CHAPTER 8
1593 Words
I didn't sleep.
I lay in the dark and thought about a forged document with my father's signature on it, and about how a man like Gregory Reeves would use a thing like that. Not violently. Quietly. In a room full of council witnesses who would see the document before they heard any objection and form an impression that no amount of denial could fully undo.
That was the point of a forgery like that. Not to win in court. To win in the room. To make my father look like a man who had made an agreement and was now trying to escape it, and to make me look like the subject of a legitimate claim rather than a designed one.
By the time the sun came up I had mapped most of it.
I was on the training field at five a.m. but my mind wasn't in the run. Dayo let it go for the first twenty minutes. Then he pulled up beside me and matched my pace and said, without looking at me:
"Talk."
I talked.
He listened the way he listened when something required his full attention, without interrupting, without reacting, just running beside me and taking it in.
When I finished he was quiet for a long stretch.
"A forged pre-bond agreement," he said.
"Dated eleven years ago. Same time as the file. He's been building it as a set."
"The file establishes his awareness of the match. The agreement establishes your father's consent to it." Dayo's voice was even. "Together they make a legal framework that looks like it predates the current dispute."
"Which means I'm not refusing an unexpected bond. I'm breaking a contract my father signed."
"And that's a different legal situation entirely."
"Yes."
We ran in silence for another minute.
"He hasn't told your father about the meeting yet," I said. "Which means we have a window."
"To do what?"
"To get ahead of the forgery." I glanced at him. "A forged document has a paper trail. Not always a visible one, but it exists. The record it was supposedly filed in. The council secretary who should have logged it. The original, whatever the original looked like before it was altered." I held Dayo's gaze. "Sera has archival access."
Dayo looked at me steadily. "You want her to find the gaps."
"I want her to find the original filing record. If there isn't one, that's the proof. If there is one and it was added recently, the timestamp tells us when he built it." I paused. "And I want a council member. Someone Gregory doesn't own. Someone who can be in that meeting room with independent standing."
"You're building a counter-presentation."
"I'm building the floor out from under his."
Dayo was quiet for a moment. Then, in the tone he used when he was revising his assessment of something: "You mapped all of this overnight."
"I had time."
"Most people would have panicked."
"I don't have room for panic," I said. "I'll panic in September."
He almost smiled. Not quite. "After breakfast. You, me, your father. Tell him everything."
My father took it the way he took hard things, quietly, fully, without flinching away from any part of it.
He sat at his desk and listened to all of it and when I finished he sat for a moment with his hands flat on the desk and his eyes on the middle distance and I watched him work through it the same way I had, except faster, because he'd been reading Gregory Reeves for twenty years longer than I had.
"The forgery is the insurance policy," he said. "Not the primary plan."
I nodded. "He'd prefer to manage this quietly. The meeting presented as routine, the agreement surfaced as a formality, our compliance framed as the obvious choice." I paused. "The forgery is what he deploys if we push back."
"So we can't push back in the room."
"Not unless we can destroy it in the room."
My father looked at Dayo. "Can she get us the filing records?"
"She says she can find the gaps," I said. "I haven't confirmed she'll share them."
"What does she want?"
"To watch him lose."
My father held my gaze. "That's personal."
"Yes."
"Which means she has her own history with him." He leaned back. "People with personal grievances are useful and dangerous in equal measure. She wants him to fall, but if it comes to a choice between her safety and your advantage, we cannot assume which she chooses."
"I know." I had thought about this too. "I'm not building the case on her alone. I'm using what she gives us to find the real proof. The proof doesn't need her once we have it."
My father looked at me for a long moment.
"When did you get so careful?" he said.
I didn't have an answer for that. Or rather, the answer was one I couldn't give him.
"Working on it," I said.
He turned to Dayo. "I want Miriam Okafor."
Dayo's eyebrows lifted slightly. "She's retired."
"She's the most respected former council arbitrator alive and Gregory knows she has no patience for him." My father's voice was steady. "If I ask her to attend the meeting as an independent observer, he can't refuse without it looking like he has something to hide. And if the forgery surfaces, I want someone in that room who can call it in real time."
"She'll want to know why," Dayo said.
"Tell her I'll explain in person." He stood. "I'll call her today."
I left them planning and went to find Cassidy, because I needed an hour of being in a room with someone who didn't know any of what I was carrying. She was in the pack kitchen eating cereal and reading something on her phone and she looked up when I came in and immediately said:
"You look terrible. Sit down."
"Thank you."
"I mean it in a loving way." She pushed a mug toward me. "Tea's still hot."
I sat down and wrapped my hands around the mug and let myself be in the ordinary kitchen of the pack house with my best friend eating cereal and for a few minutes I didn't think about Gregory or forged documents or Sera or my father's signature on something he'd never signed.
"Can I ask you something?" Cassidy said.
"Mm."
"Are you in trouble?"
I looked at her.
"You don't have to tell me the shape of it," she said. "I know you're not going to. But I want to know if you're okay. Not performing okay. Actually."
I thought about it honestly.
"I'm not in trouble yet," I said. "I'm trying to make sure I'm not in trouble yet."
"Is it working?"
"Ask me in two weeks."
She nodded, accepting that the way she always accepted the things I couldn't tell her, not pretending she didn't notice, not pushing, just holding the space and trusting me to fill it when I could.
"Okay," she said. "Do you want to train this afternoon? Not the Dayo kind. The kind where we just run and don't think."
"Yes," I said. "God, yes."
We ran all afternoon through the eastern fields, shifting finally, which I hadn't done since I arrived. The wolf part of me that had been coiled tight for three weeks unspooled into the open air and the grass and the long gold light, and for two hours I was nothing but speed and instinct and the simple animal fact of being alive.
When we shifted back at the fence line, breathless and grass-stained, Cassidy looked at me and said: "Better?"
"Better," I said.
My phone buzzed. Sera.
I found the filing record. It was added fourteen months ago. I have the original timestamp and the editor log.
I stared at the message.
Fourteen months ago. He'd built the document a year and two months before the meeting. Planned, constructed, filed in the system quietly. Waiting for the right moment to surface it.
I typed back: Can you get me a copy of the log?
Already done. Check your email.
I looked at Cassidy. She was watching me with the carefully neutral face she wore when she was giving me space to be somewhere else.
"Go," she said. "I know you need to go."
"I'm sorry..."
"Zara." She waved a hand. "Go."
I went.
The email had three attachments. I was still walking when I opened the first one and stopped dead on the path between the fields and the pack house.
The editor log was detailed. Timestamps, user ID, the record number of the document. Clear, clean, unambiguous evidence that a document filed under a date eleven years ago had been created fourteen months ago by a user ID that Sera had highlighted in red.
Beside it, in a separate document she'd included, that user ID matched a name.
Not Gregory.
Someone else. Someone I didn't recognize.
Someone on the inside of the Ironveil Pack council who had built the forgery on Gregory's behalf.
Which meant Gregory had insulated himself. The document existed. The forgery was real. But his hands weren't directly on it.
If we brought this into the meeting, Gregory would cut the other person loose, claim ignorance, and walk away clean.
I stood on the path in the evening air and understood that we were not two weeks away from a resolution.
We were two weeks away from a trap.
And the only way out was to make Gregory spring it on himself.
- Writer
