Traded To My Alpha's Cursed Twin

chapter 7- Lena

Roan looked like a man who had already decided how this was going to go.

That was the first thing I noticed when they brought him into Daphen's office. Not nervous. Not guilty, just settled. As if he had been sitting with whatever he was about to say long enough that it had stopped feeling dangerous and started feeling like relief.

I did not trust that at all. No I did not.

Daphen was behind his desk. I was by the window, nobody had told me where to stand and I picked the spot that let me see both of them at once. Vera was at the door with her arms crossed and her face doing the blank careful thing it did when she was paying very close attention.

Roan sat down without being asked.

Daphen looked at him.

"You said you know who killed Orran?,"

"Yes i do."

"Then start talking."

Roan leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. "It was Drea. One of the eastern border units. She has been feeding information out of this pack for months, such as, who is coming in, who is talking to who, what the Alpha knows and does not know." He looked at Daphen. "She killed Orran because he saw her in the east corridor two nights ago when she was somewhere she should not have been. She knew he was going to report it."

The room was quiet.

Daphen said nothing for a long moment.

Then "How do you know this?"

"Because she came to me," Roan said. "Three months ago. Tried to recruit me. Said there were people outside this pack who could offer more than a dying Alpha and a curse that was going to kill us all." His jaw tightened. "I said no. But I did not report it because I did not have proof and I did not want to be the beta who accused a loyal warrior without evidence."

"And now Orran is dead," Daphen said.

"Yes he is."

"And the Shaman is gone."

Roan's eyes moved. "I did not know about the Shaman until this morning."

"Who recruited Drea?," I asked.

Both of them looked at me.

I looked at Roan. "She came to you and tried to recruit you. Someone sent her to do that. Who is she working for?."

Roan looked at Daphen like he was checking whether he was allowed to answer me or not.

"She asked you a question," Daphen said.

Roan looked back at me. "She did not say a name. She said there were people who understood what this pack could be if it was not being run into the ground by a curse and an Alpha too stubborn to accept help."

"That is not an answer," I interjected.

"That is all I have."

I looked at Daphen. He was looking at Roan the way you look at something you are trying to decide about. Not angry. Thinking. The difference mattered.

"Where is Drea now?," Daphen questioned.

"Eastern border unit barracks," Roan said. "She does the dawn shift. She will be there for another two hours."

Daphen stood up.

"Vera," he said.

"Already moving," she said. And she was gone before he finished saying her name.

Daphen looked at Roan. "You are going to stay in this building today. You are not going to speak to anyone about this conversation. If Drea disappears before we get to her I am going to have a very specific set of questions for you about how that happened."

"I understand," Roan said.

"Good." Daphen came around the desk. "Get out." He ordered.

Roan got up and left.

The door clicked shut.

Daphen stood in the middle of his office and put both hands on the back of a chair and just held it. Head down. He was not falling apart. Just taking a second.

I watched him carefully.

"You do not believe him," I said.

"I believe some of it," he said. He did not look up. "Drea maybe. The recruitment attempt maybe. But Roan sat in that chair and told that story like he had been rehearsing it. Like he knew exactly which parts to include." He lifted his head. "A man who genuinely did not report something out of lack of proof does not volunteer that information the morning after the person he did not report gets murdered. He goes quieter. Not louder."

"He is covering himself," I said.

"Or he is covering someone else," Daphen said. "Or both."

I looked at the door Roan had just walked out of. "You are going to let him think you believed him."

"For now."

"And watch what he does."

"Yes."

I nodded. "That is very smart."

He looked at me then. Just briefly. Something in his face that was not quite surprised but was adjacent to it, like he kept expecting me to be less than I was and kept having to adjust.

"Do not sound so impressed," I said. "It is basic."

"I am not impressed," he said. "I am…" He stopped.

"What?."

"Glad you are here," he said. Like it cost him something to say it and he was not going to dress it up. "You see things differently than I do. That is very useful."

I looked at him.

Glad you are here.

It is not you are helpful or good thinking. Glad you are here. Like my being here specifically was the thing. Like it was about more than thinking.

I did not say any of that.

"Let us go and find Drea," I said.

They found her in the barracks exactly where Roan said she would be.

She ran.

That was all the confirmation anyone needed.

She made it almost forty feet before Vera caught her, and watching Vera catch someone who was running was like watching something inevitable happen. No drama, and no chase. Just Vera moving at a speed that should not have been possible for someone her size and then Drea was on the ground with Vera's knee in her back and her face in the dirt.

