The Last Direwolf

Six Files

Rhys made it as far as his own floor before his father’s assistant caught him in the hallway.

“He wants you before your nine a.m.”

Silas Kade’s office took the whole northeast corner, the kind of view that made every other office in the building feel like a consolation prize. He didn’t get up when Rhys came in. He rarely did.

“Screening system flagged six discrepancies company-wide this quarter.” He slid a folder across the desk without looking up from whatever else had his attention. “Biometric markers that don’t reconcile with filed lineage. Sentinel’s, all of them — which makes it your problem now, not mine.”

Rhys opened the folder. Six case numbers. No names — privacy protocol, standard, though something about the omission needled at him more than it should have.

“Define discrepancy.”

“Markers that shouldn’t exist in anyone currently walking around.” His father finally looked up, and something in his face had gone very still in a way Rhys hadn’t seen since he was a teenager being told, once, never to ask about a name that had come up at dinner. “I want this run down quietly. No board notice. No Legal. If you find the source, you bring it to me — no one else. Not until I’ve seen it myself.”

“That’s an unusual level of personal interest for a data error.”

“It’s not an error.” Silas said it flatly, and didn’t elaborate, and the not-elaborating sat in the room like a fourth presence neither of them was going to acknowledge. “Friday, Rhys. And don’t discuss this with anyone outside Sentinel leadership until I say otherwise. That includes Isolde. That includes everyone.”

Rhys had spent six years learning to read the difference between his father managing a business problem and his father managing something else entirely. This was the second kind. He didn’t know yet what the something else was. He intended to.

“Understood.”

***

He read the files properly at his own desk, door closed, and it took him less than ten minutes to see why his father hadn’t wanted this anywhere near the board.

The six discrepancies weren’t scattered. They clustered — same testing window, same equipment batch, same physician’s filing signature on every single intake form. Not an error repeated six times by coincidence. A pattern, run through one person’s hands.

*V.H.*

He stared at the initials for longer than the information required, because some part of him had already done the arithmetic his mind was still pretending to check. Six years on staff. The only physician assigned to Sentinel’s intake screening since before he’d left the country. The woman who’d had both hands on his arm eleven hours ago while his own pulse did something he still hadn’t found a clean explanation for.

He pulled the raw lab data next to the filed reports and laid them side by side, and the discrepancy wasn’t in what the machines had recorded. It was in what had been written up afterward — six sets of numbers, quietly, competently adjusted before they ever reached a database his father’s people could audit without a physician’s cooperation.

Someone had been correcting the truth by hand. Carefully. For years, if the file dates were any indication.

Rhys sat back, and made himself breathe the way he’d trained his body to breathe when a mission went sideways in the field — slow, controlled, no room in it for anything his face might give away later. Six discrepancies. One name on all of them. A father who wanted this brought to him and no one else, with a stillness in his voice Rhys had only ever heard once before, the night he’d learned better than to ask certain questions at dinner.

He thought about the exam room. Her steady hands. The eleven minutes that had rearranged something in his chest he hadn’t consented to and couldn’t undo.

*What did you do,* he thought, and didn’t know yet whether the question was an accusation or the first thing in years he was actually afraid of the answer to. *And what am I going to do about it.

He closed the folder, and sat with his hand flat on top of it for a long moment before he let himself stand up.

He was going to have to see her again today either way. He just no longer knew which version of himself was going to walk through that door.