Chapter Six
986 Words
~Caden’s POV~
Dawn comes in through the east-facing windows of his office in thin, pale strips.
He has not moved.
The chair is the same chair he sat in when Rhys left. The folder is still open on the desk in front of him, the single page inside it facing upward, the words legible from where he sits without needing to lean forward. He has read it enough times that he no longer needs to read it at all.
Twin gestation. Fourteen weeks. High-risk classification. Maternal health stable. Fetal heartbeats strong.
The candle he keeps on the corner of his desk for late nights has burned itself down to nothing. He doesn't remember watching it go.
He thinks about the rejection ceremony instead. The third floor. Nine in the morning. The formal cadence of words he'd rehearsed until they sat in his mouth like something inert and manageable, and then the moment he'd spoken them, the moment the bond had actually broken, and the sound she almost made.
Almost.
He had caught her arm. He remembers the weight of that, how his body had moved before the decision to move had formed in any part of his mind he could reach. *Involuntary.* That is the word for it, and the word has been sitting in the back of his skull for four months being carefully filed under things he was not going to examine.
She had been fourteen weeks pregnant.
He counts it again, because some part of him is still looking for the arithmetic to come out differently. It does not. It lands in the same place every time, with the same quiet, irrefutable finality.
He thinks about the dinner table. The candles she'd lit. The plate she'd reheated. And the small, dark velvet box he had looked at and not registered, not paused over, not thought about at all in his forward motion toward the thing he had already decided before he came home that night.
He knows now what was in it.
He sits with that knowledge in the early light and does not move.
---
By six he has made one decision, and it is not the one he wants to make.
What he wants to do is find her. That impulse is loud and undisciplined and completely useless because it runs on grief rather than evidence, and he has had enough of operating on something other than evidence. That particular mode of thinking is what brought him here.
What he will do instead is find the truth.
All of it. From the beginning.
He picks up his phone.
Conrad has been an outside intelligence operative for twelve years, and Caden has used him twice — both times for border security matters, both times with results that were thorough and uncomfortable and precisely accurate. The call takes three minutes. He keeps his voice level. He says the name Vivienne Cole and the name Vivienne's father and the phrase shell company, three years ago, I need everything and then he ends the call.
Then he opens the folder again.
He looks at the shell company registration date Rhys's team pulled from the financial records six weeks ago — the file he had read, noted, and closed without following where it pointed. Incorporated the same week Vivienne left the pack. Three days before Selene had even been presented to him as his fated mate.
He has been filing this as coincidence.
He understands, in the flat morning light, that he has known for some time that it is not a coincidence. He has simply been choosing, deliberately and repeatedly, the version of reality that required less of him.
He closes the folder.
---
Rhys arrives at seven-fifteen with two cups of coffee he has collected from somewhere, the way he always does when he is expecting a difficult morning. He stops in the doorway and looks at Caden in the chair.
He doesn't say anything about the fact that Caden is still in yesterday's clothes or that there is no evidence of sleep in either the room or on Caden's face.
"Conrad," Caden says.
Rhys takes this in. "When?"
"This morning. Full investigation. The shell company, the financial transfers, everything around the time she left three years ago. Everything around the time she came back."
Rhys crosses the room and sets one of the coffees on the far edge of the desk, at a careful distance from the folder.
"How long will he need?"
"Two weeks minimum."
Rhys nods. A pause. Then: "And Selene?"
Caden looks at the window. The valley is fully visible now in the morning light, the treeline dark and precise against a pale sky.
"Find out where she is," he says.
Rhys is quiet for a moment. "Should I reach out to her?"
"No." The word comes out without hesitation. "Not yet. Not without the truth first."
He owes her that, at the very minimum. He will not go to her carrying half a picture and good intentions. He will not arrive on her doorstep with grief and ask her to manage it for him. He has already asked enough of her without knowing he was asking.
What he owes her is accuracy. Completeness. The full accounting of what happened and who made it happen, held in his hands with certainty before he takes a single step in her direction.
Rhys looks at him for a long moment. Something in his expression is neither approval nor disapproval — just the particular, careful attention of a man watching another man decide something that cannot be undecided.
"All right," Rhys says.
He takes his coffee and goes to the window, and they stand in silence while Cresthaven wakes up below them, and Caden does not say anything else, because there is nothing left to say until Conrad reports back.
He would find the truth first.
He owed her that much, at minimum.
- Writer
