The Luna Who Walked Back In

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER THREE

Title: Cracks in the Alpha

POV: Evelyn

The second formal meeting with Raphael is on a Tuesday. It is scheduled for ten in the morning and he arrives at nine-fifty, which tells her he is not someone who gives punctuality for power. She files that away.

She brings Mirabel in as her junior counsel. This is partly because Mirabel is brilliant and partly because Evelyn has no intention of being alone in a room with Raphael until she has decided exactly how she feels about everything. Mirabel sits beside her with a notepad and does not smile, which is all Evelyn asked of her this morning.

Raphael brings no one.

He sits across from them both and he lays it out plainly. There is an organization called the Hollow Fang. It has been eliminating Alpha bloodlines for at least a decade, using corporate acquisitions to seize pack lands immediately following an Alpha's death. The land becomes untethered from pack jurisdiction within ninety days of a succession crisis. By the time a new Alpha is installed and stabilizes the council, the title has already been transferred to a holding company three shells deep. Three packs have lost territory this way. Two more are actively being circled.

"The network needs a death to trigger the acquisition window," Raphael says. "Real or staged."

"You used your own staged death as a trap," Evelyn says.

"Uhmmmm actually, I intended to. But I had to disappear completely to make the death believable. Any contact with the pack would have broken the cover." He stops. "Including contact with you."

Mirabel writes something on her notepad. Evelyn does not look at what it says.

"The shell corporations in your retainer routing," Evelyn says. "You routed money through them deliberately."

"I knew you would flag them. I knew if you had been doing what I suspected you had been doing this past year, you would see those numbers and understand immediately."

Mirabel puts her pen down very softly.

Evelyn looks at him now, fully and without flinching. "You built your entrance around the assumption that I had been quietly investigating this for twelve months."

"Yes."

"What if I had not been?"

Raphael's expression does not change, but something behind his eyes does. "Then I would have walked into this office and explained everything from scratch and hoped you would still take the case."

"And if I had said no?"

He says, with complete seriousness, "I would have understood."

The meeting continues for ninety more minutes. By the end, Evelyn has a full legal strategy mapped and Raphael has signed the formal engagement agreement. Everything is professional and clean.

After he leaves, Mirabel closes her notepad and says, "He researched you. He knows your case history from this year. He knows your specialty pivot to forensic corporate law. He knows your flag methodology."

"I know," Evelyn says.

"He has been watching you work."

"I know that too."

Mirabel picks up her pen again. "Are you okay?"

"I will be," Evelyn says. "After I figure out who inside the pack fed Albert the lies that got me banished."

Three hours later, her phone rings. It is a number she does not recognize. She almost does not answer. She answers on the fourth ring.

The voice on the other end is young, male, and sounds like it is barely holding itself together.

"This is Albert," he says. "Raphael's son. I need to know if my father is in your building right now, because something is very wrong with me and I think it has something to do with him."

Evelyn stands very still.

"Where are you?" she asks.

"The lobby," he says. "I came to see a specialist in the building. But my wolf started reacting the second I walked in and I cannot get it to stop."

She looks at the elevator panel. She presses the button for the lobby.

"Stay where you are," she tells him.

She does not call Raphael yet. She wants to see this herself first, because Albert's fracturing wolf bond is telling her something the forensic files cannot.

The elevator descends, and somewhere deep in her chest, something old and unhealed braces itself for whatever is waiting on the ground floor.