Chapter 16 - Olivia
Olivia arrived at six-thirty with the folder and two cups of coffee, one of which she set on his side of the desk without ceremony.
Viktor looked at the coffee. Looked at her. She was already seated, the folder open, three coloured tabs marking sections she’d added overnight—he could tell they were new because the ink was fresh and the handwriting had the slightly uneven pressure of someone working by lamplight after midnight.
“I reworked the timeline,” she said, pulling the first tab forward. “You had Brennan’s market trips mapped by date. I remapped them based on what else was happening in the compound on each trip—patrol rotations, ward maintenance, anything that created movement or noise. There’s a pattern.”
He sat. Took the coffee. It was black, no sugar—Olivia knew how he drank it. He directed his attention away from that and toward the folder.
“Show me.”
“Brennan’s first trip—March fourteenth—coincides with the ward recalibration on the eastern boundary.
Caitlynn was running the new frequency tests, which meant half the compound was watching the tree line or standing around the anchor points.
Maximum distraction, minimum oversight on internal movement. ”
She traced the timeline with her pencil, and he followed the line of it—her annotations precise, her reasoning visible in the connections she’d drawn between events that, separated, looked innocent and, together, looked coordinated.
“The second trip—March twenty-eighth—falls during the southern patrol rotation gap. The one I flagged at the briefing. Anyone moving north through the compound during that window would have passed through unmonitored territory for twenty minutes.”
“And the third?”
“April ninth. The morning Kahn called the full pack assembly to discuss the new ritual.” She tapped the date with the eraser end.
“Every wolf in the compound was in the great hall. Every pair of eyes pointed inward. If you wanted to move a message or a package out of the territory without being seen, that was your morning.”
Viktor leaned forward. The coffee sat untouched beside his elbow, and she continued without looking up, which told him she already knew she had his full attention and didn’t need him to confirm it.
“You cross-referenced these against the ward breach reports,” he said.
“Against the breach reports and the patrol shift-change logs. The breaches you identified in the overnight reports last month—two of them fall within forty-eight hours of Brennan’s trips. I don’t think that’s a scheduling coincidence.”
He drank the coffee while the silence held—a working silence this time, two minds running the same problem from different angles, the space between their conclusions narrowing toward a point.
“That narrows Brennan,” he said. “What about Maren?”
“Maren is where it gets complicated.” Olivia turned to the second tab.
“I went through the archive access logs—the ones I pulled from the vault last week. Maren’s name appears seven times in the twelve weeks before the kidnapping, which isn’t unusual for someone in her position.
She handles scheduling, correspondence, filing.
But three of those visits are logged outside business hours. ”
“Late entries could be overflow. Administrative catch-up.”
“They could.” She looked at him, and her eyes held that steady, assessing quality he’d been learning to navigate.
“Except the sign-in log doesn’t match the vault’s internal record.
Maren signed in at eight p.m. on the eleventh.
The vault’s access stamp shows the lock engaged at seven-forty-two and disengaged at seven-fifty-one.
She was inside for nine minutes before she logged her entry. ”
“She was in the vault before she logged herself in.”
“Which means she either forgot to sign in when she arrived and backdated it—sloppy, but possible—or she deliberately delayed the log so the timestamp wouldn’t match security rounds.” Olivia closed the folder. “I don’t have enough to prove which, but I know how to find out.”
“How?”
“I’m going to talk to her.”
Olivia watched the objection travel across his face. He saw her see it—saw the moment her chin lifted by a fraction, the slight shift in her weight toward the front of the chair, bracing.
“Not an interrogation,” he said.
“Obviously not an interrogation. I’m going to have a conversation.
” She uncapped her pen and held it loosely, a conductor’s baton for the argument she was about to make.
“Women in this compound talk to me, Viktor. They bring me things—complaints, gossip, concerns about their children and their mates, and the way the patrol schedules leave them eating dinner alone four nights a week. I’ve been fielding it since I was twenty, and I know who trusts me and who performs trust in my presence and who avoids me because I’m Kahn’s sister and proximity to power makes them nervous. ”
She tapped the pen against the folder once. “Maren has been nervous around me for three weeks. I thought it was about the kidnapping—everyone’s been on edge—but if she’s hiding something, I’ll hear it. People don’t guard their stories the same way around me that they guard them around you.”
“Because they’re less afraid of you.”
“Because they don’t think I’m watching.” The corner of her mouth shifted—an expression she hadn’t offered him before.
“The advantage of being the Alpha’s sister instead of the Alpha’s Beta is that people assume my attention is social.
They talk in front of me like I’m furniture, and I’ve learned more from one lunch in the dining hall than you’ve pulled from six weeks of patrol reports. ”
He sat with that. She was right, and the rightness of it carried a secondary weight he hadn’t anticipated—the realization that Olivia had been running intelligence for years without calling it that, absorbing information through channels he didn’t have access to because the channels were social, informal, built on trust he hadn’t earned and couldn’t replicate.
His approach was structural. Hers was human.
Together they covered ground that neither could have reached alone.
“I’ll go this morning,” she said. “You stay visible—briefing room, patrol review, wherever people expect you. If Maren sees us together and then I show up at her door, she’ll connect it.
But if I come alone, looking bored, asking about the luncheon schedule or the seating chart for next month’s council meeting, she’ll answer without thinking about what she’s giving me. ”
It was a sound approach. The logic held at every joint, the operational awareness running deeper than instinct, the mind behind it trained on people instead of terrain, but applying the same discipline he applied to topographic overlays and patrol rotation schemes.
