ELENA
Catherine Ashford the Luna, matriarch, society figure, the woman who held charity functions and spoke at inter-pack summits about the importance of family had killed her firstborn son to keep her criminal empire intact.
I find it hard to believe that a mother would kill her own son.
I watch Dominic absorb this.
Watch the colour drain from his face.
“She told me it was Vivian’s fault,” he says slowly.
“That you’d convinced him to go.”
“She planted that story.
She knew you’d believe it.
She knew you’d blame Vivian and keep her close so you’d never ask the right questions.” I look at him uninterruptedly.
“She has been running every character in this play for twenty years.
Including you.”
His hands are shaking and for a very long time it’s been a while i’ve seen him behave this way.
Good.
He should be shaking.He needs to go through the same trauma I had to deal with.
“Dominic.” I say his name, because someone has to pull him back from whatever edge he just stumbled to before he does something he might end up regretting.
“Your grief is valid.
But we need to move.
Right now, the question isn’t what she took from us.
The question is how we take her down and how we can do it without any traces being found.”
He looks at me.
I look back with a scorned face.
“Where’s Alexander?” I ask Jiang.
“Already at Nightshade with Damien.”
“Then take us there before the day is over.”
The Nightshade estate is lit like a war room.
Every senior packmate Damien trusts is in the main hall when we arrive.
Tactical maps spread across every table.
Legal documents sorted into colour-coded folders.
Laptops open on surveillance feeds.
My brother has been busy.
He is halfway across the room when I walk through the door, and he stops.
Like he completely stops when he sees Dominic behind me.
The two men look at each other.
Damien trained with Dominic for five years.
Called him a friend.
Introduced him to me.
Watched him break me anyway.
“Damien,” Dominic says.
“You have approximately thirty seconds,” Damien says pleasantly, in the tone all Nightshade wolves know means the Alpha is one breath away from shifting, “to prove to me you’re worth keeping alive because I don’t mind feeding your bones to the hungry wolves out there.”
“Dom?” I start.
“He gets thirty seconds.”
“I know,” Dominic says.
And then he does something that clearly costs him everything.
He drops his Alpha posture, “I know about your father’s pack crest.
Elena kept it in the drawer beside her bed for three years, because she said it was the only thing from home she had left.
I never asked why she needed it.
I never asked about anything.” He exhales.
“That’s not even the worst of what I did.
It’s just the thing I keep coming back to.
She had one drawer.
And I never thought to open it.”
Silence.
Damien looks at me.
I look at the ceiling.
“Fine!” my brother says.
“You live.
But you work for me until this is over.”
It is, I reflect, the most efficient peace negotiation I have ever witnessed.
Alexander appears from a side room.
Our eyes meet.
He looks at me with the professional efficiency of someone checking for injuries, and when he finds none, his expression eases by exactly two degrees.
“Glad you made it,” he says.
“You sent Jiang for me.”
“I send Jiang when I can’t go myself.”
There’s something behind that sentence.
I let it sit where it lands.
“Walk me through what we have,” I say, moving to the tactical table.
“All of it.”
What they have is devastating.
Alexander who, I am learning in careful pieces, has been investigating Catherine Ashford for eleven months on behalf of the inter-pack governance council and lays it out in cold, precise detail.
Twenty years of financial fraud.
Pack levies siphoned into offshore accounts.
Protection schemes run through legitimate businesses.
And at the centre of it all, a forged series of documents tying all the money to shell corporations with two consistent signatories: Dominic Ashford and Elena Grey.
“She named me on these before our mating ceremony,” I say, staring at a document dated nearly four years ago.
“I wasn’t even an Ashford yet.”
“She filed a retroactive amendment six months into your marriage,” Alexander confirms.
“By that point you’d signed enough legitimate documents that a forger could reproduce your signature precisely.”
“This is unbelievable!” I sprang up on my feet feeling devastated.
I set the document down very carefully, because if I don’t, I am going to do something with my hands that isn’t appropriate in a room full of witnesses.
“She is extraordinarily thorough,” I say.
“Yes.”