Bearing the Pack (Dragonblood Dynasty #13)

1. Chapter 1

Decker

This meeting is not going to go easy. I’ve come in after spending hours on the bike, twenty minutes under a locker-bay shower, and still haven’t got the road out of me. Or maybe it isn’t the road. Maybe it’s what I’ve done.

Rafael and Sable. The wolf and his mate. They deserve to be together, and I don’t care what the Aurora council thinks about it. I’m not going out there to haul in a male who’s already had his name stripped off him just so they can lock him up again while they decide what to do with him.

The healer already knew what to do.

I hold on to that and reach for fresh clothes. Jeans, a button-down, then my boots. Two pairs in the locker—the road boots and the second pair. I leave the road boots. The others are worn in over six years, and where I’m going, I want to be able to stand a while.

The meeting room is below ground. White walls on three sides, buried in maps and screens and schematics; the fourth wall a one-way window into the council corridor. The wards hum at the threshold, and my ears pop, the way they always do crossing a held line.

I stop in the doorway. Long table, twelve chairs, six people in the room.

Viktor is at the head, loose-shouldered, casual—except I can feel the tension coming off him.

A woman with cropped red hair works a tablet by the far screen, her body turned half toward the room.

Open enough to be polite. Closed enough that no one crowds her.

There’s a male on the long side I don’t know. Charcoal jacket, two silver rings on his left hand, an open folder in front of him. The pages are already read and turned face-down. Whatever’s in them, he doesn’t want me catching it off-angle.

The other three I know. Nadia, Tabitha, Vanya.

The folder was pulled before I hit the lobby. The chairs are set. This isn’t a conversation waiting to happen. They’ve already had it once, without me in the room.

“Decker.” Viktor stays seated. “Come in. Take a seat.”

I step inside. The door seals behind me. I don’t sit. The chair they’ve left me is across from the councilor on the long side, which means they want me in it. So I stand.

“Thanks for coming on short notice,” Viktor says.

It wasn’t notice. It was a summons. He says it the same way every time, and I let him.

“You know Nadia Frost, Elder Arrowvane, and Tabitha Zidane.” He glances at the women. Two of them nod. Tabitha doesn’t. “Zoe Fade has some information to share. And Councilor Davis is here to make a determination for the council.”

Davis looks up. “Mr. Decker…”

“Just Decker.”

He nods. “We have a question, Decker. Two questions, in fact. Whether Wednesday’s events represent one compromise or two. And whether the operative running the leak case is still the right person to run it.”

So that’s the meeting.

“Top to bottom,” Davis says. “The escape and the road. Your read.”

“All right.”

He folds his hands over the pages. “We’ve got the sequence from the medical wing. Transport logs. Gate coverage for when Healer Marsh went out the door in a stolen van. What we don’t have is your side of it.”

“I don’t have a side.”

His jaw works. “You were in pursuit. You tracked them. And you released them.”

“I wasn’t in pursuit.”

“But you found them.” Vanya, even and quiet. The data sheet lies open in front of her. “You’re logged as being in the vehicle bay between oh-one-fifty and oh-two-twenty.”

“I was.”

Davis leans in. “You saw the van go out.”

I let a beat pass. Not because I need it. Because I know the game, and I won’t play it.

“I saw the van go out.”

He waits. Turns a page.

“You didn’t stop it. You didn’t flag it. You stood in that bay and watched a containment subject leave the grounds without authorization, and your log shows nothing.”

“That’s right.”

“Explain it.”

“There’s nothing to explain. They left the way your records show.”

He lets it sit. Looks at Viktor. Viktor doesn’t move.

“You didn’t stop them.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I thought they should leave.”

Viktor breathes out hard through his nose. “That wasn’t your call, Decker.”

“It wasn’t going to be stopped.” It’s Nadia. Even. Her eyes on Viktor, not me.

“It was under control.”

“Was it?” She sits forward. “I sat with Sable that week. By the second evaluation, she was barely holding together. Dr. Fell had supervised access to Rafael—while he was strapped down. Can you imagine what that did to him? That monster was the one who tortured him for years.”

“He was safe from her.” Viktor doesn’t flinch.

“How could they know that? The Syndicate offer was still on the table. The way Aurora was handling him was forcing Sable’s hand, and the moment I walked out of that last conversation, I knew.

She was leaving with him that night. Whether Decker stood in the bay or not, it didn’t change what was coming. ”

Nobody speaks.

“In that moment, it was the right call,” I say. “I brought them in once already, and it got him locked up. I wasn’t going to do that to him twice.”

