MATED TO MY DEAD HUSBAND'S BROTHER

Chapter Six: What Kieran Knew

The attack changed everything.

Or maybe it just revealed what had been broken all along.

Within an hour, Caden had doubled security on the estate. Owen personally assigned guards to monitor every entrance to our quarters. The "rogue" shooter—conveniently dead before he could be questioned—was quietly disposed of, and Marcus delivered a statement to the pack about enhanced safety protocols.

All very official. All very controlled.

All completely meaningless.

Because whoever was behind this wasn’t reacting anymore.

They were escalating.

I sat in Caden's sitting room—our sitting room now—and watched the sun set over the forest while my husband paced like a caged animal—controlled on the surface, but one wrong move away from snapping.

"We need to move carefully," he said for the third time. "If we accuse Nora without ironclad proof, she'll disappear. The entire network will scatter."

"We have proof. Your files—"

"Are good. But not enough for a formal challenge. She's too well-connected. Too respected. We need something that can't be disputed." He stopped pacing and looked at me. "Did Kieran have anything else? Anything you haven't gone through yet?"

I thought about the USB drive. The folders I'd opened, the ones I hadn't.

"There's one file I couldn't access," I said slowly. "It's encrypted differently than the others. I tried every password I could think of—our anniversary, his birthday, pack dates—nothing worked."

"Show me."

I pulled out my laptop and opened Kieran's drive. Navigated to the file I'd been stuck on for two days.

FINAL_EVIDENCE.enc

Even the name felt like a warning.

Caden sat down next to me, close enough that I could smell whatever soap he used—clean, woodsy, familiar in a way that felt dangerous considering how little I actually knew him.

"Have you tried word combinations?" he asked.

"Everything I could think of."

"What about something only you would know? Something personal between you and Kieran?"

I thought about that. Our relationship had been good—or so I'd thought. Private jokes, shared moments, the normal intimacy of two years together.

But looking back now, knowing he'd been investigating, knowing he'd married me for my archival skills, I wasn't sure what had been real and what had been performance.

"Try 'blue,'" Caden said quietly.

I looked at him. "What?"

"When you woke up in the hospital with no memory. Mara asked if you remembered anything." He paused. "You said you remembered the color blue. Like it meant something."

My chest tightened. "That was—that was a different—" I stopped. "How do you know about that?"

"Because I've been paying attention to you for longer than you think." He said it simply, like it was obvious. Something about the way he said it made my pulse stutter. "Try it."

I typed: blue

Access denied.

"Blue morning," I tried, thinking of the first real conversation Kieran and I had, over coffee in my apartment before everything changed.

Still denied.

"Elara," Caden said. "What did Kieran call you? Did he have a nickname for you?"

I shook my head. "He just called me Elara."

"Always?"

I thought harder. Back to the beginning. To those first weeks when everything had felt like magic.

And then I remembered.

One night, early in our relationship. We'd been lying in bed talking about nothing, and he'd said something that had seemed romantic at the time but now felt weighted with meaning I'd missed.

"You see things other people don't. Patterns in chaos. Truth hidden in numbers. You're like a compass pointing north when everyone else is lost."

I'd laughed and said something self-deprecating.

And he'd smiled and said: "My north star."

He'd only said it once. I'd almost forgotten.

I typed: northstar

The file opened.

My breath caught.

Of course it would be that.

Of course he’d choose something that meant I’d find it.

Inside was a video.

Timestamp: two days before Kieran died.

I hit play.

Kieran appeared on screen, sitting in his office, looking exhausted. There were dark circles under his eyes and his hands were shaking slightly as he adjusted the camera.

"Elara," he said, and hearing his voice made something crack in my chest. "If you're watching this, I'm dead. And I'm sorry. I'm so goddamn sorry for everything I'm about to tell you."

He took a breath.

"I didn't meet you by accident. I was sent to find you. The organization I was working for—they call themselves The Vault—they'd been tracking bloodline trackers for years. People born with the ability to sense corruption in pack bonds. It's rare. Your mother had it. And they suspected you might too."

I went very still.

"They needed someone who could document evidence, who could find patterns in financial records that others would miss. Someone smart enough to help expose the network we'd been investigating." He paused. "They chose you. And I was supposed to get close to you, recruit you, bring you into the fold."

His voice cracked slightly.

"But I f****d up. Because somewhere between the mission and the marriage, I fell in love with you. 

The words didn’t feel like comfort.

They felt like another kind of betrayal.

And I couldn't tell you the truth because if you knew—if you understood what you really are—you'd become a target. They'd come for you the way they came for your mother."

My hands were shaking.

"Your mother didn't just disappear, Elara. She was killed. The world seemed to tilt. By the same network I've been trying to destroy. Because she found evidence of what they were doing and tried to expose them." He looked directly at the camera. "They've been watching you your whole life. Waiting to see if you inherited her abilities. And when The Vault found you first, when I married you and brought you here—it forced their hand."

He stopped. Composed himself.

"There's something else you need to know. About your bloodline. About what it means." He pulled out a document and held it up to the camera. "This is a genetic test. I ran it without telling you. I'm sorry. But I needed to know if you were—"

He stopped mid-sentence.

His head turned sharply toward something off-camera.

"s**t," he muttered. Then louder: "I said I needed ten more minutes—"

The door burst open—violent, sudden, wrong.

I saw a flash of movement. Kieran stood, reaching for something—

The video cut to black.

But audio kept recording.

Kieran's voice: "What are you doing here?"

Another voice. Male. Calm. Familiar.

"Cleaning up a problem."

"We had a deal. I give you the evidence, you leave Elara alone—"

"Plans changed."

A struggle. Something crashing.

Kieran: "She doesn't know anything! She's not a threat!"

"She will be. Eventually. Better to handle it now."

More struggle. A sickening crack.

Then silence.

Then footsteps walking away.

The recording ended.