The Moon Goddess Gave Me Two Alpha's.

Ruining Lyra's Clan.

I knew about the maid before the maid knew about me.

Her name was Sela, nineteen years old, assigned to the east wing where my bedroom was, and in my first life she had spent three years feeding Lyra every small detail of my day without me ever once suspecting her.

She had a warm face and remembered how I took my tea and I had been too busy being grateful for small kindnesses to question where they came from.

Lyra had found her in the first month.

That was the thing I had not known the first time around, how early it had started, how far back the architecture of my destruction went.

I had spent the first three days of this second life being angry about it and the last four being useful about it instead.

I let Sela into my room on Wednesday morning like normal and went downstairs for breakfast and came back twenty minutes later and stood in my doorway and watched her go through my desk drawer with the focused efficiency of someone who had done this before and expected to keep doing it.

I let her finish.

I let her find the journal I had left open on the desk, the one with the carefully written entries about nothing, about training schedules and pack gossip and small ordinary thoughts, the journal I had started specifically for Sela to find and report back.

Then I said "looking for something?"

She spun around and the colour left her face completely.

I came into the room and closed the door behind me and sat on my bed and looked at her.

I said nothing and let the silence do the work because silence did that if you gave it enough room.

"I wasn't," she started.

"Sela," I said. She stopped.

"I know what you're doing," I said, "and I know who asked you to do it and I know what she is paying you and I want you to understand that I am not angry at you because you needed the money and she knew that when she approached you and used it, so this is not about you." I paused. "But it is going to stop today."

She was shaking a little. "She'll tell them I stole," she said quietly. "That's what she said, if I stopped she would tell Elder Mira I stole from the packhouse stores."

There it was. Lyra never recruited, she trapped.

"She won't," I said. "Because I am going to make sure she has bigger things to worry about than you. But I need you to do something for me first."

Sela looked at me with the expression of someone who was very tired of being in the middle of things. "What," she said.

"Keep reporting to her," I said. "Everything I tell you to tell her. Nothing else."

The silence lasted a long moment.

"You want me to feed her false information," Sela said slowly.

"I want you to tell her exactly what I give you," I said, "which will be true enough to be believable and wrong enough to be useful."

Sela looked at me for a long time and I looked back and let her decide, because this only worked if she chose it and not because I had cornered her into it, and then she said "okay" in a small voice and I nodded and stood up.

"Thank you," I said. "Go finish the east wing rooms, I'll find you this afternoon."

She left and I sat back down on my bed and my wolf settled in my chest with that quiet satisfied feeling she had been doing more of lately.

I thought about Lyra sitting somewhere in this packhouse right now waiting for Sela's first report, completely certain that her spy was in place and her plan was running and everything was going exactly the way she had designed it.

It was going exactly the way I had designed it.

I almost felt bad about how easy this was.

Almost.