His Forgotten Silver Luna

Chapter 4

The reports were spread across Damien's desk like a diagnosis.

He'd been staring at them for an hour. Not reading he'd read them three times already, knew every number by heart, could recite the quarterly losses the way other men recited prayers. He was staring the way you stared at something when you already understood it and were simply waiting for your gut to catch up with your brain.

The Ironclad Pack was bleeding out.

Not dramatically. Not all at once. It was the quiet kind of dying the kind that happened in spreadsheets and supply chain reports and the careful language of financial advisors who were paid to deliver bad news in ways that didn't cause panic. Two years of slow hemorrhage from the northern logistics operation. A medical division that had never recovered from losing its best administrator. Three senior Betas who had quietly relocated their families to other packs in the last eighteen months, which meant the rot had reached the point where people with options were exercising them.

Damien closed the folder.

He stood and walked to the window. His office occupied the top floor of the pack's main building a converted hunting lodge that had grown over three generations into something that looked almost like a manor house. Beyond the glass, the Ironclad territory spread in every direction: pine forest and open land and the distant suggestion of mountains going blue in the autumn afternoon.

His father had built this. His grandfather before that. Four generations of Cross Alphas had held this territory, grown it, protected it.

He was the one watching it contract.

"You need to eat something."

Selene's voice came from the doorway. His younger sister was twenty-three, sharp-faced and sharp-minded, with their father's eyes and a mouth that had gotten her into trouble in every room she'd ever entered. She was carrying a plate of food he hadn't asked for and wearing the expression she reserved for when she'd decided to be direct and was bracing for his reaction.

She set the plate on the edge of his desk and sat down without invitation.

"The SGC intermediary office called," she said. "Sinclair Corp has agreed to a preliminary meeting."

Damien turned from the window. "When."

"Three weeks. Manhattan. Their offices." She paused. "Their terms."

He registered the implication. Coming to them. Their building, their ground, their rules. Under any other circumstances he would have pushed back an Alpha didn't travel to a business meeting like a supplicant. He negotiated the location. He set at least half the terms.

Under any other circumstances, he had leverage.

"Fine," he said.

Selene looked at him for a moment. "You've heard of Silver."

"Everyone's heard of Silver."

"I mean specifically. The SGC profile."

"I've read it." He moved back to his desk and sat down. "Nobody knows who she is. No pack origin, no verifiable history before four years ago. Either she's genuinely self-made or someone very skilled built her a new identity."

"And that doesn't concern you?"

"Everything about our current situation concerns me. Silver is at least theoretically a solution to part of it." He pulled the next folder toward him. "What concerns me more is the Beta retention problem and the fact that our medical division still hasn't replaced"

He stopped.

Selene was watching him with an expression he didn't immediately categorise.

"Still hasn't replaced the administrator we lost three years ago," he finished.

"The one who left," Selene said carefully.

"Yes."

A silence passed between them that had the particular quality of things neither of them were saying. Selene had never directly addressed what happened three years ago not with him, not since the night itself, when she had looked at him across the ceremony hall with an expression that had communicated everything she thought of his decision without requiring a single word.

She picked it up now.

"I want to say something," she said. "And I want you to let me finish before you respond."

"Selene"

"Let me finish." She waited. He said nothing. "What Kane did the pressure he put on you, the arguments he made about bloodline and pack stability and what an omega Luna would mean for our standing I understand that you were twenty-five and newly Alpha and he had decades of influence over this family. I understand it wasn't simple."

Damien's jaw tightened.

"But I also need you to know that I have thought about what happened to Nova Sinclair every single day for three years," Selene continued. "She was left at the boundary with a canvas bag. After a bond rejection. In October." Her voice was controlled and precise, which was worse than if she'd been angry. "We don't know if she survived."

The room was very quiet.

"I know," Damien said.

"Do you."

"Selene." His voice came out rougher than he intended. "Yes. I know."

He did know. He had known from the morning after, when he'd woken up to the ghost of a severed bond and the absolute silence where something warm had been and understood with complete clarity what he had done and what it had cost. Not just her though that was the part that lived in him like a splinter, working deeper every year.

He had trusted Kane. He had let Kane's arguments about pack stability and bloodline purity and the weakness an omega Luna would project override the evidence of his own instincts, his own bond, his own judgment.

He had been wrong.

He had been catastrophically, irreversibly wrong.

"The pack was supposed to be stronger without her," he said. It came out flat. Factual. "That was Kane's argument. That a strong Luna from a ranked bloodline would consolidate our position. Strengthen the alliances." He looked at the folders on his desk. "Look how that turned out."

Selene followed his gaze. Said nothing.

"Priya left eight months in," he continued. "Kane's chosen candidate. Packed her things and moved to her mother's pack and sent a letter through lawyers. The alliances Kane promised never materialised." He paused. "And the pack has been declining ever since."

"So Kane was wrong about everything."

"Kane was wrong about everything."

Another silence. Then Selene stood and moved toward the door. She paused with her hand on the frame.

"The Silver meeting," she said. "I want to come."

"It's a business consultation."

"I know. I still want to come." She didn't explain further. She left.

Damien sat alone in his office with the reports and the window and the territory going dark outside, and pressed two fingers against the place on his chest where the bond used to live, the habit he'd developed without noticing, like pressing a bruise to confirm it was still there.

It was always still there