THE WEIGHT OF TWO YEARS
1064 Words
(Briella's POV)
The council session ended at noon, and by twelve fifteen, Briella's assistant had sent three follow-up documents to Silver Ridge's finance head and confirmed two supplementary data packages for the afternoon review. Briella signed the last authorization form in the corridor outside the meeting room, handed her tablet back, and turned to find Victor standing ten feet away, waiting.
He had not been in the morning session. His absence had been explained as an urgent pack matter. Briella had made no comment about it and kept the meeting moving, which the council appreciated visibly and Richmond, seated at the side wall, watched with something in his face she had stopped trying to read.
Victor looked like a man who had not slept.
"I want to show you something," he said.
She could have said no. Professionally, she had no obligation to meet with the Alpha outside of the scheduled sessions. She said yes, because she was done running from things, and because whatever Richmond's truth had started rearranging inside her, she needed Victor's side of it to sit beside it before she could understand the full shape of what she was holding.
He led her to the finance wing. It was a long room with floor-to-ceiling records and a wide central table covered in binders and printed contracts. The finance head was not there. Victor closed the door behind them, walked to the table, and pointed at an open binder.
Briella walked over and looked down.
Cole Enterprises. Her company seal. Her holding company name, the one registered under her mother's maiden name, the one she had specifically chosen because it was traceable if someone looked carefully but invisible if someone did not know what they were looking for.
Two years of supply contracts.
Medical supplies. Food stores. Building materials. Fuel reserves. All running through Silver Ridge at below-market rates, all signed and delivered without a single personal communication, all sitting in these binders like a quiet and enormous secret.
Victor stood beside her and looked at the same page.
"Your finance head recognized the seal yesterday," she said, keeping her voice even. "I assume that's the urgent pack matter that kept you from the morning session."
"He came to me at seven a.m.," Victor said. "I have been in this room for five hours."
Briella turned the page. Another twelve months of contracts, all fulfilled without incident, without late deliveries, without a single complaint on either side.
"You've been keeping us stable," Victor said. His voice was low and careful, the way a person speaks when they are afraid that the wrong word will break something irreplaceable. "For two years, without telling me. Without telling anyone."
"It was a business decision," she said.
"Briella."
"The pack needed a reliable supply partner. Cole Enterprises had the capacity. The margins were reasonable."
"You subsidized three of those contracts." He pointed at a highlighted row. "This one alone, you absorbed forty percent of the cost. That is not a business decision. That is, " he stopped. He put both hands flat on the table and looked down at them. "That is you taking care of people who did not deserve it."
The room was very quiet.
Briella looked at the highlighted row and then away.
"I didn't do it for you," she said, and it was true, and it was also not the whole truth, and they both understood that.
"I know," he said. "That's what I've been sitting with all morning. You didn't do it for me. You did it for them. For the pack. Even after everything." He straightened up and looked at her, and for the first time since she arrived, she let herself look back at him fully, not for two seconds, not with careful measurement, but with her whole face, the way she used to before she learned to ration herself. "I spent four years looking for you. Every city. Every pack territory. I had standing alerts at forty-three border checkpoints. And the whole time, you were here. Your name was in my own finance records."
Something in her chest did something she did not have a word for.
"Victor," she said.
"My wolf is deteriorating," he said, and the words came out stripped of all performance, just a fact, said plainly by a man who had stopped pretending it wasn't true. "The healers call it prolonged separation stress. They don't know the cause. Richmond knows, and he won't tell me, which means he's protecting someone, and the only person Richmond protects that hard is you."
Briella set her pen down on the binder. Very carefully.
"You should talk to Richmond," she said.
"I'm talking to you."
"Victor."
"Four years," he said. "I need to know what I did. I need to know why you left without a word. You were the one person I thought would never leave without telling me the truth, and you did, and it has been breaking me in ways I cannot explain to anyone in this pack."
The mate bond hummed, low and insistent, at the base of her throat.
She picked her pen back up.
"Schedule a private meeting through the council secretary," she said. "I will give you thirty minutes this evening."
Victor stared at her.
"That's it?" he said.
"That's what I can offer right now," she said, and it was not cruelty, it was the truth, and she saw him understand the difference, saw his shoulders drop slightly the way shoulders drop when a person accepts something difficult.
She left the finance wing with the binders still open on the table and Victor still standing beside them, and she walked all the way to her room before she leaned against the closed door and pressed the back of her hand against her mouth.
The mate bond was not a scar. She had always known that.
She had just spent four years pretending it was, because a scar couldn't hurt you anymore, and this, whatever this was, still could.
Below her window, she heard raised voices from the direction of the council room, too far away to make out words, but the urgency in them was clear.
She crossed to the window and looked out.
Three pack guards were running toward the east gate.
Something was wrong.
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