“And if she doesn’t give you anything?”
“Then she’s either innocent or better at this than we think, and we move to Brennan.
” She stood, tucked the folder under her arm, and paused at the door.
“I’ll report back by noon. Directly. To you.
Not through Kahn, not through Chris. You’ll hear it first, the same way I should have heard the briefing first.”
The correction was precise, a scalpel rather than a hammer, and he took it without flinching because she’d earned the right to deliver it.
She left, and he went to the briefing room where he ran the patrol review with his usual focus while something at the back of his mind kept returning to the way she’d said I’ll report back by noon.
***
Olivia found Maren in the administrative wing at half past nine.
The woman was at her desk in the narrow room behind the main office—close enough to overhear the traffic through Kahn’s study corridor, far enough to be overlooked by anyone not looking for her.
Eleven years of proximity had made Maren part of the landscape, one of those figures you nodded at without registering, whose reliability was assumed because questioning it would have meant questioning the system she maintained, and nobody questioned systems that ran smoothly.
Olivia knocked on the open door. “Maren. Do you have a minute?”
Maren looked up. Mid-fifties, iron-grey hair pulled back tight, reading glasses on a chain around her neck.
Her expression assembled itself into professional warmth with a speed that Olivia noted—the quarter-second delay before the smile, the way her hands moved to center the papers on her desk, a tidying gesture that created the appearance of order rather than serving any functional purpose.
“Olivia. Of course. Sit down.”
She sat. Crossed her legs. Let the silence stretch for exactly long enough that Maren would feel the need to fill it.
“The council meeting next month,” Olivia said. “Kahn mentioned a seating adjustment—something about the visiting delegates from Silver Ridge needing a separate table. Has that come through to you?”
“Not yet.” Maren’s hands settled. “I’ve been buried in the quarterly supply logs. Everything’s been behind since—well. Since everything happened.”
The euphemism was standard. Since everything happened had become the compound’s shorthand for the kidnapping, the ransom, the marriage, the accumulating evidence that the pack’s defenses were thinner than anyone had wanted to believe.
“I can imagine,” Olivia said. “The filing alone must be a nightmare. I’ve been in the archives—the system down there needs an overhaul.”
“God, doesn’t it.” Maren’s shoulders loosened by a degree.
The reading glasses came off the chain and were cleaned with the hem of her sleeve, a self-soothing gesture Olivia had seen her make a dozen times at pack functions.
“I’ve been saying that for years. Nobody listens until the roof’s already leaking. ”
“Some of the vault records are missing. Did you notice? Weeks six through nine—intake forms, ration returns, access logs. All gone.”
She delivered it casually, wrapped in the rhythm of the complaint they’d been building together—two women commiserating about administrative chaos—and she watched Maren’s face the way Viktor would have watched a tree line, tracking for movement, for the twitch that preceded the ambush.
Maren’s cleaning slowed. Her thumb pressed the lens of her glasses with slightly more pressure than the fabric warranted. The delay before she answered was less than a second, but Olivia counted it, and a second was a long time when you knew what to measure.
“Missing?” Maren put the glasses back on. “That’s—no, I hadn’t noticed. I haven’t been in the vault since—” She stopped. Adjusted. “Since before the recalibration, probably. It’s been a busy quarter.”
Since before the recalibration. The vault’s internal access stamp said otherwise—seven visits in twelve weeks, three after dark.
Olivia let it go. Didn’t push, didn’t probe, didn’t let her face show what the discrepancy meant or where it pointed.
Instead, she redirected the conversation to seating charts and delegate protocols.
The kind of administrative minutiae that Maren handled with genuine ease and visible relief.
They talked for another fifteen minutes about nothing that mattered, while the thing that did matter sat beneath the conversation, humming.
When she left, she walked back to the study at a pace that would look unhurried to anyone watching, and found Viktor at the desk with patrol reports spread in front of him.
She sat across from him. “Maren lied.”
He set the report down.
“I asked about the missing vault records—casually, buried inside a conversation about filing. Maren said she hasn’t been in the vault since before the recalibration. The access stamp has her there seven times since, three of them at night.”
“She could have forgotten.”
“She didn’t forget. I watched her when I mentioned the missing records. There was a pause—short, less than a second—where she had to choose what to say, and a person with nothing to hide doesn’t need to choose. She picked the answer that put the most distance between herself and the vault.”
Olivia opened the folder and found the access log, smoothing it flat across the desk so they could both see the columns.
“She also anchored her answer to a specific event—since before the recalibration—which sounds natural but can’t be pinned to a date.
If she hadn’t already been thinking about the timeline, she would have said a while ago, or I don’t remember.
She chose a landmark, and she put herself on the far side of it. ”
Viktor was looking at her. The pen lay untouched beside the reports, his hands still on the desk, and whatever he was doing behind those grey eyes involved something more than reassessing the suspect list.
“You got that from a fifteen-minute conversation,” he said.
“I got that from eleven years of watching people construct their answers in kitchens and hallways and across dining tables, because when you grow up as the Alpha’s sister, everyone is performing something in front of you, and you either learn to read the performance or you spend your life believing the script.
” She closed the folder and leaned back. “Maren’s script slipped.”
“We bring this to Kahn tomorrow,” he said. “Together.”
“Together,” she agreed.