CHAPTER 6
979 Words
The walk my father took me on wasn't a casual one.
He led me past the training fields, past the eastern fence line, into the tree cover where the pack lands gave way to old forest. The kind of forest that had been standing long enough that the trees blocked sound from outside it. Private, in the way that only wild things could be private.
He walked for five minutes before he spoke.
"Tell me about the message."
I told him. Word for word. The number, the timing, the six words.
He listened without interrupting, which was how he listened when something mattered.
"You didn't tell Dayo," he said.
"I wanted to tell you first."
He nodded slowly, hands clasped behind his back, eyes on the ground ahead of us. "You said you thought the person might not be fully Gregory's. What made you think that instead of trap?"
"Because a trap doesn't warn you about a specific person. A trap gives you something vague enough to make you paranoid generally." I kept pace beside him. "This was specific. Priya. By name. Which means whoever sent it knows the details of my situation, not just that I exist."
"And that rules out a random Ironveil operative."
"It rules out someone who only knows what Gregory told them. Gregory wouldn't tell an operative about Priya unless he trusted them completely." I looked at him. "But someone who'd observed the situation long enough to understand that Priya is the specific threat, that's someone who's been watching this for a while and has formed their own opinion about it."
My father stopped walking.
He stood very still, looking at a point between the trees, and I watched something move across his face that I couldn't fully read. Recognition, maybe. Or something older than recognition.
"There was a girl," he said. "At the Ironveil Pack. About eight years ago, when you were ten. She came to a council youth program, one of the ones Felix Osei ran for young wolves from politically connected families." He paused. "She was Gregory's niece. His brother's daughter. She grew up in Ironveil but she was never, she was always at the edge of it. Watching. Not quite belonging."
I waited.
"Her name is Sera," he said. "She'd be about twenty-six now. Last I heard she was still inside the Ironveil structure, but in a peripheral role. Archival work. Records." He turned to look at me. "Someone with access to records would know about Priya. Would know the shape of things without Gregory having to tell them directly."
"Is she someone Gregory trusts?"
"I think she's someone Gregory underestimates." His voice was careful. "Which is a very different thing."
I thought about that. About the difference between being trusted and being underestimated. About how much space lived in that gap, and what a person could do inside it.
"I want to write back," I said.
My father looked at me sharply. "Zara."
"Not revealing anything. Not confirming anything. Just one line. Something that tells her I received it without telling her what I'm going to do about it."
"If she's not what you think she is"
"If she's not what I think she is, I've confirmed I'm at Crestfall, which Gregory already knows, and that I received a message, which tells him I have an unknown contact, which he'll spend energy trying to identify." I held my father's gaze. "That's not nothing. That's noise in his system. And noise in his system buys us time."
My father looked at me for a long moment.
Then he said, "What would you write?"
I'd already composed it in my head.
"'Received. Thank you for the weather report.'"
He was quiet.
Then, slowly: "That's good. That's very good."
"She'll know I understood. Gregory's people won't know what to do with it."
He turned and started walking back toward the pack house. I fell into step beside him. The forest was very still around us, that deep afternoon stillness that felt like the world holding its breath.
"Send it," he said. "Then delete the thread and we do not discuss this inside any building."
"Understood."
We walked in silence for a moment.
"Dad."
"Mm."
"How long have you been preparing for Gregory to make a move on this family?"
He didn't answer immediately. The trees thinned ahead of us and I could see the training fields again, the pack house roof above them, the ordinary afternoon life of Crestfall continuing without knowing what we were talking about in its tree line.
"Since the day your mother told me she was pregnant," he said quietly. "And I understood what it would mean for you to be born an Alpha's daughter with a bond strong enough to be felt across territory lines."
I stopped walking.
He stopped too and turned to look at me.
"You've known that long," I said.
"I've been afraid that long," he said. "There's a difference."
He held my gaze for one more moment. Then he walked back toward the house, and I stood at the edge of the tree line and looked out at the fields and understood something I hadn't understood until right now.
My father had spent eighteen years being afraid of exactly the thing that had already happened to me once.
He'd just been afraid of the wrong version of it.
I took out my phone and typed six words.
Received. Thank you for the weather report.
I sent it before I could think too hard about it.
The reply came in forty seconds.
Just an image. No words.
A photograph of a document. Old letterhead. Ironveil Pack Council seal at the top.
My hands tightened around the phone as I looked at it.
It was a record. A formal pack record dated eleven years ago.
At the top, in the field marked Subject:
My name.
- Writer
