Chapter 7
979 Words
The room paused on that, briefly. Diplomatic protocol allowed receiving alphas to know who would be on their land—it was a courtesy, not unusual in itself. The specificity, though, was less standard. Most alphas accepted a count and a chain of command. Asking by name suggested someone wanted to confirm something before agreeing to host.
"Did you send it?" Mikhail asked.
"I sent it this morning."
"And?"
"He confirmed within the hour. No comment, no follow-up questions. Just confirmation."
Mikhail nodded once, a small motion that did not invite further discussion. "Bloodmoon has been generous in offering hospitality. We'll take it at face value."
Aurora made note of this without making note of it, the way she'd learned to do when something was being filed past her rather than at her.
"What aren't we being told?" she asked, keeping her voice mild. "I'm not asking you to break Council confidence. I'm asking whether there's something operational we should know about that hasn't been said yet."
Mikhail looked at her for a beat longer than the question required. His amber eyes carried that same quality she'd been cataloguing since yesterday—careful, considered, the attention of a man taking measurements.
"What you're being told is what we know," he said. "What we suspect, I'll share when suspicion is closer to fact. That's how I run an operation, Aurora. You've worked under me for four years. You know that."
"I do," she said. "I asked anyway."
A flicker of something crossed his face—respect, irritation, both—and then he moved past it. "We leave for Bloodmoon territory at first light tomorrow. Make your arrangements. Dismissed."
The room began to break up in the unhurried way of professionals who had been given their assignments and intended to spend the rest of the day quietly preparing for what those assignments would require. Aurora gathered her notes. Marcus caught her eye from across the table and tipped his chin slightly toward the door—the small signal they'd developed over four years that meant find me later, not here.
She nodded back, equally small.
She slipped out of the headquarters through the side entrance—the one that emptied into a narrow alley lined with herb planters that the operative who oversaw the building's cover identity kept obsessively well-tended. The morning had warmed into something approaching pleasant. She walked three blocks before she pulled out her phone.
The message she sent was brief.
Need to see you before tomorrow. Tonight if possible.
The reply came within ninety seconds, which told her he had been waiting for it.
Same place. After moonrise.
She turned south.
–
She spent the afternoon doing the practical work of departure—pulling field gear, updating her go-bag, signing the paperwork that allowed her to draw advance supplies from the quartermaster, writing the standard pre-deployment letter that the Order required of all field operatives in case they didn't come back. Hers was already on file. She updated it anyway, because four years of these had taught her that the version you wrote when you were not anxious read differently from the version you wrote when you were, and she wanted whoever opened it to find the calm version if it came to that.
She thought about adding a sentence to it. About the man she would be seeing tonight. About what to tell him if she didn't return.
She didn't add the sentence. She closed the letter, sealed the envelope, and filed it.
Some things were still too dangerous to put in writing.
The walk to Vincent's sanctuary that evening took her past three blocks she hadn't walked yesterday and two that she had, and the frequency in the air—the one her wolf had been listening to since the recall came down—was sharper now. Not louder. More defined. Like the difference between a sound at the edge of hearing and a sound you have begun to suspect is a word.
He opened the door before she knocked. He had been listening for her.
"You're early," he said.
"You're not surprised."
"No."
He stepped aside. She crossed the threshold and let the door close behind her and felt the same sealing-off she always felt in this space—the city's noise muting, the frequency in the air dropping back to its lower register, her shoulders releasing a tension she had not been aware of carrying all day.
He led her into the sitting room without ceremony. There were two glasses of something amber on the low table. He'd poured both before she arrived.
"How was the briefing?" he asked.
She told him. She kept the operational specifics general—she had not agreed to share intelligence, only observations—but she told him the shape of what had been said and the larger shape of what had not. Bloodmoon's coordination. Damien's specific request for the roster. Mikhail's careful management of what the team was being given access to.
Vincent listened the way he always listened, which was completely. When she finished, he was quiet for a long moment.
"Damien Bloodmoon," he said finally. "I've never met him in person. His pack has a reputation."
"For what?"
"For knowing things they're not supposed to know, and for keeping that knowledge quietly until it's useful." He turned the glass in his hand without drinking from it. "If he asked for the roster by name, he was looking for someone specific. Either someone he wanted confirmation was coming, or someone he wanted confirmation was not."
Aurora felt the small drop in her chest that came with hearing someone else articulate something she had suspected but had not yet put into words.
"That's the name you've been holding, isn't it," she said. "Whatever this is, it's connected to Bloodmoon."
He looked at her for a long moment.
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