." She said it with the specific patience of a woman who had been managing me since I was eight years old and had developed considerable skill at it. "We know."
I exhaled. Picked up my phone from the table.
It had buzzed while I was at the window. Message from the pack member I'd assigned to keep eyes on the Winters property.
Three words.
She's there. Alone.