~RYLAND’S POV~

I found her before the morning meal, before most of the packhouse had stirred. She was already at the small table in her room with a cup of tea she hadn’t drunk yet, her hair still loose.

She looked up when I came in but didn’t speak.

I closed the door and sat across from her. Not beside her. Not standing. Across, because the news I was carrying needed space around it, not proximity.

"Matthew is dead," I said without preamble. No softening cause she didn’t need the version that came wrapped in careful words.

"Self-inflicted. Before Cade could get to him.

Before anyone could ask him a single question."

She didn’t move. She just sat there with both hands wrapped around the cup, staring at the table between us like she was looking for something in the grain of the wood that might make this make sense.

The silence stretched. I watched her face.

Whatever was moving behind her expression was moving deep.

I started to reach across the table toward her hand when a knock on the door, broke the moment.

"Alpha... it’s Cade."

I looked at Lyra and she nodded once.

"Come in."

He looked at us both, read the room, and dropped into the chair beside me without a word. He set his hands flat on the table. Then he shook his head.

"Nothing," he said.

"No evidence trail. No paper that connects him to anyone above. Nothing we could take to the council even if we wanted to." He exhaled. "He’s a dead end. Literally."

"He was the only thread we had," I said.

"And he cut it himself." Cade said it plainly, the way he said things he needed to say and didn’t particularly enjoy saying.

Lyra’s voice came in low, steady, almost controlled. "If a person can take their own life just to keep the truth a secret..."

She didn’t finish it. She let it hang between the three of us, because the end of it didn’t need saying. We all understood what she meant.

Whoever was behind this had a grip on people that went further than threats or money or leverage. They had something that made dying feel like the safer option. That was a different kind of power than what we’d been dealing with so far.

Cade completely closed the door.

"Nobody outside this circle talks about this.

Not staff, not lower council, not distant allies.

Nobody." He looked at both of us. "Whatever we know, stays here."

"Agreed," I said.

"And Lyra needs more guards," Cade added, which was the thing I’d been deciding how to bring up since before I’d come into this room.

"Rotating shifts. Faces she knows. People you’ve personally cleared."

I looked at Lyra.

She almost said something. I could see the shape of the argument forming in her expression, I can handle things, I don’t need...

She didn’t say it. She looked back down at the cup in her hands and said nothing.

"I’ll have it arranged by this afternoon,"

Cade leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling for a moment.

"We’re back to square one. No leads, no evidence, no trail that goes anywhere useful."

He wasn’t defeated, Cade didn’t do defeat, he did recalibration, but I could hear the frustration filing itself away underneath the steadiness, which was its own kind of telling.

"Whatever next step we take, we’re taking it blind."

—

I called the formal council meeting after the midday meal.

The room filled with the familiar weight of it, elder council members, advisors, the faces that had been playing political games inside these walls since before I’d held the Alpha title and some of them since before my father had held it. They sat with the careful posture of people who understood that how you occupied a chair in a council room was itself a statement.

I laid it out. The poisoning. The investigation.

The divination tracing the vial to Elder Saltzman’s son. Matthew’s involvement. His death. I didn’t dramatise any of it. I didn’t need to.

The room was very quiet by the time I finished.

Then, like a slow tide, every eye in the chamber moved toward Elder Saltzman.

He sat rigid at the far end of the table, his expression set in something harder than stone, his hands folded on the surface in front of him with the stillness of a man who had made a decision about what his face was going to do and was keeping it there by force.

The council pressed him. Questions came from several directions, measured at first, then less measured. Prentis, who had a habit of getting to the version of a question that nobody else had the appetite for, leaned forward and asked it without decoration.

"Did you know?" he said. "Were you aware of what your son was doing inside this pack?"

Saltzman’s jaw tightened. The silence that followed lasted one beat too long.

"No,I had no knowledge of it."

His voice didn’t shake. He held the room’s weight without moving, without blinking, without giving an inch of ground. Whether that was innocence or a very old man’s very practiced composure, nobody in the room could say for certain, and we all knew it.

"And what is your position," Prentis continued, "now that you do have knowledge of it?"

Saltzman looked at the table for a moment.

Then he exhaled, slowly, like a man accepting the shape of something he hadn’t chosen and couldn’t change.

"He got exactly what he looked for," he said.

The room absorbed that without a sound.

Prentis sat back. Nobody asked a follow-up.

Even the air in the room seemed to decide that was the end of that particular line of questioning.

The meeting dispersed with less noise than it had entered. People filed out in ones and twos, the conversations that would normally cluster around the doorway after a council session staying uncharacteristically quiet.

Whatever the room had just witnessed, nobody seemed in a hurry to talk about it in the hallway.

—

I found Lyra at the window.

She was standing with her arms crossed, looking out at the courtyard below, where two of the afternoon guards were doing their rotation change. Just watching. The kind of watching you do when you’re not really looking at what’s in front of you.

I came and stood beside her without saying anything immediately.

"Elder Saltzman," she said, after a moment.

Not a question. More like testing the name in the air to see what it felt like.

"He may know more than he said," I told her.

"He may also not. Both are possible."

"Someone coached Matthew. Someone made sure he’d take that exit before talking."

She didn’t turn from the window.

"That kind of loyalty doesn’t happen on its own. It’s built. Over time."

"Yes," I said.

"Which means whoever we’re looking for has been here a long time." She paused. "Or has had help from someone who has."

I didn’t answer that. We both already knew what shape the answer took.

She was quiet for another moment.

"This isn’t over," she said finally. Her voice was low and even, not resignation but something harder than that. The voice of someone who has already finished grieving the situation and started thinking about what comes next.

I didn’t tell her it was. I didn’t give her the version where the worst was behind us, because she would have seen through it immediately and it would have cost me something I couldn’t afford to lose with her.

"No... It isn’t."