"Got her," Vera said. Completely calm. Like she had gone to collect something mildly inconvenient from a shelf.

I was breathing hard from running. Daphen was not. Of course he was not.

"You know," I said to him, "it would be very satisfying if you looked at least slightly out of breath."

He looked at me sideways.

"I have been cursed for four years," he said. "Running does not bother me anymore."

"That is not the flex you think it is."

Something moved in his face. Fast. Gone before it fully arrived. But I saw it.

He almost smiled.

Drea did not talk easily.

She sat in the chair in Daphen's office, the same chair Roan had sat in two hours ago and she looked at the floor and said nothing for a long time. Vera had cleaned her up. There was a cut on her jaw from the ground. She kept touching it with two fingers and then stopping herself.

"Who sent you?," Daphen queried .

Nothing.

"Who has the Shaman."

Nothing.

"Drea." His voice dropped. Not louder and neither Lower. The kind of low that meant something. "I have been patient with you for about as long as I am going to be. I need you to understand that I am not asking these questions because I want to have a conversation. I am asking them because people in my pack are dead and missing and I am going to find out what happened to them with or without your help. The only thing you get to decide right now is whether you are useful to me or not. And I strongly suggest you be useful."

Drea looked up.

"If I talk," she said, "they will kill me."

"And if you do not talk," Vera said from the door, "that becomes our problem to solve."

Drea looked at Vera. Something shifted in her face.

"Mara Ashveil," she said. Low. Like saying the name out loud was its own kind of danger. "She has the Shaman. She reached out to me eight months ago. Said the Alpha was dying anyway and she could make it faster or slower depending on what I did for her." She pressed her mouth together. "I have a brother in the southern territory. She has people near him. If I stop…"

"We can protect your brother," Daphen said.

"Can you?," she asked. Not sarcastic. Actually asking.

"Yes," he said.

She looked at him for a long moment.

"The Shaman is alive," she said. "Mara wants her alive. She needed to know the exact conditions of the curse, what breaks it, and what does not. She has been trying to get that information for months." Drea's hands tightened in her lap. "She knows now. About the bond. About the free choice condition. And she knows…" She stopped.

"Say it," I said.

Drea looked at me. For the first time since she sat down she looked at me directly. "She knows the bond between you two is starting to lock. She felt it. And she is not going to wait for it to complete."

The room went very calm.

"What does that mean?. "What does she do if she does not wait?."

Drea looked at Daphen.

"She accelerates the curse," she said. "She can do it remotely. She has been holding back because she needed information first." She paused. "She has the information now."

Daphen stood up.

He walked to the window and put his back to us and stood there and I watched his shoulders and the way he was holding himself and I knew, and I could see it that he was deciding something. Not reacting, but Deciding.

I crossed the room and stood beside him at the window.

I did not touch him. Just beside him.

He glanced at me once.

I looked back.

We did not say anything because we did not need to.

Outside the window the pack house courtyard was full of wolves going about their morning training, talking, moving between buildings and none of them knowing that the woman who had been feeding information to a dead woman who was not dead had just told us the clock had run out.

"Vera," Daphen said without turning around.

"Yes."

"Lock the pack down. Nobody goes in or out. And get Caden."

"Caden?" Vera asked.

"He is still here and he knows more about Mara than he has told us." His voice was flat and certain. "It is time he told us the rest."

Vera left.

Drea was still in the chair.

"Am I…?" she started.

"You are staying in this building," I said before Daphen could answer. "Under watch. Not a cell. But you do not leave." I looked at her. "And your brother, give Vera his location. We will send someone today."

She stared at me.

"Why are you…?"

"Because you told us the truth," I said. "And because being used by someone more powerful than you to do things you did not want to do is not something I have a lot of patience for judging." I looked at her for long. "Don't you ever make me regret it."

She nodded in affirmation.

I turned back to the window.

Daphen was looking at me.

Not the sideways look from before. Straight on. Like he was seeing something he was still in the process of understanding.

"What?," I asked.

"Nothing," he replied.

"Say it."

He was quiet for a second.

"You are going to be very hard to get rid of," he said. Not a complaint. Not quite a compliment either. Something that lived in the space between those two things.

I felt it land somewhere it had no business landing.

"Good," I said. " Then Stop trying."

I walked out.

And from down the corridor came Caden's voice, sharp and carrying not at all the composed version of himself.

"What the hell do you mean she can accelerate it? Since when can she… Daphen, since when has she been able to do that?"