Chapter 3
I found my mother on her knees in the moonflower garden, the way I always found her at dusk. She had her hands deep in the soil, turning it around the roots of the white blooms she had planted the year my father died. The flowers were closed for the evening, tight little fists of white petals. They only opened under moonlight. She had always loved that about them.
I stood at the garden's edge for a moment before she heard me. She looked older in the low light. Softer. The kind of soft that comes from years of grief settling into a person's bones and making itself at home.
"Ari." She sat back on her heels and smiled. "You're out late."
"I needed some air." I stepped onto the stone path and crouched beside her. The soil smelled dark and wet. "Mom. I need to tell you something."
She read my face the way mothers do. Her hands stilled in the dirt. "What happened?"
"I've been reviewing the family accounts." I kept my voice level. Careful. "There are some irregularities. Transfers I don't recognize. I've frozen everything as a precaution until I can sort it out."
She blinked. "Frozen — Ari, I've been helping Emelia with a few things. She's had nothing, you know that. I didn't think —"
"How much, Mom?"
She looked down at her hands. A long pause. "I'm not sure of the exact amount."
I watched her face. The confusion was real. The trust in her eyes when she said Emelia's name — that was real too. She had no idea. She genuinely had no idea what she had been handing over, or to whom, or why.
That was the part that made my chest tight. Not the money. The fact that someone had looked at my mother's grief and her love and her open hands and had decided those were weaknesses to be used.
"It's fine," I said. "I'm handling it. I just need the accounts locked until I finish the audit."
"Of course." She reached over and touched my hand, leaving a small smear of soil on my wrist. "You're so much like your father. He always caught things before they became problems."
I looked at her moonflowers. Closed tight. Waiting for the moon.
"Get inside before it gets cold," I said. I kissed her cheek and left her there.
I did not tell her about the photographs. I did not tell her about the healer, or the payments, or the name Emelia Harrison and what it actually meant. Not yet. The territory was sealed. The accounts were frozen. But my mother's heart was still full of a story Kellan had written for her, and I needed that story to stay intact for eleven more days.
After that, she would see everything. The whole hall would.
---
The pack's audiovisual setup was managed by a junior wolf named Cody Reeves — twenty years old, two months out of his Delta evaluation, and still quietly grateful that I had passed him on a footwork assessment that, strictly speaking, he had not earned. He was not a bad fighter. He was just a nervous one. I had made a judgment call. He had never forgotten it.
I found him in the equipment room off the great hall two days after my visit to the garden. He was running cable checks for the Solstice setup, headphones around his neck, a tablet in his hand.
He looked up when I came in and straightened immediately. "Beta Larson."
"Cody." I closed the door behind me. "I need a favor."
I handed him the flash drive. I told him exactly what I needed — the files loaded onto the projection system, queued to display midway through the feast, triggered on my signal. A single tap on the remote I would be carrying. No previewing the files. No copies. No questions.
He held the drive and looked at me for a moment. He was smart enough to understand that something significant was about to happen in that hall. He was also smart enough to understand that his job was not to understand it.
"Yes, ma'am," he said.
"Good." I turned to go, then stopped. "Cody. If anyone asks you about the setup before the banquet, you're running a standard slideshow of the year's training highlights. That's all you know."
He nodded. "Training highlights. Got it."
I left him to his cables.
---
I rehearsed the speech every night.
Not because I was afraid of forgetting it. The words were simple. The format was fixed by pack law, the same structure that had been used for rejections since before my grandmother's time. I knew it the way I knew my own name.
I rehearsed it because I needed my voice to stay even when I said it. In front of every ranked wolf and Elder and pack family in Silverfang. In front of Kellan's face when he finally understood what was happening. In front of my mother.
I stood in front of my mirror each night and said it quietly, the way you practice something you intend to do only once and intend to do perfectly.
*I, Ariana Larson, Beta Female of Silverfang Pack, reject you, Kellan Thomas, as my mate.*
The bond pulled every time. A deep, low ache, like a bruise pressed from the inside. My wolf did not like the words. She had spent three years learning his scent, building the architecture of a bond she believed was sacred, and she did not understand yet that the wolf on the other end of it had been laughing at her the whole time.
I let her feel it. I did not fight it. I just kept saying the words until my voice stopped wanting to break.
---
The night of the Winter Solstice Banquet, the great hall was full and warm and loud with the particular noise of a pack at ease — the clink of glasses, the low rumble of conversation, the smell of roasted meat and pine boughs and a hundred wolves who believed this was just a celebration.
I sat at the Beta table and ate my dinner and smiled at the right moments and refilled my water glass twice.
Across the hall, Kellan was at the Beta family table. His arm was draped along the back of the chair beside him — Emelia's chair. She was laughing at something, her head tilted, the candlelight catching the silver chain at her throat. The moonstone was tucked under her neckline tonight. She had learned, at least, to be subtle about it in my presence.
He caught my eye once. Smiled. Warm. Easy. The smile of a man who has no idea the floor is already gone beneath him.
I smiled back.
I reached into my jacket pocket and felt the small weight of the remote.
Midway through the feast. That was the timing. Let them eat. Let them settle. Let the hall fill up with the comfortable noise of a pack that thinks it knows what tonight is.
Then show them what I know.
I set my fork down. Picked up my water glass. Waited.
The projection wall behind the head table was dark. In about four minutes, it would not be.
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