Drab grey and hard plastic. They're the kind of chairs that says whatever happens in that room, you don't get to be comfortable while you wait for it.
I've been in them for forty-five minutes.
Jasper is in the chair beside me. He hasn't said much since we arrived, which is fine. I haven't had much to say either. We've spent the last several weeks talking constantly—coordinating, intercepting, running interference every time Ragon got close to finding her. We developed a rhythm without meaning to, a shorthand. Like you do with someone when the stakes are high enough that you don't have room for anything except the work.
He got close more than once.
That's the part that kept me up at night. Not the guilt, though there was plenty of that. It was the nearness of it. Ragon going damn near feral in his search, his grief curdling into something I didn't recognize, lashing out at nothing and everything, the house becoming a place you moved through instead of lived in. Jasper and I were running every lead to the ground before it could reach him. Covering our tracks. Covering each other's.
It was exhausting and I was good at it. I'll miss having a purpose that clean.
I glance at Jasper.
He's staring at the closed door across the hall with the expression of a man taking inventory of a decision he's already made.
I know that expression. I've been wearing it since I watched Drake put his clothes back on and try to leave that room only to get barked back into submission by the man I called my pack lead for so many years.
That was the moment I understood. Not that Ragon was wrong—I'd known that for a while. But that it wasn't going to fix itself. That somebody had to stop waiting for it to.
Drake got there first.
I'm glad he did.
The door opens and Chase steps out, suit jacket on, expression professionally neutral in the way that means things are going well. He looks at both of us.
"You're up," he says.
I draw a long breath.
Here we go.
The hearing room is larger than I expected. There's a long table. Six registry board members on one side—four men, two women, all alpha, all with the practiced impassivity of people who make decisions about other people's lives for a living.
Chase gestures to two chairs across the table and Jasper and I sit.
Then the other door opens.
A staff member walks Ragon through.
He looks how he's looked for weeks. Worn down. The bun he's kept his hair in for as long as I've known him is half undone, strands loose around his jaw. The circles under his eyes have become permanent fixtures. He looks like a man who has been grinding himself down and doesn't know how to stop.
He also looked exactly like this at six this morning when I poured him a cup of coffee. He thanked me without looking up from his phone. I said nothing. Put the pot back and left the kitchen.
I knew it would be the last cup I ever made him.
Ragon takes his seat at the end of the table and then his eyes sweep the room and find me.
I watch his face.
He goes through it all at once—confusion, then recognition, hen a crack—brief, raw—before he shuts it down. His jaw locks. His eyes move to Jasper and the crack seals over completely, replaced by a hardness I’ve only seen a few times since I met him.
Jasper's betrayal lands as a shock.
Mine lands differently. Heavier. It takes more from him to absorb. He looks away.
Chase begins catching us up on what he's already presented—Jasper's reports, the recordings, the clinical assessments from Arden, the documented pattern of what happened in that house over the last year and a half. He moves through it methodically, and I watch Ragon's expression go stonier with every piece. He's doing the math. He's understanding, probably for the first time, the full architecture of what was built around him while he was busy watching it from inside.
He figures out that Jasper was never there to bond into his pack.
