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“Did you take it?” I demand.

He blinks.

“If you took it, I’ll⁠—”

He chirps once, loud and urgent, then darts to my pack and shoves his nose into the hidden pocket.

I grab it and check again.

I take it and warily check the hidden pocket one last time. My fingers brush something so subtly I almost miss it. When I reach in again, I realize it’s nothing more than a torn slip of paper. I snatch it free and smooth it open between my fingers, scanning the messy handwriting with a growing sense of horror.

Ramsey’s scrawl is one I’d know anywhere.

I think it’s time you let fate decide who you belong to, don’t you?

I sink down on the edge of the bed, struggling to breathe.

Echo looks back at me with a mournful expression. I wonder, fleetingly, if he’s sorry, too, but mostly because another pickpocket got the jump on him.

I swallow hard against the bile in my throat as reality sets in. Ramsey stole my Null. Which means he knew I was taking it in the first place. More inside information he’s managed to glean. Except this secret was known only by me. So how the hell did he find out?

As if echoing my thoughts, Echo chitters and jumps away, tail swishing like he’s ready to fight on my behalf. I stare after him, trying desperately to calm down and think clearly about what to do next and failing, failing, failing, failing…

17

NASH

Iwake feeling mostly fine, which is both a relief and an insult considering I passed out in front of half the mafia pack yesterday. My head is clear. My palm is healed. My wolf is steady.

Mostly.

There’s something under my skin now that wasn’t there before. Not mine, exactly. Not Grey’s either. More like a single ember left behind after standing too close to a wildfire. Small enough to ignore. Hot enough that my wolf keeps circling it warily.

I tell myself it’ll fade eventually.

Mia isn’t at breakfast or the morning meeting. When I ask, Grey tells me she’s on a personal errand. I don’t press it since we’re in a room full of people I’m still not sure whether I can trust, but it leaves me unsettled. Mia’s not one to put personal shit before work, especially at a time like this.

I text her, but she doesn’t respond. Then, it’s time for me to start the pack interviews, and I lose myself in the task for a few hours. Marcus manages to get out of all but the first one, thanks to a tip that comes in from one of our scouts about the missing hex witch, Davina. Until the leak is found, I don’t trust anyone else to follow up, so I send him to run it down.

By lunchtime, I feel like I’ve been interrogating hostile witnesses for a week straight. It’s not the process that’s draining. Grey and I built a clean framework—structured questions, careful sequencing, pauses to give the alphas time to assess. But digging into their personal lives as an outsider feels wrong. Even with Grey knowing my secrets, it’s not fair that I should get to learn all of theirs in a way that is designed to make them feel guilty until proven innocent.

Then again, it seems to have helped that I gave up mine first. Everyone I talk to is a hell of a lot more cooperative today than they were yesterday. With Grey’s help, I’ve already cleared Dutch, Crow, Razor, and Camila.

Razor’s interview was the fastest of them all at eleven minutes flat. He sat across from me with his arms crossed and his jaw set like a man prepared to be offended by the whole enterprise and then answered every single question with a bluntness that made the process faster than it had any right to be. When he left, I glanced at Grey. He nodded.

Clear.

Of course he is. The guy’s an open book.

Dutch took forty minutes, mostly because he is apparently constitutionally incapable of giving a short answer to anything and, at one point, went on a tangent about pack communication infrastructure that was genuinely interesting and had absolutely nothing to do with what I’d asked.

I redirected him twice.

He was also honest, not to mention thoroughly and exhaustively loyal to Grey, and I now know more about Dutch’s philosophy on operational transparency than I ever expected to.

I also know he’s in love with Andy Balistrieri.

Crow was the quietest. And the hardest to read—at least for me. He sat across from me with the particular stillness of someone who has spent a long time being overlooked and now prefers it that way. He answered everything in complete sentences that contained exactly what was asked and nothing more. A lot going on behind those eyes. None of it is treachery. Grey’s nod confirmed it.