Chapter 7
739 Words
AIDEN
I did not sleep that night, and I did not pretend to myself that it was only about Ethan.
I lay awake cataloguing the way she'd taken it — the debt, the leverage, the brother we'd spent five years trying not to name in front of her. She hadn't flinched from a single piece of it. She'd asked better questions than I'd expected, and forgiven a girl who'd betrayed her, and thanked us, of all things, for telling her the truth in a shape ugly enough to actually be useful.
I got up before dawn and found Carter already at the kitchen table, a laptop open in front of him, the blue light carving hollows under his eyes.
"You didn't sleep either," I said.
"I was finishing the paperwork." He didn't look up. "Enrollment documentation is easier to fabricate in January, when the administrative office is short-staffed and the new intake is too large for anyone to check faces against names carefully. We have a window. Six weeks, if we start now."
"And a name?"
"She already gave us one." Carter finally looked up. "Last night, on the balcony, before you went out there. Alex George."
I turned the name over. It fit her the way I imagined most disguises eventually fit the people wearing them — not quite comfortable, but close enough to survive in.
"She'll need documentation from Professor Liang's office specifically," I said. "Admission letters that reference technical portfolio review, not just a name on a general roster. If anyone questions it later, we want a paper trail that looks like merit, not manufacture."
"I'll handle Liang's office." Carter closed the laptop. "You handle her."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning she is going to need to learn to walk, sit, and speak like someone who has never once in her life had to think about how she walks, sits, and speaks. That's not administrative work. That's you." He studied me with the particular patience he reserved for moments when he already knew what I was going to say and wanted to hear me say it anyway. "You're the only one of us disciplined enough not to enjoy it too much."
"I'll enjoy it plenty."
"I know." He almost smiled. "That's why I said it."
We worked through the morning in near silence, the kind that had defined most of our partnership since we were boys — dividing a problem into pieces neither of us needed to discuss twice. Jasper surfaced around ten, took one look at the papers spread across the table, and declared himself in charge of "making her sound like she's never once been polite in her life," which was, annoyingly, an accurate description of what voice projection training would require.
Ryker didn't surface until noon, and when he did, he didn't ask about the documents. He asked about Mia.
"You looked into the maid," he said. Not a question.
"I did."
"And?"
"Seventeen. Father in debt to three separate collectors within the pack. Mother deceased. She had exactly one soft place in her life, and Lillian found it before we did." I closed the folder. "Alessia asked if she was allowed to forgive her. I don't think she was really asking us."
Ryker was quiet for a moment. "Keep an eye on the girl anyway. Guilt does strange things to people with nothing left to lose."
"I already have someone watching her."
"Good." He turned to leave, then stopped in the doorway, the way he did when something was working itself loose in him that he hadn't decided whether to say aloud. "She thanked us last night. For telling her the truth."
"I heard."
"Nobody's ever thanked me for that." He said it the way he said most things that actually mattered to him — flatly, like a fact rather than a feeling, so that only someone who already knew him could hear what it cost him to say it at all. "I don't know what to do with that."
"You don't have to do anything with it," I said. "You just have to keep deserving it."
He nodded once and left, and I sat with the documents a while longer, thinking about a girl who had walked into our apartment eight days ago carrying a suitcase and a stolen title — Holiday Luna — and was already, without seeming to notice she was doing it, teaching four grown Alphas how to be worth trusting.
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