Chapter 28
Eli
The chairs outside the hearing room are the kind designed to make you feel small.
Drab grey and hard plastic. They're the kind of chairs that says whatever happens in that room, you don't get to be comfortable while you wait for it.
I've been in them for forty-five minutes.
Jasper is in the chair beside me. He hasn't said much since we arrived, which is fine.
I haven't had much to say either. We've spent the last several weeks talking constantly—coordinating, intercepting, running interference every time Ragon got close to finding her.
We developed a rhythm without meaning to, a shorthand.
Like you do with someone when the stakes are high enough that you don't have room for anything except the work.
He got close more than once.
That's the part that kept me up at night.
Not the guilt, though there was plenty of that.
It was the nearness of it. Ragon going damn near feral in his search, his grief curdling into something I didn't recognize, lashing out at nothing and everything, the house becoming a place you moved through instead of lived in.
Jasper and I were running every lead to the ground before it could reach him.
Covering our tracks. Covering each other's.
It was exhausting and I was good at it. I'll miss having a purpose that clean.
I glance at Jasper.
He's staring at the closed door across the hall with the expression of a man taking inventory of a decision he's already made.
I know that expression. I've been wearing it since I watched Drake put his clothes back on and try to leave that room only to get barked back into submission by the man I called my pack lead for so many years.
That was the moment I understood. Not that Ragon was wrong—I'd known that for a while. But that it wasn't going to fix itself. That somebody had to stop waiting for it to.
Drake got there first.
I'm glad he did.
The door opens and Chase steps out, suit jacket on, expression professionally neutral in the way that means things are going well. He looks at both of us.
"You're up," he says.
I draw a long breath.
Here we go.
The hearing room is larger than I expected. There's a long table. Six registry board members on one side—four men, two women, all alpha, all with the practiced impassivity of people who make decisions about other people's lives for a living.
Chase gestures to two chairs across the table and Jasper and I sit.
Then the other door opens.
A staff member walks Ragon through.
He looks how he's looked for weeks. Worn down. The bun he's kept his hair in for as long as I've known him is half undone, strands loose around his jaw. The circles under his eyes have become permanent fixtures. He looks like a man who has been grinding himself down and doesn't know how to stop.
He also looked exactly like this at six this morning when I poured him a cup of coffee. He thanked me without looking up from his phone. I said nothing. Put the pot back and left the kitchen.
I knew it would be the last cup I ever made him.
Ragon takes his seat at the end of the table and then his eyes sweep the room and find me.
I watch his face.
He goes through it all at once—confusion, then recognition, hen a crack—brief, raw—before he shuts it down. His jaw locks. His eyes move to Jasper and the crack seals over completely, replaced by a hardness I’ve only seen a few times since I met him.
Jasper's betrayal lands as a shock.
Mine lands differently. Heavier. It takes more from him to absorb. He looks away.
Chase begins catching us up on what he's already presented—Jasper's reports, the recordings, the clinical assessments from Arden, the documented pattern of what happened in that house over the last year and a half.
He moves through it methodically, and I watch Ragon's expression go stonier with every piece.
He's doing the math. He's understanding, probably for the first time, the full architecture of what was built around him while he was busy watching it from inside.
He figures out that Jasper was never there to bond into his pack.
I can see the moment it happens. His eyes going flat and distant, like a flame turning to ash.
He doesn't say anything.
He doesn't mention Vee or tell the board who actually has her. His lips thin. He waits. Whatever's happening behind his eyes, he keeps it there.
I don't know if it's dignity or defeat. Probably both.
Chase finishes his presentation and then nods at Jasper.
Jasper gives his account steadily. The day-by-day of it. The comfort bans and the nest destruction and the favoritism so blatant it was documented in reports. He doesn't embellish and he doesn't protect anyone. He just says what happened.
The board members take notes.
Then Chase nods at me.
I look at Ragon.
He's not looking back. He's looking at the table in front of him, his hands flat against it, very still.
