Kael POV
He had looked at the security feed three times.
He was aware of that number. He was aware that three times was two times more than surveillance required and one time more than he could explain as professional habit. He was sitting in his office with the screen open in front of him and the timestamp read 11:47 PM and the last thing he had watched was a clip from the east hallway that he had already watched twice before.
He watched it a third time.
Luna in the hallway. The mop. Breck nineteen years old, third-tier ranking, a minor irritant Kael had noted before for this kind of small cruelty walking through her clean floor deliberately. The ankle hook. Luna going down hard on both knees on stone.
He watched what happened next the same way he had watched it the first two times. The one-second pause. Then she got up. She picked up the mop. She cleaned the boot prints. She did not look at Breck. She did not look at anyone. Her face did not change.
Kael closed the feed.
He leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling and conducted the same argument with himself that he had been conducting since approximately six hours ago when he first pulled up the footage.
You are watching because you need to assess her. You bought her with a purpose. Knowing how she responds to pressure is relevant.
He believed the first part. He believed it completely he had bought her with a purpose and that purpose required information. He needed to know if she would break quietly or if she would be a problem. He needed to know her patterns. Watching the security feed was reasonable.
He did not entirely believe the second part.
The second part had a shape to it that felt uncomfortably close to something else. Something he was not going to name.
He pulled up the file Reyn had assembled. Luna Ash, twenty-one, illegitimate daughter of Alpha Gregor. No confirmed wolf. No rank. No history of anything that should have brought her to his attention before three weeks ago when Voss appeared at his door with shaking hands and a story that had not left him alone since.
He read through it again. Basic facts, all of them birth record, pack placement, work assignments at Ironveil. She had been a servant in her own father's house since childhood. The file noted this in one flat line and moved on like it was not remarkable.
Kael read that line twice.
Not relevant, he told himself. Plenty of illegitimate wolves had difficult circumstances. It was not his concern. Her circumstances before arriving at Blackfang were not the point.
The point was Mira.
He brought Mira's face up in his mind deliberately the specific practice he had developed over the past three weeks of using her memory like a compass point. When everything else started drifting, Mira brought him back to why he was doing this.
She had been bright. That was the word he always landed on. Bright and quick and always slightly out of reach like she was always moving to the next thing before the current thing had finished. He had found that attractive once. He had mistaken movement for depth.
He was honest enough with himself, in the dark of his own office, to acknowledge that.
But she was dead. Whatever she had been to him, whatever the complicated truth of it was, she was dead and she did not deserve to be dead and the girl sleeping in the small room on the ground floor of his pack house was the reason.
That was the story. He was keeping it.
He closed the file. He opened the security feed again.
He stopped himself before it loaded. He closed it.
He stood up and walked to the window instead and looked out at the dark grounds below. His wolf moved it had been moving all day, restless in a way it normally never was, pacing the inside of him with an insistence that he kept shutting down. The wolf did not understand the plan. The wolf did not care about Mira or justice or what Voss had said on his doorstep. The wolf just knew what it had smelled in the auction room and it had not stopped knowing it for a single hour since.
She is not who you want her to be, he told it. Directly. Firmly. The same way he had been telling it all day.
The wolf was not persuaded.
He pressed his hand flat against the cold window glass and made himself breathe evenly and thought about something practical. The attendant. Voss.
He had assigned Reyn to the search three days ago and increased the priority this morning he had done it in the middle of reading Luna's file for the second time and he had not explained the timing to Reyn, who was perceptive enough not to ask. Finding Voss was critical. She was the only external source confirming what Luna did. If she had run, if she had been paid to run, if her account had been manufactured
He stopped that thought.
He stopped it completely and deliberately and then stood there noticing that he had stopped it, which was its own kind of information he did not enjoy having.
His phone rang. Reyn.
He answered before the second ring. "What."
"I found something." Reyn's voice had the quality it got when he was choosing his words carefully not hesitant, just precise. He was a precise man when the information was sensitive. "The trail out of the neutral territory housing. Voss didn't just leave. Someone cleaned up after her."
Kael kept his voice even. "Cleaned up."
"Professionally. The kind of clean that takes resources and contacts and specific knowledge of how tracking works. Her scent trail was disrupted not just faded, actually disrupted, which means someone with access to disruption compounds went behind her." A pause. "This wasn't a scared woman running on instinct. Someone planned this. Someone helped her and then erased the help."
Kael said nothing for a moment.
"There's more," Reyn said.
"Say it."
"I talked to the housing block manager. Voss had a visitor two days before she left. The manager didn't see a face hood up, careful about it. But she heard the conversation through the door. She said Voss wasn't upset. She said Voss sounded relieved."
The word landed in Kael's chest like a stone into still water. Relieved. Not threatened. Not coerced.
Paid.
"Keep going," Kael said.
"I'm trying to trace the disruption compounds. They have sources only a handful of suppliers in the region carry the grade used here. I should have a name in forty-eight hours." Reyn paused again. "Kael. Someone with serious resources made sure that woman disappeared before anyone thought to question her story. That's not nothing."
"No," Kael said quietly. "It is not nothing."
He ended the call.
He stood at the window for a long time after. Below, the grounds were dark and still. The guard rotation moved past on schedule. Somewhere on the ground floor, in a room he knew the exact location of, Luna Ash was asleep.
He thought about her face on the stage when he said what he said about Mira.
He had expected fear. He had expected denial. He had prepared himself for both.
She had given him nothing. Just those flat grey eyes, and behind them something that looked, in retrospect, less like guilt than like a person who had learned not to expect to be believed.
He turned away from the window.
He did not open the security feed again.
But he left the file on his desk, open to the page with the single flat line about a servant girl in her own father's house, and he did not close it before he left the room.