The name I buried
932 Words
Sara's p.o.v
I spent the night thinking about the handwriting in my head.
Not Vivienne. Vivienne was calculating but she moved through suggestion and pressure, forged documents and planted doubts. Whoever left that photograph was sending a personal message.
Someone who knew Sera Calloway. Someone who had been watching me from the very first day and waiting to see what I would do.
I went for breakfast with the photograph locked in my bag and my face perfectly composed.
The fracture started with my phone.
I was in a session with the medical team when it lit up on the table. I had forgotten to turn it face down. Mara had sent a photo of Eli in the garden, covered in mud, holding up a worm with enormous pride.
I smiled before I could stop it.
I flipped the phone over.
But Caden was in that session. He had arrived late, sliding into a chair at the end of the table, and I had adjusted without reacting. He had been quiet throughout most of it.
The session ended and people filed out. I was gathering my things when he said, "Who's the boy?"
I went still. Then I looked up.
He was relaxed in his chair, arms crossed. Watching me with the careful attention I was beginning to understand was just how he looked when something mattered to him.
"My son," I said.
"You didn't mention a family."
"You didn't ask."
A slight nod. "How old?"
"Three."
"He's with someone while you're here?"
"My closest friend. He is well taken care of."
"I didn't doubt that." A pause. "What's his name?"
"Eli."
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. "Good name."
I picked up my notebook. "Is there something else you needed for the restructuring, Alpha Vale?"
“ No” he said
He let me go.
But I felt his eyes on me all the way to the door, and the question he had not asked was the loudest thing in the room.
Lena found me before lunch.
She closed my office door behind her, which told me everything before she spoke.
"A document is going around the senior wolves," she said. "A Council memo. It says the restructuring is a cover to dissolve Silverstone's pack status and place it under a neighbouring Alpha."
I sat back. "That is not my mandate."
"I know. But it looks real. The formatting, the seal, the signatures."
Forged. After my conversation with Vivienne in the hallway.
I stood up. "Get me in front of the senior wolves tonight."
Lena straightened. "You want to address it directly?"
"I want to remove the space between what they know and what they fear. That is where rumours live."
…
Twenty-three senior wolves sat around the long table at six that evening.
I stood at the end without a chair.
I put the original mandate document on the table. My Council credentials beside it. Then I spoke for twelve minutes without notes.
I told them exactly what I was doing and exactly what I was not. The report would make recommendations, not mandates. Every recommendation would go through their Alpha first.
"I am not your enemy," I said. "I am also not asking you to trust me. Watch what I do. We have five weeks left."
Bernard cleared his throat. "The document that was shared..."
"Is forged," I said. "I will be filing a report on it with the Council."
No one spoke.
Caden found me in the hallway afterward.
"That was well handled," he said.
"Thank you."
We fell into step together. The hallway was narrow and we were heading the same direction and it just happened.
"Do you know who made it?" he asked.
"I have a suspicion."
"So do I," he said.
The hallway opened into the main foyer. He stopped at the foot of the stairs. I stopped too.
For one unguarded moment we were two feet apart and the house was quiet and I made the mistake of looking at him directly. Not past him. At him. His face in the low light. The grey eyes that had been watching me all week with something too large to keep pretending I did not see.
"Seraphina," he said.
Just my name. But the way he said it, slowly, like he was testing the shape of it, made my heart do something I had not given it permission to do.
"Alpha," I said.
"Why do I feel like I know you?"
One half second. I could not breathe for one half second.
"I don't know what you mean," I said.
"Yes, you do."
I held his gaze for one more moment. Then I said, "Good night, Alpha Vale," and went up the stairs without hurrying.
Around the corner I leaned against the wall.
Hand over my mouth.
He was close. Too close.
And my wolf, the one who had been running for three years, was sitting completely still.
Facing toward him.
I pushed off the wall and walked to my room.
My phone was buzzing on the bed. Mara. I answered.
She did not say hello.
"Sera," she said, and her voice was the kind of quiet that meant something was very wrong. "Someone just came to the house. They were asking about Eli."
The floor dropped out from under me.
"What?"
"A woman. She said she was from the Council records office. She wanted to confirm his birth registration."
My whole body went cold.
"Mara. Take Eli and leave the house tonight."
"Sera, what is..."
"Please. Right now. I will explain everything. Just go."
- Writer
