Rafe occupied the corner near the window.
He was doing something with his hands. Picking at the hem of his sleeve, over and over, fingers moving in a rhythm that seemed almost compulsive. When he caught me looking, he stopped. Smiled. But his eyes tracked to the door like he was calculating the distance, and something about that made the back of my neck prickle.
Gideon stood near the cold fireplace looking like a man waiting for sentencing. Gray cast to his skin, lines carved deeparound his mouth, power expenditure written in the way his hands trembled.
Daniel stood at the head of the table, and the weight on his shoulders looked like it might finally break him.
“Tell them,” Daniel said. His voice came out rough. Scraped raw. “Tell them what you found.”
Gideon moved to the table. Placed both palms flat against the wood.
The temperature in the room dropped.
“The wards are dying.” Gideon's voice carried that strange resonance it got when he was pulling power. “Not naturally. Someone's been poisoning them from inside.”
Silence crashed through the room like a physical weight.
Gideon's eyes swept the assembled pack. “Someone's been siphoning power from the Evernight Forest's ward network. Corrupting it from the inside out. Every ward stone, every protection marker, every boundary line.” He paused. Let that sink in. “All of it compromised.”
“That's not possible.” Sienna's voice cracked on the last word. “The wards have been here for generations. They're tied to pack blood. To the Alpha line. No one outside the family should be able to touch them.”
Gideon pulled a worn leather notebook from his coat, flipped it open to pages covered in runes and diagrams that seemed to shift when I wasn't watching directly.
“The corruption goes deep,” he said. “Someone's been working on this for a while. Patient. Careful. Degrading the protections bit by bit until the foundation is rotten.”
“Can you trace it?” Evan asked.
“The corruption is tied to a living source. As long as whoever cast this spell is alive and maintaining it, I can only clear it temporarily. It'll come back. Again and again, until we cut out the root.” Gideon turned another page in his notebook. “But tocut out the root, I need to find where it's planted. And someone's been very careful to hide that.”
“Then we search.” Daniel's hand pressed flat against the map. “Every inch of the territory. Every abandoned building, every cave, every?—”
“And while we're searching, the wards keep dying.” Luke's voice cut through the room like a blade. “While we're chasing shadows, our borders get weaker. Our families get more exposed.” His eyes tracked to me. Held. “Maybe we should talk about who we're taking strategic advice from.”
The room went still.
Daniel's head turned slowly. The temperature, already cold from Gideon's magic, seemed to drop another ten degrees.
“Careful, Luke.”
“I'm being careful because someone has to.” Luke pushed off from the fireplace, and I could see the wolf in his posture. The challenge in the set of his shoulders. “We've got a corruption no one can explain, wards that are failing for the first time in three generations, and we're standing around discussing it with a human who's been pack for what? A few months?”
“That human,” Daniel said quietly, “has bled for this pack.”
“Has he? Or has he bled near this pack?” Luke's jaw tightened. “His wife died because rogues came for wolf business. His son got tangled up in wolf problems. That makes him a victim, Daniel. Not a strategist.”
“I lost my wife to the same rogues that have been targeting your pack.” I kept my voice level. Calm. Anna would have been proud of me. “The same ones that nearly killed your Alpha's son. The same ones being coordinated by whoever is poisoning your wards. So yeah, I've got some personal investment in seeing this thing burned out at the root.”
“Personal investment isn't the same as understanding.”
“Then help me understand. Tell me what I'm missing that a few decades of work didn't teach me about foundations and rot and the way cracks spread when you ignore them.”
Luke's eyes flashed. Not golden, not quite, but close enough that the wolf was right there under the surface. “This isn't about that.”
“Isn't it? Because from where I'm standing, you've got a structure that's been compromised from the inside. Something's eating away at the supports, and you can keep slapping patches on the surface, or you can tear down to the studs and figure out where the damage actually starts.” I held his gaze. “I know something about that. Ask anyone who's hired me.”
“This isn't a house or a set of numbers, Harrington. This is pack business. Wolf business. The kind of thing your species has been running from for thousands of years.”
“Enough.” Daniel's voice cracked through the room like a whip. “Luke. Stand down.”
