He pulls out his tablet.
"I put the board meeting on hold and pulled Marie's file. The watermarks and stamps were fake. The entire documentationof her parents' designation was fabricated." He sets the tablet down. "I asked Marie if she could prove any of what she was claiming. She said not unless I wanted to ask around the Hollows. She claims everyone there knew her family."
Rhys's face goes white.
I look at him.
His jaw is set, his hands flat on the table.
"That's where I found Rhys," Malcolm says. "The Hollows. That's where he was when I—" He stops.
"I know," Chase says.
The Hollows. A district on the edge of town that everyone knows by reputation and most people avoid. Shady businesses. Connections to human trafficking that go back years.
"I did check her story," Chase continues. "The man she claims is her father is currently in prison. Not just for the murder of his mate—which is documented—but for charges involving human trafficking. Both alphas and omegas."
The word sits in the room.
Rhys doesn't move.
"The board checked his file," Chase says. "It corroborated her. Omega daughter named Marie. And a younger son, also omega." He pauses. "That's the only brother Marie has. The man claiming to be her brother when she was dropped off at Ragon's home isn't really related to her. She refuses to say who he actually is at this point. Her real brother, the omega, went missing after the father was imprisoned. He'd been staying with a woman named Mel that claimed to be their cousin. Marie said she was no cousin of hers."
Mel. The woman to came to take over my kitchen and belittle me not long after Marie arrived at Ragon’s.
Rhys goes very still.
Chase looks at him.
"Mel," Rhys says, quiet. "She ran logistics for the ring." He looks at the table.
The silence that follows has a different quality.
Chase nods. "Marie wouldn't elaborate on Mel, but she knows more than she's saying." He pauses. "That's a thread I'm going to keep pulling."
I think about Marie at Ragon's in those early weeks, before everything became war. How she looked sometimes when she thought nobody was watching—tired in a way that didn't match how I usually saw her.
"The board," Finn says. "What did they decide?"
Chase looks at him. Then at all of us.
"After learning about the falsified paperwork, the father's criminal record and Marie's corroborating testimony—they were embarrassed. Again." His expression is dry without quite being satisfied. "They've been embarrassed twice now in close succession because of their omega handling. They don't like it." He pauses. "They agreed to overturn Alex's flag, on the condition that no further incidents occur."
Malcolm makes a sound.
"It's not a perfect condition," Chase says. "But it's real. The flag is gone."
Nobody speaks.
The flag is gone.
I sit with that. The thing that has been the wall between Alex and everything he wanted for ten years. Gone. Because Marie—Marie, who I watched destroy my life in Ragon's house for months—demanded a registry meeting and threw a fit until they listened to her.
"There's one more thing," Chase says.
He reaches into his jacket pocket and produces a folded piece of paper. He holds it out to me.
"She asked me to give this to you," he says. "I haven’t read it."
