Broken Crown

CHAPTER 5

"Tell me again why you didn't just leave her there."

Jace is leaning in the doorway of my office with his arms crossed and his mouth doing the thing it does when he thinks he is being subtle, which is never.

"Because she would have been in that basement within the hour," I say. I don't look up from the papers on my desk.

"And that's the whole reason."

"Jace."

"Right. Got it." He pushes off the door frame. "Ren wants a word, by the way. Something about the council."

He leaves before I can respond to that.

I set down the paper I am holding.

The council.

I knew this was coming. I have known it since the drive back from Cresthaven, when I sat with Zara Cole asleep against the car window and my Beta's questions hovering unasked in the front seat. Ren is too professional to say the obvious out loud before I've said it first. That is one of the things I value about him.

The obvious is this: I am promised to Selene Voss.

The alliance with the Voss pack is three years in the making. Her father, Alpha Dorian Voss, controls the eastern supply routes that Black Ridge depends on. The agreement is political, practical, and beneficial to everyone involved.

I have met Selene four times. She is polished and capable and she looks at me the way powerful women sometimes look at powerful men, like a territory on a map that she has already decided is hers. I don't dislike her. I don't feel anything about her at all.

Ren appears in the doorway.

"The council has called a formal session for Thursday," he says.

"About?"

"You brought an unaffiliated female into the Alpha residence without notice." He says it carefully. "They have questions."

"They have objections," I say. "Call it what it is."

"Yes." He steps inside and closes the door. "Kael. The Voss alliance…"

"Is still intact."

He looks at me the way Ren looks at me when he thinks I am wrong but has decided to present information rather than argue. It is an expression I have known for fifteen years. "Selene is arriving next week for the formal introduction ceremony."

"I know."

"And Zara Cole is now living in this compound."

"I know that too."

"And Cain…" He stops. He does not usually bring up my wolf directly. It means he is more concerned than he is showing. "How is he?"

I lean back in my chair.

Cain has been the loudest he has been in years. Since the moment we walked into Cresthaven and scented something beneath the suppression, something muted and distant but *there*, like a voice behind a closed door, he has not been quiet. He is not frantic. Cain does not do frantic. But there is a quality to his attention that I have not felt directed at anyone before.

"He's fine," I say.

Ren nods. He does not believe me. "Thursday. Don't be late."

He leaves.

I turn back to the papers and find I am not reading them. I am thinking about a girl with blue eyes who flinches at open hands and says it's fine about things that are categorically not fine, and who stood in my office this afternoon and let me look at damage that most people would have hidden behind ten walls.

She didn't show me because she trusted me. I know that. She showed me because she calculated, quickly and quietly, that refusing would cost her more than compliance. She is running the same math she has always run. Survival arithmetic.

I want her to stop running that math.

That is a thought I file away carefully. This is not the moment for it. There are too many moving parts, too many obligations already in motion, and Selene Voss lands on my territory in seven days.

My phone buzzes on the desk.

I look at the screen.

Dorian Voss. Calling.

I pick it up. "Alpha Voss."

"Kael." His voice is expansive, self-satisfied. He has always sounded like a man who is perpetually ahead of the conversation. "I hear you had a visit with the Cresthaven rabble. Productive?"

"Routine," I say.

"Glad to hear it. Now, about Selene's visit, I want to formalize the marking date. I was thinking the week she arrives. Strike while the iron is…"

"We'll discuss timing when she arrives," I say. "I'll be in touch."

I hang up.

I sit in the quiet for a moment.

Then I pick up Ren's report on the Cresthaven compound, the background file I had pulled two weeks ago, before the visit, when I first heard the name Zara Cole mentioned in a council briefing about Luca Cole's alliance request.

The file is thin. It says almost nothing. She does not exist in any official pack registry. She has no rank, no record, no name attached to any document of significance. She has been, in every measurable way, erased.

I turn to the last page.

There is a single line from the compound's own archived records, the kind that packs keep internally and never expect to be read by outside eyes.

Cole, Zara. Female. Ability status: bound, double-sealed. Age at binding: 6. Reason: parental death, negligence.

Double-sealed.

I read that again.

Binding a wolf's abilities once is a severe punishment, rarely used, requiring significant power and pack authority. Double-sealing is something I have read about in historical texts. It is overkill for a child's negligence. It is the kind of thing you do when you are afraid of what someone might become.

Not what they did.

What they might become.

I close the file.

Outside my office window, the compound is settling into evening. The lights are coming on in the main hall. Somewhere in the east wing, in the room I assigned to her this morning, Zara Cole is probably sitting in the dark because she has not yet learned she is allowed to turn the lights on.

That thought bothers me more than it should.

I push back from the desk and stand.

Cain stirs.

She's still awake, he says, which is not something he should be able to know.

Stay out of it, I tell him.

He goes quiet. But not the kind of quiet that means he has listened.

The kind that means he is waiting.