Rejected Reborn

Someone Close

Arker’s face did something I hadn’t seen it do before when I told him — not the controlled Alpha stillness, not the careful editing he did around difficult news. Something closer to grief, quick and unguarded, gone almost as fast as it appeared.

“Weeks,” he repeated. “Before you even arrived.”

“That’s what Wren said. Secondhand, through his cousin. It’s not proof. But it’s not nothing either.”

He was quiet a long moment, turning something over that I could see cost him to look at directly. “There’s a short list of people with the kind of access that would let them feed Ferro real information. Household leadership. Security. My own office staff.” His jaw tightened. “People I’ve trusted for years. People my father trusted before me.”

“Dino had access,” I said carefully. “But Dino’s gone, and Wren’s cousin said this started before the ritual, before any of this week even happened.”

“Which means whoever it is, it isn’t about the bond at all,” Arker said slowly, working it through out loud. “It’s older than that. It’s been running the whole time I’ve been Alpha, maybe longer.” He looked up at me, something bleak in his expression. “I don’t know who to trust in my own house, Avery. That’s not a feeling I’ve had to sit with before.”

We brought Corrine in within the hour, and then Selene, and by evening the four of us sat around a table with a list of names none of us wanted to be looking at — people I’d shared meals with, people whose sessions I’d sat through, people who’d smiled at me in hallways and meant it, as far as I could tell.

“I want to be careful here,” Corrine said, tapping the edge of the list with one finger. “An investigation like this, handled wrong, tears a pack apart faster than any outside threat could. We accuse the wrong person, we lose their trust and everyone who trusts them besides. We move too slow, we lose the chance to catch whoever’s actually responsible before they do more damage.”

“Then we move carefully and quickly,” Selene said. “Both. I didn’t survive thirty years married to an Alpha without learning how.”

It was Selene, in the end, who suggested the thing none of the rest of us had thought to consider — that whoever was talking to Ferro had likely been talking to him through more than one channel, and that channels left traces, if you knew where a careful person might slip.

“Financial records,” she said. “Communications logs. Nobody feeds information to a rival Alpha for weeks without some trail, however faint, however well hidden. I’d start there before I started interrogating anyone by name.”

It took three days. Three days of careful, quiet work happening alongside the ordinary rhythm of the estate — my sessions continuing, Bena’s resource agreement moving through a second council review, patrols doubling at the border while inside the house, Corrine and a small trusted team combed through logs and records with the patient, unglamorous persistence that actual investigations are apparently made of, nothing like the version I’d have imagined from television.

I kept working through all of it, because Arker had been right about that much — the estate needed to keep functioning, needed proof that fear hadn’t won, and my sessions became, in a strange way, the calmest hours of my day. Wren came back twice more that week, steadier each time. Ruth’s daughter, the one who’d used my coping techniques months ago, started coming to sessions herself. Teo brought a friend.

Bena found me on the third evening, in the wellness suite, later than her usual visits.

“The council approved the resource agreement,” she said, something loosening in her posture I hadn’t seen there before, not once, in the whole time I’d known her. “Formally. This morning. My father’s people get the northeast parcel, the trade routes, everything we drafted.” She sat down across from me, uninvited, the way she always did, though it felt different now, less like an intrusion and more like something closer to habit. “I wanted to thank you. Properly. Not the version of thanks I gave in the council chamber for the cameras and the elders.”

“You don’t owe me anything.”

“I owe you the truth,” she said, “which is that I spent most of this week assuming you were the problem standing between my people and their future, and it turned out you were the reason they got one.” A dry almost-smile. “I’m not going to pretend that’s an easy thing to sit with. But I’d rather sit with it honestly than keep pretending I don’t owe you the acknowledgment.”

I appreciated it more than I let on. We talked another twenty minutes — easier than I’d have thought possible a week ago, two women who’d started as rivals and ended somewhere closer to something else, not quite friends yet, but no longer strangers standing on opposite sides of someone else’s bad plan.

She was gone twenty minutes when Corrine found me, expression tight, a single sheet of paper in her hand.

“We found it,” she said. “The trail. Financial transfers, routed through three accounts to make them harder to trace, going back almost a year.” She hesitated, and I watched something painful cross her face before she said the rest of it. “It leads to Priya.”

I felt the floor tilt slightly under me. Priya, who’d met me at the gate my first day with a tablet and a harried smile. Priya, who’d delivered every difficult piece of news this estate had handed me with careful, gentle neutrality. Priya, who I had trusted, without ever once examining why, more than almost anyone else on this estate.

“That’s not possible,” I said, even as some cold, clear-eyed part of me was already running back through every conversation, every message, every moment Priya had been standing exactly where information needed to travel through to leave this estate.

“I know how it feels,” Corrine said quietly. “I’ve known her four years. I’d have said the same thing yesterday.” She held out the paper, steady despite everything. “I think it’s time we asked her directly, before this goes any further. And I think, given everything you’ve built with her, you should probably be in the room when we do.”