12. Leo
LEO
The blood-covered prophecy page sits in an evidence bag on the table, and I want to set the entire resort on fire.
Brynn won’t stop staring at it.
“You’re not sleeping in that room again,” I say.
“It’s my room.”
“It was your room.”
She crosses her arms, fuming. “You can’t just relocate me like luggage.”
“Watch me.”
I’m already carrying her bag. She didn’t pack it. I packed it, badly, with whatever I could grab while my wolf paced under my skin demanding I move her somewhere with stone walls and one door I could stand in front of.
The Obsidian Suite has both.
It’s reserved for visiting bloodline heads. Warded six ways. The kind of room you put someone in when you’d rather die than lose them.
I don’t examine that thought too closely.
“This is ridiculous,” Brynn says, trailing me down the corridor. “I’ve worked here for eight years. I know every ward in this building.”
“Clearly not the ones that failed.”
That shuts her up…for about four seconds.
“Rude,” she mutters.
I push open the suite doors. Black marble. A fireplace already lit. A bed the size of a small country, which I will not be sharing, even though my wolf has opinions.
Brynn walks past me and drops onto the sofa like she’s lived here for years.
“Fine,” she says. “But I want snacks. The good ones. The ones the kitchen pretends don’t exist.”
“I’ll have them sent up.”
She blinks. “I was joking.”
“I wasn’t.”
For a moment she just looks at me. Something flickers across her face that isn’t annoyance. Then she pulls a cushion into her lap and hugs it, and my wolf settles a fraction, because she’s here, behind stone, behind wards, where I can see her.
I hate how much that helps.
“You’re staring,” she says.
“I’m assessing the room.”
“You’re staring at me.”
“You’re in the room.”
She throws the cushion at my head. I let it hit me.
Tristan arrives forty minutes later wearing the expression of a man who has heard gossip and intends to enjoy it.
“So,” he says, leaning in the doorway. “The Obsidian Suite. Bold.”
“Shut up.”
“I’m just saying. That’s a lot of room for one terrified matchmaker and one emotionally stunted Alpha.”
Brynn raises a hand from the sofa. “I’m right here.”
“I know.” Tristan grins at her. “You look radiant under threat. Has anyone told you that? The danger really brings out your eyes.”
I growl before I decide to.
Tristan’s grin widens.
“There it is,” he chuckles. “Right on schedule.”
“You’re supposed to be helping,” I tell him.
“I am helping. I brought Evander.”
He steps aside. Evander walks in without looking up from the tablet in his hands, drops into the nearest chair, and starts pulling up the resort’s security architecture like the rest of us aren’t here.
“Hello to you too,” Brynn says.
“Someone accessed the ward grid from inside the building,” Evander replies. No greeting. “Three nights ago. Same window the page appeared.”
The room goes quiet.
Even Tristan stops smiling.
“Show me,” I say.
Evander turns the tablet. Lines of access logs scroll past, timestamped, neat. He taps one.
“Here. A credential was used to enter the matchmaking records vault. Then the security feed for that corridor cuts out for eleven minutes.”
“Eleven minutes,” I repeat.
“Long enough to leave a page in a locked room and walk out.”
Brynn comes to stand beside me. Close. Too close for someone trying to keep his wolf calm. She smells like the storm and like something underneath it that I’ve stopped being able to ignore.
“Whose credential?” she asks.
Evander’s jaw tightens. “That’s the part I don’t like.”
“You don’t like a lot of parts,” Tristan says.
“This one more than usual.” Evander swipes again. “The credential belongs to a staff account that was deactivated two years ago. A matchmaker who left. Except the account logged in.”
“A ghost,” Brynn murmurs.
“A cover,” Evander corrects. “Someone reactivated a dead account so the trail leads nowhere.”
I stare at the screen.
Whoever did this knows the system better than the people who built it.
That means it’s not an outsider.
That means it’s one of us.
Dominic chooses that exact moment to arrive.
He doesn’t knock. He never knocks. He walks in eating something he definitely stole from the kitchen and surveys the room like a man arriving late to a play he’s already seen.
“Okay, who died,” he says.
“Nobody,” I tell him.
“Yet,” Tristan adds helpfully.
Dominic spots the evidence bag on the table. He picks it up before I can stop him.
“Don’t touch that.”
“Too late.” He turns it over, frowning at the dried blood. “Cheerful. Is this the threat page? Because the handwriting is genuinely terrible. If you’re going to threaten my brother’s witch, at least have penmanship.”
