THE WEIGHT I CARRY
1142 Words
(Richmond's POV)
Richmond had not slept.
He had sat at his desk from midnight until five a.m. with Briella's file open on one screen and Soren's communication records open on another, and built the case the same way he built every case: methodically, without assumption, following only what the evidence confirmed and nothing it did not.
By five-fifteen, it was airtight.
Soren had been in contact with the coalition for sixteen months. Not fourteen. Sixteen, which meant he had started the operation two months before Victor's bond deterioration became apparent to anyone, which meant he had not been exploiting a weakness. He had been anticipating one. He had known, before Victor's healers knew, that the incomplete mate bond would eventually become a crisis. He had bet on it. He had built an entire betrayal around the certainty that Victor's wolf would fail.
Richmond sat back in his chair and looked at the ceiling.
The worst part was not the betrayal. The worst part was how patient it was. Sixteen months of patience, sixteen months of water glasses refilled and council meetings attended and Alpha's-right-hand performed, sixteen months of Soren sitting beside Victor at dinner and watching him deteriorate and doing absolutely nothing to stop it.
Richmond got up, went to the window, and looked out at the training yard.
Victor was already out there. Five-fifteen in the morning, and Victor was running drills alone in the dark, which was what Victor did when his wolf was bad and he did not want his pack to see him struggle. Richmond had watched him do this for four years. The form was still precise. The power was still there. But the rhythm was off, fractionally, in the way a machine is off when one essential component is misaligned. The wolf that used to move through Victor like a second heartbeat had become something he was managing instead of something he was.
Richmond knew exactly what would fix it.
He also knew it was not his decision to make.
He dressed, went downstairs, and intercepted Soren at seven a.m. before the council breakfast. He did it quietly, in the corridor outside Soren's room, with two of Victor's most trusted guards positioned at either end of the hall. He showed Soren the file on his tablet screen. He gave him ninety seconds to look at it.
Then he said, "Victor is giving you the option to come forward yourself. That option closes in one hour."
Soren looked at the tablet, then at Richmond, then at the guards at either end of the corridor. His expression moved through several things quickly, surprise that they had found it, calculation about whether there was a way out, and then something that looked almost like relief, the specific relief of a man who has been holding something heavy for a very long time and finally sees a place to put it down.
"One hour," Soren said.
"One hour," Richmond confirmed, and stepped aside to let him walk to Victor's office.
Richmond went to the dining hall, poured two cups of coffee, and went to find Briella.
She was on the east terrace, which he was starting to understand was where she went when she needed air and did not want anyone to read her face. She was in a gray shirt and dark trousers, her hair down, which was the first time he had seen it down since she arrived, and it changed the shape of her face in a way that made his chest do something he was practiced at ignoring.
He handed her a coffee. She took it without comment.
"Soren's with Victor," he said.
She wrapped both hands around the cup. "How did Victor take it?"
"I'll know in an hour," Richmond said. "Soren went in at seven. Victor knows the broad facts already. I briefed him at six."
Briella nodded. She looked out at the mountain line, and he looked at her profile, and the morning was very quiet around them.
"Your file was the piece I needed," he said.
"The relay address," she said. "I had a security protocol on my holding company from the start. Anyone who ran more than two inquiries into the structure got flagged. Soren was flagged at month three. I just didn't know why yet."
"You sat on it for eleven months," he said.
"I sat on it until I had context," she said. "Information without context is just noise."
He looked at her. The way she said it, calm and factual, the way she approached everything, and he thought about the hallway again, the way she would have stood in it, hearing his words without context, building a whole life on the noise of a sentence she caught at the wrong angle.
"Briella," he said.
She turned her head.
He had promised himself he would wait. He had told himself the timing was wrong, that she was in the middle of processing too many things at once, that adding himself to that list was selfish. But she was looking at him with the directness that he had come to understand was her version of openness, her face calm but her eyes fully present, and he was tired of calculating the right moment.
"I know you have enough to think about," he said. "I know Victor is part of it, and the truth about what happened four years ago is part of it, and none of this is simple." He held her gaze. "I'm not asking you to make any decision. I just want you to know that what I said to Victor that night, I meant it. You are not someone a man gets ready for at his own pace. You are someone a man spends years becoming worthy of, and not every man manages it." He paused. "I don't know if I have. But I stopped pretending I wasn't aware of you a long time ago, and you deserve to know that too."
The mountain air moved between them.
Briella looked at him for a long moment.
"You are a deeply inconvenient person, Richmond Hale," she said.
He almost smiled. "I know."
"I'll think about it," she said.
It was the same thing she had said on the terrace four nights ago, about the truth he gave her. But this time the weight of it was different, and they both knew it.
She turned back to the mountain line, and he stood beside her, and they drank their coffee in the quiet morning, and below them the pack was waking up, and somewhere in Victor's office, a sixteen-month betrayal was being confessed, and the day was only just beginning.
His phone buzzed.
A message from Victor's personal guard. Three words.
"Alpha needs you."
Richmond set his empty cup on the railing, looked at Briella once, and went inside.
- Writer