Davis isn’t done. “We’d already determined that subject three-oh-six-seventy was —”

“His name is Rafael.”

He clears his throat. “Of course. We’d determined that Rafael posed a potential threat to those around him, and we had a protocol in place to manage it.”

“Your protocol is what made him a threat. I told the director I didn’t approve of what was happening in that wing. His note’s on file. The healer made the call I’d already made. I didn’t stop the van, and when I found them, I didn’t bring them back. I’d do it the same way tomorrow.”

Davis’s hand goes still on the page.

“You understand the position that puts the council in.”

“No. I understand the position you’ve put me in.”

His nostrils flare. “This isn’t the council’s first concern about your methods. Independent assets. Off-book contacts. The way you tend to —”

“Find people?”

He stops.

“That’s the job,” I say. “You want a clean ledger, hire an accountant. The methods that found those two in the mountains the first time are the methods you’ve got a problem with tonight. Same methods. You can have both or neither.”

I don’t raise my voice. I don’t move.

He looks at the folder. Closes it. “The council will have more questions.”

Viktor lets the quiet stretch, then leans forward on his forearms.

“That conversation can wait for another day,” he says to the room. “What Decker’s movements actually handed us is bigger.” He glances at Vanya. She nods.

“We finally have the proof the council’s been looking for,” she says.

“That outpost road was supposed to be clear. By the time Healer Marsh turned the key on Wednesday night, Creed already had an ambush set. Which means someone inside this building told Creed they were coming. Someone with access to the security feeds, flagging that a van was on the road.”

“The mole,” Zoe says.

Tabitha’s hand tightens around her pen. She doesn’t speak.

Viktor’s eyes come back to me. “You’ve been working this case a while. Your reports have been thin.”

I say nothing.

“Don’t take it as a fault,” Vanya says. “I spent twenty-one years inside the Syndicate without getting caught. People who operate at that level don’t leave easy trails.”

Viktor nods. “Tonight, we have a candidate.”

“All right.”

“Zoe came to me forty-eight hours ago with patterns she’d been catching on her side. Routing access. Window-of-opportunity work. I told her to keep digging. After the escape, those patterns started pointing at a person.” He turns to her. “Walk him through it.”

Zoe steps to the screen. She doesn’t look at Davis, or at me. She looks at the tablet, then up at the wall. A routing diagram I recognize appears, next to a column of access timestamps I don’t.

“Three windows on Wednesday’s transport,” she says.

“The schedule went out Tuesday morning to everyone analyst-tier and up. The revised route went to six people Tuesday afternoon. The clear-time—when the mountain road was logged free of Aurora movement—was never sent anywhere. It updates live on the security desk in the restricted wing. To put Creed in the right place at the right hour, you’d need eyes on that feed.

Without it, you’d be setting a rig on a road that still had our vehicles on it. ”

She pulls up a list. Six names. The fourth one is mine.

“These six badged into the restricted wing in the windows that mattered.” The list shrinks. “Cross-reference against who’s actually cleared to be in there, and one credential stays lit that has no business in that column.”

A single line lights up.

Tabitha’s eyes go to the screen. She doesn’t move.

“An operative?” I say.

Zoe shakes her head. “A survivor.” Her mouth goes tight. “And I hate pointing at one of the ones who got out of those places. But the logs don’t lie.”

“Recommendation?” Viktor says.

“Pull the activity file. Start looking, and see what comes up,” Zoe says.

Viktor nods. “Decker.”

“I’ll pull the file.”

Davis closes his folder again. He hasn’t read from it since Viktor took the room. “It seems we have an obvious suspect.”

I don’t say what I’m thinking—that the name on that screen is probably sitting in a room somewhere right now, drinking coffee, with no idea today’s the day they got to be the obvious suspect.

The obvious suspect is rarely the right one. But you pull what you’ve got.

“Double down on this,” Viktor says. “Full attention. You report to me. Only me. No paper. No ride-alongs. Pull what you need from intel and keep it under wraps.”

“Understood.”

“I’ll give the council my recommendation when you’ve worked the file,” Davis says. “Not before.”

“That’s all,” Viktor says.

I turn for the door.

“Decker.” Tabitha’s voice, behind me.

I stop. I don’t turn.

“The last man inside Aurora who started asking the questions you’re about to ask was Samien Khalef.”

I turn to face her. Something moves across her face—the grief still raw under it.

“And we buried him.”

“I know.”

She holds my eyes. “Don’t be the next one.”

I shut the door behind me.