10. Leo
LEO
The kiss still burns on my mouth when the resort goes dark.
Not just the lights. The wards.
I feel it the way I’d feel a heartbeat stopping. One second the air hums with old protective magic. The next there’s nothing. A hollow silence under my skin where seven hundred years of Covenant power should be.
My wolf surges to the surface so fast it hurts.
“Leo.” She’s looking at me like she felt it too.
“What was that?”
“The wards just failed.”
“All of them?”
“All of them.”
She doesn’t ask how I know. She’s a matchmaker. She lives inside this resort’s magic. She knows the difference between a power outage and the resort losing its spine.
We get out of the pools and run.
The main atrium is chaos by the time we reach it. Staff sprint between collapsing displays. A compatibility mirror has shattered across the black marble, glass and silver everywhere. Somewhere a guest is screaming about her villa wards dropping mid-shower.
“Where’s Marguerite?” I ask.
“I don’t know.” Brynn’s already moving, kneeling beside a junior staffer who’s gone white.
“Hey. Talk to me. What’s still holding?”
“Nothing.” The girl’s voice shakes. “The lunar anchors, the bond locks, the perimeter. It’s all gone.”
I scan the room. My brothers aren’t here yet. Good. I need a clear head and Tristan’s mouth doesn’t help.
Then I hear him.
“It’s her.”
A man in a velvet dinner jacket. Old money, old magic, the kind who thinks his bloodline buys him manners. He’s pointing at Brynn.
“That witch has been triggering anomalies all week. The mirror. The chandeliers. Now this.”
A few heads turn. A few mutters agree.
Something cold moves through me.
“Say that again,” I glare at him.
He hesitates. Smart of him.
“Everyone saw the mating alarm she set off.” He recovers his nerve. “Unstable magic. She shouldn’t be allowed near the system.”
Brynn’s still kneeling. She’s gone very still, which is worse than her talking. Brynn never goes quiet. The silence is a wound opening.
I cross the floor.
I don’t raise my voice. I’ve never had to. “Brynn Fairmont has spent the last week holding this resort together while you’ve been drinking wine. The wards didn’t fail because of her. They failed because something attacked them.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I can scent it.” I lean in just enough that he understands the size of the thing in front of him. “There’s foreign magic in the air. It isn’t hers. I’d know hers.”
The words land before I can stop them.
I’d know hers.
Across the room, Brynn’s head comes up.
The man retreats into the crowd. The muttering dies. My wolf settles, barely, like a hand pressing down on something that wants to keep snarling.
Brynn stands slowly. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“Yes I did.”
“People are going to talk.”
“Let them.”
She studies me. There’s a question in her face I’m not ready to answer, so I look away first. The oldest sibling burden. You learn early how to end a conversation before it ends you.
We find the matchmaking core an hour later.
It’s a vaulted room beneath the atrium, lined with floating ledgers and slow-turning compatibility wheels. Half of them have stopped. The other half spins wrong, backward, like clocks losing the argument with time.
Brynn moves through it like it’s her own body. She knows where everything lives.
“This shouldn’t be possible,” she says. “The core is the most protected room in the resort. You’d need Covenant-level access just to open the door.”
“How many people have that?”
“The Marguerite. Evelina.” She frowns. “Maybe a handful of senior staff.”
I watch her run the list in her own head. I watch the exact second she reaches the top of it and flinches away from what’s there.
“Not Marguerite,” she says. Fast. Like she’s slamming a door. “Whatever you’re thinking, don’t. She’s the one who took me in. Eight years ago I had nothing, and she gave me a job and a name and a reason to stay. She’d cut off her own hand before she’d touch that book.”
I don’t answer.
You don’t clear a name because someone loves it. You clear it because the books do. Marguerite has Covenant access. Marguerite is missing. Those are two facts, and Brynn’s faith in her isn’t a third.
But I look at her face, at the way she’s gone fierce and certain over the one person in this place she trusts, and I let it stand. I don’t cross the name off. I just don’t say it out loud.
Some walls you don’t kick down while the person’s still standing behind them.
I crouch beside the central ledger. The book is open. The pages keep rewriting themselves, ink crawling and resettling, trying to repair damage that won’t hold.
