The Gamma Who Knew Too Much

CHAPTER TWO

The Photograph

POV: Abigail

The Northern Pack's main territory looked exactly the same.

That was the thing Abigail had not prepared for. She had prepared for the emotions, catalogued them the way she catalogued security risks: identified, ranked, managed. She had prepared for Henry's face and the council room and the smell of the northern pines that lined the packhouse road. She had not prepared for the ordinary sameness of it all, the same iron gate, the same gravel path, the same wide stone steps, as if three years was nothing and she had simply been away on a long trip.

She carried her own bags up the steps.

Nobody offered to help and she had not expected them to. The pack members who saw her arrive looked at her the way people look at a rumor that has just walked through the door, with wide eyes and closed mouths. A few of the older ones looked away. She understood. She had been their Gamma. She had trained with some of them. She had planned the defensive campaigns that kept their borders intact for eight years. And then she walked out of this pack like a problem that had been solved, and now she was back, and nobody knew which story to tell about that.

She knocked on the strategy room door and opened it without waiting for an answer.

Three council members stood near the window. Henry stood at the head of the table with a map spread in front of him, older-looking than she remembered, not in the way of age but in the way of weight, the kind that settles on a person who has been carrying something heavy for too long. He looked up when she entered and something moved across his face that he shut down before it finished forming.

"Abigail," he said.

"Alpha," she said, because that was the appropriate address and she had decided to be appropriate.

She put her bag down, pulled out her tablet, and took the seat at the far end of the table. "Walk me through the disturbance pattern. Timeline, locations, any documented behavioral changes in pack members who live nearest the affected zones."

The council members looked at each other. One of them looked at Henry.

"She is here to work," Henry said, and they began.

For forty minutes she listened and took notes and asked precise questions that made two of the council members write things down because they had clearly not thought of them before. She was good at this. She had always been good at this. The work was the one place in her life where nothing hurt because there was no room for it.

She was writing a location note when the door on the left side of the room opened and a man walked in carrying two folders and a bottle of water, and he set both down on the table and looked up and it was the man from the elevator.

The quiet one from Crestline Tower's conference room. The one who had read her business card without asking for it. The one she had not thought about on the drive back to the office but had thought about twice.

He looked at her without surprise. He pulled out a chair and sat down. He opened one of the folders.

"Abigail," he called. Not a greeting…More like a confirmation.

She looked at him for two full seconds. Then she looked at the wall behind him.

On the wall behind him, between the window and a set of old territory maps, there was a framed photograph. A wide family photograph, the kind taken at formal occasions, large and posed and lit carefully. Henry stood in the center. To his left was a man Abigail recognized as Henry's father. To his right, taller and with the same line of jaw but a different set to the eyes, was the man now sitting at this table.

She put down her pen.

"You are Simeon," she said. "Henry's stepbrother."

"Yes," he said.

She picked her pen back up. She looked at her notes. She wrote one word, which was a location coordinate, and then she looked at him again and her voice came out completely level. "You have been my firm's primary anonymous investor for three years and four months."

"Yes," he said again.

The room had gone quiet in the way rooms go quiet when everyone present understands they are watching something that is none of their business and they cannot look away.

"We will discuss that later," Abigail said.

She turned back to the map.

She finished the briefing. She assigned two of her consultants to begin field assessment of the disturbance zones. She outlined a forty-eight-hour data collection protocol and told the council which areas were priority. She answered every question put to her with the same clean precision she had walked into this room with.

She did not look at Simeon again for the rest of the meeting.

When the room cleared and only Simeon remained, she closed the door. She stood on her side of the table and he sat on his and the room was very quiet.

"You had three years," she said. "Nine months on top of that. You had calls and emails and every wire transfer that crossed between your shell firm and my accounts. You had every single one of those moments to say your last name."

He did not look away. "I know."

"Why didn't you?"

"Because," he said carefully, "I was afraid you would walk away from the investment. And the firm was more important than my comfort."

She looked at him for a long time. Long enough that most people would have filled the silence with something. He did not fill it. He waited, because he was a man who understood that some silences needed to be left alone.

"I will finish this job," she said at last.

She picked up her bag and walked to the door and stopped with her hand on the frame, her back to him.

"When the job is done," she said quietly, "you and I are going to have a different conversation."

She walked out.

Down the long corridor, through the main hall, and up the stairs to the guest wing, she kept her steps even and her breathing controlled, and she was completely fine, until she got to her room and locked the door behind her. She sat on the edge of the bed and pressed both hands flat against her knees and stayed very still for a very long time.

For three years and four months she had trusted him more than she had trusted anyone, including herself, in certain moments. And his last name had been sitting inside that trust the whole time like a stone at the bottom of clear water.

She had not seen it. The one, who saw everything.

That was what sat the hardest.