The Gamma Who Knew Too Much

CHAPTER THREE

Both Things at Once

POV: Abigail

By the fourth night, Abigail had mapped every disturbance point in the Northern Pack's territory and she had a theory she did not like.

The pattern was not random. Supernatural disturbances that spread without a pattern were natural, the way weather was natural, unpredictable and indiscriminate. This one had a logic to it, quiet and deliberate, like water finding the same crack in a wall again and again. It was targeting specific defensive nodes. The ones that, if collapsed in sequence, would leave the pack's eastern and northern borders completely exposed at the same time.

Someone had designed this. Someone who knew exactly which nodes to hit and in what order.

She was still at her desk at eleven at night when the knock came.

"Come in," she said, without looking up.

Henry stepped into the room. He was not in Alpha mode, not formal and measured the way he had been in the council room. He was just standing there in a plain dark shirt with his hands loose at his sides and his face doing something she had not seen it do in a long time, which was nothing. No performance. No management. Just his face.

"Sit down," she said.

He sat down across from her and she saved her work and closed the tablet and looked at him. She waited.

He put four folders on the desk between them.

"Everything," he said. "Every intelligence report from three years ago. Every threat projection. Every classified communication I received in the eight months before your rank was removed." He pushed the folders toward her. "I should have given these to you the day you arrived. I gave them to you tonight because I spent three days trying to think of a better way to do this and there isn't one."

She looked at the folders. She looked at him.

"Talk," she said. The same word she had used on the phone.

So he talked.

He told her about the intelligence report that arrived six months before the rejection. A supernatural extinction event, classified category five, building in the territory between two allied packs. He told her the event had a trigger condition: if the Northern Pack's strategic intelligence was leaked to either of the two packs involved, the event would detonate ahead of schedule with no warning and no containment window. He told her his intelligence identified a suspected leak point inside the Gamma line.

Not Abigail specifically. The Gamma line in general. Someone with access to the strategic archive.

He could not investigate without alerting the suspected source. He could not tell Abigail because she might accidentally set off the explosion without meaning to.The only option he had, the only one his intelligence advisors could offer, was to remove the Gamma entirely, publicly and completely, in exchange for a political alliance with the outside pack that could contain the event.

He had done it. He had stood in front of the pack and removed her rank and her bond and he had not explained a single word of it, because he could not, and he had watched her walk out of those gates with eight years of her life on her back and he had gone inside and locked the council room door and not come out for six hours.

The room was quiet when he finished.

Abigail looked at the folders for a long moment. Then she picked them up.

"Forty-eight hours," she said.

"For what?"

"For me to read every word of this, check every source, and cross-reference your projections against current supernatural activity data."

He nodded. He stood up.

"Henry," she said.

He stopped.

"I will come back and tell you what I find. And then I will tell you what I think. All of it." She held the folders steady. "That is the only way I know how to do this."

He left without another word.

She read for forty-eight hours. She slept three hours in the middle, not because she was done but because her eyes refused. She checked his intelligence sources against her firm's independent research database. She ran his three-year-old projections against the current disturbance data she had collected from the pack's territory. She cross-referenced his advisors' conclusions against two other case studies of category five events from the last century.

On the morning of the third day she went and found Henry in the council room.

She put the folders on the table.

"Your intelligence was correct," she said. "The threat was real. The category five designation was accurate. Your solution was the only viable one at the time given the information you had."

He looked at her with an expression she could not name.

"And," she continued, "I still needed to know the truth three years ago. Both of those things are true. I am not going to pretend one of them cancels the other out."

"I know," he said.

"I also need you to know that the current disturbance is the second wave of the same event." She spread her territory map on the table over his. "Your alliance did not solve the problem. It delayed it. And whoever is managing that delay is already inside your borders."

Henry's face went very still.

She tapped the map. "The leak is not old. The leak is now. And whoever is doing this knows the pack's defenses so well that they are hitting the right spots in the exact order that leaves everyone the most unprotected." She looked up at him. "That is not outside intelligence. That is insider knowledge."

The colour did not exactly leave Henry's face. But something behind his eyes went out, slow and quiet, like a flame in a room with no air.

She watched him understand what that meant.

And she picked up her pen and got back to work, because the pack had maybe two weeks left and understanding the problem had never once been the same thing as solving it.