I’ve spent fifteen years reading falsified accounts. Doctored numbers. Treaties with one clause too clean. You develop an instinct for the place where a lie sits inside the truth.
This whole book is sitting wrong.
“Brynn. Come here.”
She kneels next to me. Close enough that I can smell rain and something sweeter underneath. My wolf leans toward it. I ignore him.
“This is the master pairing record,” she says. “Every match the resort’s made this season.”
“Find yours.”
She goes still again. “I’m not a guest. I wouldn’t be in here.”
“Find yours anyway.”
Her hands are steady, but I can feel her pulse pick up. The bond does that now. I feel her heartbeat like a second one inside my own chest. I haven’t told her that. I’m not sure I ever will.
The pages turn. Stop.
There she is. Brynn Fairmont, staff designation, then a string of magical notation I can’t read.
But I can read the part underneath. The part where something’s been scraped away and written over.
“That’s an edit,” I say.
“It’s a correction. They happen all the time.”
“No.” I point. The ink under the new entry hasn’t fully settled. Old letters bleed up through the new ones like a bruise under the skin. “Something was here before. Someone deleted it and wrote you in over the top.”
Brynn leans closer. Her breath catches.
“That’s a villa assignment,” she whispers. “Mine.”
She touches the faded layer underneath. A symbol flares weakly, then dies.
“That’s the original,” she says. “Before someone changed it.”
“Changed it to what?”
She looks at me. And for the first time since I’ve known her, Brynn Fairmont has nothing clever to say.
I take over. I make my voice flat, the way I do when a number is about to ruin somebody’s quarter.
“Walk me through it. What does the original entry say?”
She swallows. “It says I was assigned to the east staff wing. Standard. Away from guests. Away from the family suites.” Her finger drags to the new entry. “And this one moved me to the guest villas. Near…”
“Near my family.”
“Near you.”
The room feels smaller.
“Someone changed your assignment,” I say slowly. “On purpose.”
“Assignments don’t change themselves, Leo. Not here.” She’s pale. “And there’s something worse.”
“Show me.”
She turns the page back. Hunts. Stops on an entry that’s been gutted completely. Not overwritten. Removed. A clean black scar where a record used to live.
“This was a pairing,” she says. “A real one. Someone deleted the whole thing.”
“Whose?”
“I can’t tell. It’s gone.” Her jaw tightens. “But you don’t delete a pairing to hide nothing. You delete it to hide who it was supposed to be.”
I stand. My wolf is pacing now, low and hot under my ribs, and for once it isn’t about her body or her mouth or the kiss in the caves. It’s about the fact that someone reached into the most protected room in the supernatural world and rearranged the pieces.
And one of the pieces was her.
“So let me make sure I understand.” I keep my hands very still. Still hands lie better than still faces. “Someone with Covenant access deleted an existing match. Then they took you off the staff roster. And they wrote you into the guest villas instead.”
“Yes.”
“The villa next to mine.”
Brynn doesn’t answer. She doesn’t have to.
My family didn’t end up here by accident. I knew that. Evelina dragged us to this resort the way she does everything, with a smile and a knife behind it. I assumed the manipulation was hers. Maternal meddling. A mother who wants grandchildren and a stabilized bloodline before her sons go feral.
But Evelina wouldn’t gut the core record. She wouldn’t need to. She owns the people who keep it.
This is someone else.
“Leo.” Brynn’s voice is small now. “The mating bond. The one that went off the first night.”
“I remember.”
“What if it wasn’t an accident?”
The question sits in the air between us like a held breath.
I think about the first night. The chandeliers erupting red. Her hand against mine. The alarm tearing through the resort. I’d hated it. I’d told myself it was a malfunction, a chaotic witch and an unlucky touch.
But malfunctions don’t rearrange records weeks in advance.
“You think someone wanted us to bond,” I say.
“I think someone moved me next to you on purpose.” Her hands curl into fists in her lap. “I think someone deleted a real match to do it. And I think the bond that’s been getting stronger every time you touch me…”
She stops.
“Say it,” I tell her, though I already know.
She looks up at me. Her eyes are bright and furious and frightened all at once, and my wolf wants nothing in the world except to put itself between her and whatever did this.
“I don’t think we found each other, Leo.” Her voice shakes on the last word. “I think someone put me in your path. On purpose. And I don’t know why.”