“I’m not his witch,” Brynn says.
“She’s not my witch,” I say.
We say it at the same time.
Tristan makes a small, delighted sound.
Dominic sets the bag down. “Anyway, I came to say someone’s been in the lower service tunnels. The ones we sealed.”
Evander looks up sharply. “How do you know that?”
“Because I was in the lower service tunnels.”
“Why were you in the sealed tunnels?”
Dominic shrugs. “I get bored. Anyway, the seal on tunnel four is scratched up. From the inside.”
Cold runs down my spine.
“Show me,” I say again.
We don’t all go.
I make Brynn stay. She argues. I win, mostly because Tristan agrees with me for once and parks himself between her and the door with a grin and a deck of cards he produced from nowhere.
“We’re going to play a game where I let you beat me,” he tells her.
“I’ll beat you for real.”
“Even better.”
I leave them to it.
The service tunnels run beneath the resort like veins. Cold. Damp. The kind of dark even my eyes have to work in.
The deeper we go, the more the resort’s hum fades behind us. No music. No magic. Just the drip of water somewhere ahead and the scrape of our boots on old stone.
Dominic leads. He moves through the dark like he was built for it, no hesitation, no light. Evander follows, scanning everything, his tablet glow painting his face blue.
“How often do you come down here?” I ask Dominic.
“Often enough to know it’s never this quiet.”
He doesn’t elaborate. He never does. But I catch the tightness in his shoulders, and I file it away with all the other things my youngest brother knows and won’t say.
The seal on tunnel four is exactly as Dominic described. Deep gouges in the metal. Frantic. Someone trying to get out, or something trying to get in.
I crouch and run a finger over the marks.
“Not claws,” I say. “Tools.”
“Someone propped it open,” Evander says. He’s already photographing it. “Then resealed it to look untouched. They missed the inside.”
“Sloppy.”
“Or rushed.” Evander straightens. “People get sloppy when they’re scared of being caught.”
I breathe in.
Old air. Mold. The mineral cold of stone that never sees the sun. And under all of it, faint, almost gone, a scent I can’t place. Witch magic, but wrong. Bent. Like something sweet left out too long.
My wolf rises, hackles up. Every instinct I have wants me topside, between this and Brynn.
“Someone was down here,” I say. “Recently.”
Dominic goes still. The joking drains out of him in a way that reminds me he’s better at this than he lets anyone believe.
“Then where’d they go?” he asks quietly.
Evander pulls the tunnel’s access records the second we’re back in range of a working terminal.
He stares at the screen for a long moment.
“Fuck!”
“What?”
“The footage.” He turns the tablet. “Every camera in the tunnel network. The last seventy-two hours.”
“What about it?”
“It’s gone.”
I look at the screen. He’s right. Where the recordings should be, there’s nothing. Not corrupted. Not damaged.
Just deleted.
Cleanly. Completely.
“That’s not possible,” I say. “The system backs up to three separate vaults.”
“All three are empty.” Evander’s voice has gone flat, which is how I know he’s furious. “Someone didn’t just erase the footage. They erased the backups. And the logs that would show the backups being erased.”
“So we have nothing,” Dominic says.
“We have less than nothing.” Evander sets the tablet down very carefully, like he doesn’t trust himself to hold it. “Whoever this is didn’t break in. They had access. Real access. The kind only a handful of people in the entire bloodline have.”
The hallway feels colder.
I think about the deactivated credential. The resealed tunnel. The page that was left in a locked, warded room while Brynn slept.
Someone walked through every protection we have and left no trace they were ever there.
Because they were never supposed to leave a trace.
Because they belong here.
I head back to the suite with my jaw locked so tight it aches.
Tristan’s still playing cards with Brynn. From the look on his face, she did beat him for real. She’s smiling. She has no idea what we found.
I want to keep it that way for exactly one more minute.
I don’t get it.
“Well?” she says, looking up.
I open my mouth.
Evander walks in behind me and answers before I can soften it.
“Someone with full bloodline clearance accessed the tunnels, left the page, and erased every record of it from a system that was built to be unerasable.”
Brynn’s smile fades.
Tristan sets the cards down.
“You’re saying it’s one of us,” Brynn says slowly. “Someone here. Someone with access.”
“I’m saying,” Evander tells her, “that we just spent three hours trying to find a trail.” He looks at me, and for once there’s no cold detachment in his eyes. Just something that looks a lot like fear.
“And every single trace of the intruder has vanished.”