The Alpha's Hidden Debts

Chapter 21: The Leak

Sera's Pov

By the time I reached the lower hall, word had already moved through the compound the way it always seemed to, fast and quiet, wolves passing each other in corridors with the particular tightness in their shoulders that meant something serious had happened before anyone had said a word about it out loud.

Dex walked me down without much explanation beyond what he'd already given me on the stairs. "Young one," he said. "Barely eighteen. Found with a device tuned to an Ironmoor frequency this morning during a routine sweep." His jaw was tight. "Riven's handling it himself."

"Why not someone else?"

"Because he doesn't trust anyone else to do it right yet." Dex glanced sideways at me. "He doesn't believe in interrogations that break people. He believes in ones that find the truth without leaving a person ruined on the other side of it. Not everyone has the patience for that. He does."

The room they'd taken him to was small, plain, somewhere near the back of the lodge I hadn't been in before. Riven stood near the door when I arrived, and didn't tell me to leave, just glanced at me once, a question in it, and I gave him the smallest nod. I wanted to see this.

The wolf sat at a table in the center of the room. He was young, younger than I'd expected even knowing the number, all sharp angles and nervous energy, the kind of fear that hadn't learned yet how to hide itself behind composure. His hands were folded tight on the table in front of him.

Riven crossed the room and sat down across from him. He didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to.

"Tell me about the device," Riven said.

The young wolf's eyes flicked toward the door, toward me, toward anywhere that wasn't Riven's face, before finally settling somewhere on the table between them. "It's not what you think," he said.

"I haven't told you what I think yet."

"I wasn't…" He stopped. "I have family in Ironmoor. A cousin. She reached out a few months ago, said she missed me, wanted to know how I was doing, what was happening up here. I didn't think it was anything."

"And the device?"

"She sent it to me. Said it was easier than letters, that letters took too long to cross territory and got read by too many hands along the way." His voice was shaking now, just slightly. "I was just telling her things. Ordinary things. Who was here, what the compound looked like, what we were doing day to day. I didn't know it was…" He stopped again.

"Didn't know it was what?"

"I don't know," the wolf said, and there was something raw and honest in it that made me believe him immediately. "I don't know what it actually was. I just thought I was talking to my cousin."

I watched all of it from my place near the wall, and I found myself, oddly, not afraid. I'd watched Caden run interrogations before, more than once, standing exactly where I stood now, off to the side, useful but unacknowledged. His were colder than this, more controlled in a way that left no room for anyone in the chair to feel anything but trapped, every question a closing door, every silence a pressure building toward something the person across the table would eventually break under just to make it stop.

Riven's wasn't like that. He was cold, certainly, precise in the way he asked each question, giving nothing of himself away. But there was no cruelty underneath it. He wasn't trying to break the boy sitting across from him. He was trying to understand him, and the difference showed in small ways, the patience he allowed between questions, the way he didn't raise his voice even once when the answers came out tangled and frightened, the way he let silence sit without using it as a weapon.

"What's the name," Riven said. "The contact your cousin connected you to. The one actually receiving what you sent."

The young wolf's hands tightened on the table. "I don't know them. I never met them. My cousin just said it was someone trustworthy, someone who'd keep an eye on things for the family." He swallowed hard. "The name on the messages was Fenn. That's all I know. Just Fenn."

I watched Riven's face. It didn't change much, not in any way the boy across the table would have caught, but I caught it, the small, sharp stillness that crossed it before settling back into careful neutrality.

I looked at Dex, standing near the door. He'd caught it too. The two of them exchanged a glance, brief, loaded with something I didn't have the context to read yet.

"You know that name," I said.

Riven didn't answer right away. He finished with the boy first, quiet instructions to one of the guards waiting outside about where he'd be held, gentler than I expected given what had just happened, no punishment beyond confinement until they understood the full shape of it. Then he came back to where I stood and drew me a few steps further from the door, out of easy earshot.

"Not the person," he said. "I've never heard of anyone named Fenn specifically. But the family name attached to it, in the old texts, in the histories I told you about…" He paused, like he was deciding, one more time, whether saying it out loud made it more real than it already was. His eyes held mine, steady, the same way they had the night he'd told me what Caden said at the gate.

"The Vael family," he said, "were the ones who organized the hybrid purge."