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Lexi stands. “I need to tell Grey.” She looks at me, the Mia conversation already folded away behind her alpha face. “Thank you, Nash. For your help today.”

“Anytime. We’ll resume the interviews once you’ve had a chance to talk to Grey.”

She leaves. Marcus starts to follow.

“Marcus.”

He stops.

“What did Lovaro say?”

Marcus grimaces. “Harrow resigned.”

I go still. “Did they find evidence of wrongdoing, or did he go voluntarily?”

“Does it matter?”

“It matters if I need to kill him.”

“Then resigned voluntarily. Officially.” Marcus drops into the chair Lexi vacated and rubs a hand over his jaw. “He walked out in the middle of the advanced tactics block. Lovaro’s been covering the classes himself.”

“Lovaro hasn’t taught field strategy in fifteen years.”

“Which is probably why he’s been using the words catastrophe, dereliction, and your immediate return in the same sentence.”

I lean back, jaw tight. “The term can survive a few days without me.”

“The term, yes. The board’s patience, less so.” Marcus taps the folder once. “They’re already saying your absence is proof the college can’t function without you. And if the school can’t function without you, then you’ve built a monument to your ego instead of an institution.”

“Lovaro said that?”

“No. I did. But he was circling it.”

“You’re not helping.”

He grins, but it’s short-lived. “I’ll call him,” he says. “Coordinate what I can. But Nash.” He stops, frowns. And I already know what he’s going to say next. “You need to go back and take care of it yourself.”

“I’m aware,” I say darkly.

“It might need to be sooner rather than later,” he adds.

“I’m aware,” I say again, this time with more of an edge.

He holds up his hands.

I look at the folder on the table. At the photo of a woman who has been helping Ramsey attempt to dismantle everything Grey and Lexi are trying to build—everything Mia fought for.

“He’s going to make a move soon. I can feel it,” I say.

Marcus doesn’t argue. I look up at him again, decisive. And hoping like hell that I’m not wrong when I say, “We stay and finish this first.”

Marcus holds my gaze for a moment. "And after this is finished?"

I think about the drive home from the stakeout. The way she couldn't stop almost looking at me and what that means from a woman who is the most deliberate person I’ve ever met.

I think about standing beside her in the meeting room yesterday, watching her run a room full of wolves who would follow her anywhere, and feeling something shift into place in my chest that I don't have a word for yet but that I know I'm not walking away from.

The pack needs me. The war college needs me. Four years of building something real out of nothing, and the infrastructure of it is starting to show the strain of my extended absence in ways that the board can only patch for so long.