Repossessed: 30 Days to Reclaim His Pack

Half a Name

Kane found Ivy in the west wing gallery, back against the wall, phone clutched to her chest like it could shield her.

"Who were you talking to?"

She flinched at his voice. "Nobody."

"You slammed a door hard enough I heard it from the study." He crossed the room. "Nobody doesn't do that."

Ivy's eyes went to the window. Checking for something. Or someone.

"You need to leave this alone, Kane."

"I can't. It's my pack on the line." He stopped an arm's length from her. "You said someone came to you before the rejection. Not my father. Who?"

"If I tell you, it doesn't stay contained. You understand that? It goes everywhere. It burns everyone, including you."

"It's already burning me." His voice roughened, just slightly, and he let it stay that way. "Three years of thinking I did this to her. Tell me who actually did."

Selene appeared in the doorway, filing still pressed against her side under her jacket.

"Ivy." Her voice was steady, careful. "Whatever this is, I can protect you if you talk to me first."

"You can't protect anyone." Ivy's laugh had no humor in it. "Not from him."

"Him who?" Kane and Selene said it at the same time.

Ivy's mouth opened.

"The Elder," she said. "Not just any Elder. The one who—"

The gallery doors slammed open.

Two men in Castellan colors filled the frame, and Ivy's face went from scared to something closer to resigned.

"Miss Castellan." The lead man didn't look at Kane or Selene at all. "Your father's called for you. Now."

"I'm in the middle of—"

"Now." His tone left no room.

Ivy looked at Selene. A single held look, nothing more — but it landed like a promise anyway.

"Ask him about the reading," Ivy said, fast, low, before the man reached her. "Ask him why he already knew what it would show before you told him."

"Ivy—" Selene started forward.

The second guard stepped between them, solid as a wall.

"Family matter," he said. "The Elders don't override pack authority on a Castellan under her father's roof."

He wasn't wrong. Kane knew the law well enough to know he couldn't fight that one, not without starting a war he was already thirty days from losing anyway.

Ivy was gone before Selene reached the door, the guards closing ranks behind her, boots already fading down the corridor.

Selene turned on Kane. "What did she mean, he already knew?"

"I don't know." Kane's jaw was tight enough to ache. "But you called him an hour before you knew what the reading would show."

"I told him two conflicting signatures. That's all."

"And he already knew what they'd say."

The color drained slow out of Selene's face as it landed.

"He wrote half the law," she said quietly. "He put himself over this exact case, out of every case on the docket. He told me to keep the filing hidden instead of taking it to the full Council."

"Sounds like a man protecting something."

"Sounds like a man who already knows exactly what's on that filing," Selene said, "because he's the one who put it there."

Kane's shoulders dropped an inch, his hand uncurling at his side without him telling it to. Not relief. Not yet. Just the first crack of something close to it. If Roe had orchestrated this, the forced signature wasn't his failure. It was never his choice to begin with, not the first time and not the second.

"If that's true," Kane said, "the man giving your orders is the one who took you from me."

"He doesn't give me orders." The words came out and then just — hung there, unfinished, like she didn't quite believe them either.

"Then why did you say understood to him like it was reflex."

Selene didn't answer that. She didn't have to.

Down the hall, a door banged shut — the Castellans leaving the manor entirely, Ivy's voice audible for one last second before it cut off.

"Ask him about the third signature," she'd shouted, muffled through wood and distance. "There's a third—"

Then nothing. Just an engine starting outside, and gravel under tires, and the two of them standing in a gallery with twenty-eight days left and a name they still didn't fully have.