Chapter 3
The renovation plans spread across the dining table like a declaration of war.
I'd been working on them for four days. Architect's sketches, material samples, cost estimates printed on crisp paper—all of it arranged with the careful enthusiasm of a Luna who had finally, joyfully, found her purpose. The east wing redesign alone would run close to two hundred thousand dollars if Cody approved the imported Italian marble I'd circled in the catalogue. The artisan woodwork was another sixty. The commissioned murals for the foyer—a Luna's touch, I told him, something that would impress the alliance partners when they visited—were quoted at forty-five.
Cody looked at the numbers and barely blinked.
'You've been wanting to update the wing for years,' he said, setting the estimate back on the table with the easy generosity of a man who believed he had nothing to worry about. 'Do it right.'
'Thank you.' I smiled at him across the table. Warm. Grateful. A little shy, the way he liked me. 'And about the Harvest Banquet—'
'Silverfang's Alpha has been angling for a joint summit for months,' I said. 'If we host it here, we control the agenda. It would look strong.' I paused, tilting my head. 'Our allies need to see that Ironvale is thriving. That we're worth standing beside.'
I watched him buy it in real time. The slight lift of his chin. The calculation behind his eyes shifting from cost to opportunity.
'Schedule it,' he said.
I added the banquet to my list. Then the Luna's wellness retreat—a six-week program at a private estate two territories over, complete with a curated gifting package for the allied Lunas I'd be networking with. Rare botanical extracts. Handcrafted silver jewelry. A gesture of goodwill that would run Ironvale's hospitality budget into a deficit it couldn't quietly absorb.
Cody signed every approval I put in front of him. He was relieved. That was the part that twisted the knife—not that he agreed, but how visibly relieved he was. Three years of a quiet, compliant, grateful Luna, and all it took was her asking for nice things to convince him she'd never figure it out.
I kept my smile gentle and my notes meticulous.
---
Nora's contact sent the name through a secured channel: *Theo Salazar. Rogue investigator. No fixed territory. Leaves packs cleaner than he finds them.* There was a location: a bar called The Meridian, operating in the neutral strip between Ironvale's eastern border and the start of Crescentfall land. And a warning: *He doesn't take clients. He takes cases. Know the difference before you walk in.*
I drove out on a Tuesday evening, telling Delia I had a committee meeting with the banquet florist. She handed me my capsule and my glass of water with her usual fond concern. I took it with both hands, smiled, swallowed, and spat it into a gas station trash can twenty minutes down the road.
The scent-blocker compound Nora had prepared smelled faintly of pine resin. I applied it at my pulse points in the car, checking the rearview mirror out of habit, looking for headlights that had followed me too consistently. There were none.
I had a dossier in my bag—printed pages folded into a plain manila envelope. Rowan's appointment schedules. Cody's alliance fund allocations. The extraction dates I'd reconstructed from memory, cross-referenced with the days Makenna's condition had reportedly 'improved' according to the Crescentfall Pack's medical updates I'd found in Cody's office files. I'd memorized my opening statement on the drive over. Thirteen seconds. Specific, clean, no excess emotion.
I was terrified the entire way there.
I went anyway.
---
The Meridian was the kind of bar that had been designed to be invisible. Low ceiling, amber lighting, the kind of wood-paneled walls that absorbed sound and seemed to absorb scrutiny too. Half the tables were occupied by wolves who carried themselves with the particular self-contained stillness of rogues—people who'd learned to take up exactly as much space as they needed and not one inch more.
I stood in the doorway for three seconds, letting my eyes adjust, and found him immediately.
Corner booth. His back to the wall, the whole room in his sightline. Dark hair, a few days past needing a cut. A glass of black coffee on the table in front of him, untouched. He was doing nothing—not reading, not on his phone—just sitting with a quality of stillness that was different from rest. It was contained. Like a pressure system that hadn't broken yet.
I started toward him.
I made it four steps before my wolf moved.
Not the sluggish, half-awake stirring I'd grown used to. Not the weak flutter I'd been told was my 'delicate constitution.' This was something else entirely—a lurch, violent and desperate, like something waking from a deep sleep and throwing itself at the bars. The scent hit me first: dark cedar and rain, cool and old, something that bypassed my brain entirely and went straight down into the base of my spine.
My knees buckled. I caught myself on the edge of the nearest table.
Inside me, in a voice I'd almost forgotten, raw and cracked with disuse—
*Mate.*
Across the bar, I watched Theo's hand close slowly around the edge of the table. His jaw went tight. He wasn't looking at the room anymore. He was looking directly at me, and even from eight feet away I could see the exact moment it hit him—a fractional widening of his eyes, quickly controlled, and then a stillness that was different from before. Deeper. Like something in him had stopped moving because it had finally found the thing it had been looking for.
He exhaled through his nose. Low. Almost inaudible.
'...Mate.'
Not a question. Not to me. To himself, or to his wolf, or to whatever force had decided that this was the moment.
The bar kept going around us. Someone's glass clinked. A door opened on the far side. Neither of us moved.
I straightened up. My legs were steady. My wolf was still pressing against my ribs like she wanted to come through my skin, and the scent of him was everywhere now, cedar and cool rain, and I could feel my pulse in my throat.
I walked the rest of the way to his table and sat down across from him.
Theo Salazar looked at me. His expression had settled back into something neutral and hard-edged, but his eyes hadn't. His eyes were doing something complicated that I recognized because I imagined mine were doing the same thing.
The silence stretched for a moment. Long enough to acknowledge what had just happened. Short enough to not drown in it.
'I need your help to destroy my Alpha,' I said. My voice came out level and clear. I set the manila envelope on the table between us. 'Apparently the Moon Goddess has a sense of timing.'
Theo looked down at the envelope. Then back up at me.
The corner of his mouth moved—not quite a smile, but something adjacent to it. Grim and a little incredulous.
He picked up his untouched coffee and, for the first time, took a drink.
'Start from the beginning,' he said.
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