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Then Lexi calls me, and I tell her everything I told Grey. She’s already heard it, so she mostly asks if we’re okay and whether or not she should call my dad.

“I appreciate the sentiment, but no,” I tell her. “I’ll catch up with him when I’m back.”

“Let me know if there’s anything else you need,” she says, and I know she just wants to feel useful.

“I will,” I promise her. “If Violet remembers anything else, let me know.”

“You’ll be my first call.”

By the time I hang up from that, we’re forty minutes from the city, and I have temporarily run out of calls to make. The silence that fills the car is different from the silence on the drive up. That kind of quiet had been soft. Anticipatory. Full of things neither of us had said yet.

This one has edges.

And I know, without having to ask, that none of it has to do with Lena or Ramsey or pack threats. This is about us. What happened last night. And what I said about it afterward.

Nash is looking out the passenger window. His elbow rests against the door, his jaw in his hand, and he’s watching the trees with an expression I can’t see from this angle but suggests brooding.

I focus on the road.

This is the right call, I tell myself. You have a pack to protect and a war to win, and whatever happened in those woods stays in those woods, and that is the only version of this that makes any sense.

My wolf makes a sound that is not agreement.

Stay out of it, I tell her.

She goes quiet. But she turns her face away from me, which is its own commentary.

Twenty minutes from the city, Nash says, without preamble: “The leak had to have known the exact coordinates for that camp.”

“Yes.” My voice sounds raw as I say it.

“Which means it was someone in that meeting or someone who had access to Donahue’s notes afterward.”

“The coordinates weren’t in the general patrol brief,” I say and let the rest of the sentence remain unspoken.

I can feel him looking at me then, trying to gauge my mental state as we both process the truth of it. Someone inside that conference room is the leak.

Nash says nothing, but I can’t let the roiling in my stomach win out. So eventually, I say, “I’ve been through everyone in that room. I keep getting stuck.”

“Because that would mean it’s someone you trust.”

“Of course it’s someone I trust.” The words come out sharper than I intend.

He nods. Doesn’t offer solutions or platitudes, which I appreciate. This isn’t a problem that gets solved in a moving car. It gets solved by going home and looking everyone in the face and using every instinct I have. Determining the mole might not be as hard as I think, once I look them all in the eye. The hardest part will be what I’ll have to do with that information once I have it.

I tighten my hands on the wheel.

The city appears ahead of us. Indigo Hills rising out of the basin in its glittering stubborn way, beautiful and brutal and mine.

I feel the transition physically. The moment the city closes around us like a hand. The woods falling away. The person I was inside them, the one who said it wasn’t nothing for me either in the dark, the one who let him lay her down in the grass, the one who said okay and meant it with her whole body, receding like something I dreamed.

Good, I tell myself.

My wolf says nothing. She’s still giving me the silent treatment.

We pull into the estate just over two hours after leaving the trailhead. The gates open. Guards nod. Everything is exactly where I left it, but nothing is the same. Least of all me.

I park and cut the engine.