I face the board.
And I tell them everything.
Every comfort ban. The time she knelt. The nest—I describe that in detail because that one deserves detail, the way she looked after.
How she moved through the house for weeks like a light in her had gone out.
Drake gagging and sobbing because he didn't want to participate and Ragon pushing him to anyway.
Vee not even trying after. How her scent suppressed until she was practically invisible in her own home and none of us said anything meaningful about it.
That we all knew something was wrong and chose the path of least resistance every single time.
I say it plainly. I don't soften it or explain it or offer context that might make it easier to hear. I tell them I'm at fault too. I know I am and it deserves to be said.
The alphas across the table look at me and Ragon and sometimes Jasper with an expression that needs no translation.
They're right to look at us that way.
One of them asks about Drake. Chase explains—bond broken, currently recovering, not present.
Ragon's face moves when Chase says it. Grief.
Sharp and brief, there and gone before he can manage it.
I feel the faint echo of it through our bond, a distant ache from a connection already damaged.
He didn't know Drake was sick. He was too wrapped up in himself to think about Drake, and now he realizes what his obstinacy cost.
That’s grief that I don't have the bandwidth to feel for him right now.
A few minutes later Chase sends a text, and Arden comes in from a side door with a briefcase and a stack of papers. He stands tall and delivers his clinical assessment in the precise measured voice he uses for professional settings, working through everything he documented over his sessions.
Then he puts the briefcase down.
"I have one more thing to address," he says. His voice hasn't changed in register but something underneath it has—sharpened, like a blade before it does damage. "Not as a clinician but as the Director of Omega Advocacy at the OPA."
The board members straighten slightly.
"Verena was placed in Alpha Ragon's home without the registry verifying the terms of his offer.
He presented a conditional arrangement to her—a five-year probationary period before permanent bonding and the registry failed to catch it.
Failed to flag it. Failed to follow up with a single wellness check in five years, despite unclaimed omega protocols that mandate annual contact. "
He lets the silence sit, his eyes drifting over the board members in turn.
"Quite frankly, you dropped the damn ball.
I've brought this before the OPA and we will be conducting a full investigation into placement procedures and follow-up compliance for this registry branch.
What happened to Verena did not occur in a vacuum.
Your registry created the conditions that made it possible.
" His eyes move down the table. "I would encourage the board to review those procedures before we do it for you. "
The board is very quiet.
He nods then packs his papers.
Chase squeezes his arm before he goes.
Arden pauses at the door. His eyes find Jasper for just a moment, a tension in them that doesn't belong in a registry hearing room, and then he's gone.
I file it away without commentary.
The board confers briefly among themselves. One of them makes a note.
Another exchanges a look with the woman beside her.
I glance at Ragon.
His face is closed. He's looking at the table again.
The board retreats to deliberate and we all file into the hallway.
The staff member who brought Ragon in stands beside him.
Ragone stares at us. His face is tight and closed and I know that face like I know my own hands.
I've watched it manage things for years.
Watched it go through grief and joy and that controlled fury he gets when something has gone wrong that he refuses to show.
I want to bend my neck.
Old habit. The reflex is still there even when the loyalty is gone.
But Drake broke his bond for her. Drove sick through a storm and put himself on his knees in front of Vee because it was the right thing to do.
I stand straight and meet Ragon's eyes.
He looks away first.
It doesn't feel like winning. It doesn't feel like anything except necessary.
The door opens a few minutes later.
We file back in and retake our seats.
The female alpha who asked about Drake stands.
She clears her throat. "The verdict of this registry hearing is as follows.
" Her voice carries the practiced cadence of someone who's delivered this speech a hundred times.
"In the matter of Omega Verena, we find an established pattern of neglect and abuse.
Custody is revoked from Alpha Ragon Charles, effective immediately. "
She stares directly at Ragon, her lip curling slightly. "You will return Verena to the registry immediately and you are flagged against future omega custody. There will be a fine of $25,000 and three hundred hours of community service."