THE ALPHA WHO REJECTED HIS FATE

Chapter Fifteen

Zane POV

I reached him before he hit the ground, my hands already moving to the wound the way instinct demanded even though some colder, more experienced part of me already knew it was pointless.

Blood came fast, too fast, the particular dark, arterial fast that meant he knew exactly where to aim. Whatever Voss had done in his life, however many careful, bloodless cruelties he'd arranged from behind a council seat, he had not left this one detail to chance.

"Stay with me," I said, which was absurd, which was the kind of thing you say to someone whose eyes have already gone distant and unfocused, whose breath has already gone from ragged, too sparse, to nearly nothing at all. "Voss. The letter. What letter?"

His mouth moved. No sound came out of it that I could make into words.

Kael POV

"Pressure," I said, dropping to my knees beside Zane, pressing my own hands over his against the wound, though we both understood, even as we did it, that we were trying to hold back something that had already finished happening.

Voss's eyes found mine. For one strange, suspended moment, the satisfaction that had never once left his expression through the entire conversation flickered into something else, something almost like relief, as though dying here, on his own terms, in front of the two people he'd spent the whole night baiting, was the last piece of a plan he'd been carrying out exactly as intended.

"You'll want to hurry," he said, barely beyond a whisper, blood bubbling faintly at the corner of his mouth. "Before she reads it wrong. Before he tells her his version first."

"Whose version," I said, my voice not entirely steady anymore. "Tell me who has it."

He didn't answer. His eyes stayed open, fixed somewhere past my shoulder, and his chest went still beneath our hands in the particular, final way that made further pressure meaningless.

Around us, the warriors who'd followed us out here had gone quiet, weapons still raised toward a threat that no longer existed, none of them quite certain whether to lower their guard or keep waiting for whatever this night still intended to throw at them. I understood the feeling. My own hands were still pressed against a dead man's chest, red on the wrist, and some part of me hadn't caught up yet to the fact that there was nothing left worth pressing against.

Vexara POV

I reached them just as they finished, just in time to see Kael's hands go slack against a wound that no longer needed pressing, just in time to watch my brother's face do something I hadn't seen it do since we were children losing our parents together in the same week.

"He's dead," I said, unnecessary, obvious, the kind of thing you say when your mind needs a moment to catch up to what your eyes have already confirmed.

"He did it himself," Zane said, still crouched over the body, his hands red to the wrist. "Before we could ask him anything else."

I stood there a moment longer than I meant to, staring down at a man I had spent two months tracing through fabricated documents without ever once imagining I would watch him die in front of me, confessing with his last living breath to something none of us had asked him about at all.

A letter. A version someone else might tell first. My mind ran through everything I had learned in two months of careful, quiet investigation and found no mention anywhere of any letter, no thread I had followed that led toward Seraphine's father having written anything he ever sent.

Which meant either Voss had been lying with his final breath, spending his last moment on this earth planting one more piece of chaos simply because he could.

Or there was something about the night Seraphine's father died that none of us, not even I, who had made it my business for two months to know everything, had found yet.

I hated both possibilities equally. I had built my entire investigation on the belief that if I was thorough enough, patient enough, careful enough, I could uncover the full shape of Malachar's cruelty and hand Kael a case with no gaps left in it. Voss's last words told me, plainly, that I had been wrong. There were gaps. There had always been gaps. I simply hadn't known where to look for them yet.

Kael POV

"We need to get back to the settlement," I said, my voice rougher than I meant it to sound. "Now."

"Kael." Vexara's hand closed my arm before I could turn toward my horse. "If there's a letter, if her father wrote something he never sent, someone else has it. Someone who knew him well enough to know it existed."

"Then we find them."

"There's only one wolf left alive who fits that description closely enough to matter," Vexara said, and her face had gone the particular, careful pale of someone about to say a thing she didn't want to be the one saying. "And he's sitting in a cell at the Iron Keep right now, waiting for a tribunal that hasn't happened yet."

I felt something twist low in my chest at the thought of it, the idea that Malachar, even locked away, even stripped of every seat and honor I intended to take from him, still held one more card he hadn't shown anyone, still had the power to decide when and how the rest of us learned the truth. Eight years I had trusted that man's counsel without question. Eight years ago, I had let him shape half the decisions that built my pack's strength, never once suspecting that every piece of guidance he gave me was laid over a foundation of lies patient enough to survive two decades undisturbed.

I looked down at Voss's body one last time, at the blood already cooling in the dirt beneath a burning camp he had set alight himself rather than risk it speaking, and understood, with a certainty that settled cold and absolute in my chest, that whatever Malachar still had left to say, he had saved it deliberately, and he intended to choose exactly when we heard it.