12. Lucian
LUCIAN
We're back at the manor three days when I catch myself choosing Sophie over the pride, and the discovery unsettles me more than any attack has.
It's a small thing. A relocation call comes in during breakfast, a wolf family in Idaho needs a route by nightfall, and my first instinct isn't to reach for the phone.
It's to finish the conversation I'm having with Sophie about her coffee preferences, because she's laughing at something and I like that sound.
I catch the impulse and correct it, but the correction costs me effort it never used to, and I notice.
Hector notices too. He finds me in the study after, closing the door behind him with the quiet that means a hard conversation. "You hesitated this morning."
"I still took the call."
"After you hesitated." He doesn't sit. "I've watched you run this pride for years without a single wasted second. Now there's a woman at your breakfast table and you lose some of those seconds. I'm not judging you for it, Luke. I'm telling you it could be a problem, and problems get people killed."
"You've made this speech."
"I'll make it as many times as I have to.
" His scarred hands stay loose at his sides, but his voice has gone flat and serious.
"An Alpha who's reachable is an Alpha with a pressure point.
They must know by now she matters to the network.
If they learn she matters to you, they stop trying to kill her and start trying to take her, because leverage is worth more.
I've buried people we loved because someone found the safe places.
Burying her isn't something I'd handle well, or you for that matter. " He meets my eyes.
I don't argue, because he isn't wrong. I've spent two decades keeping everyone at a careful distance precisely so no one could be used against me. Sophie dismantled that a while ago, but I'd still do it again.
"I hear you," I tell him. "I'm not going back to distant. But I hear you."
Sophie's waiting in the vault anteroom with a fresh print and an off-white color in her face.
"Stop looking guilty about whatever Hector just said and look at this instead." She slides the page across. "I stopped chasing the diversions. I went after the revision log, every ledger system records who edits an entry and when. Yours were scrubbed, not deleted, scrubbed."
"Explain the difference like I didn't grow up in this."
"Deletion leaves a hole an auditor can see.
Scrubbing rewrites the edit so the changed entry reads as if it was always the original.
" She taps a decades-old column. "Someone went back through your family's history and smoothed every alteration until the theft looked native to the book.
This isn't a thief taking a slice off the top.
This is a forger rewriting your past so the crime was never there to find. "
The cold arrives before I've fully understood it. "How far back?"
"Thirteen years, minimum. That's the earliest scrub I can date.
" She holds my gaze, refusing to look away from the part that will hurt.
"Your father signed the ledger that first one lives in.
Which means either he approved a correction he didn't understand, or someone with access equal to his made it look like he did. "
My father taught me every rule I follow now.
I inherited what I believed was a clean house and I've told myself since finding all this out that I simply failed to guard it well enough.
Sophie is telling me the rot was already inside the walls when the keys were handed to me, that a man I trusted absolutely was deceived under his own name, or worse, he was the deceiver.
"You bring me the worst version of everything," I say.
"I just bring the honest version. The worst part comes free. Being betrayed by someone good doesn't make your father a fool. It makes the traitor talented. Don't confuse the two. He'd want you angry at the right person."
That night I do what I've avoided for weeks. I start investigating my own leadership circle.
Not openly. Openly would warn them, and warning them would end everything.
I do it the way Sophie would, through records rather than confrontation.
I pull the vault-access history for the four names on her spreadsheet, and I cross it against travel logs and board attendance and the dates of every scrub she's found.
I work alone in the study past midnight, and I hate every minute of it, because each name belongs to a face I've trusted with lives.
Sophie finds me at two. She doesn't ask what I'm doing. She sees the files and understands, and instead of leaving me to it, she pulls a chair around beside mine and takes half the stack.
"You don't have to do this part with me," I tell her. "These are my people to doubt."
"That's exactly why I'm doing it with you.
" She uncaps a pen. "You'll flinch when you hit a name you love.
I won't. You need someone who can read Marchetti's travel log without remembering she carried you through your father's funeral.
" She glances at me. "Loyalty's a blindfold, Lucian.
I'm your eyes for when you can't look straight. "
We work until the windows go gray, I stop being the Alpha auditing his own and become half of a pair doing a grim job well, and the loneliness I've carried since I took the chair loosens.
By morning the pride has quietly made its decision about her.
I see it at breakfast. The cook sets her place at the family table without being asked.
The teenager with the healed arm brings her printouts before I've requested them.
My mother's oldest staff, who went silent around every outsider I've ever brought here, passes Sophie the bread and asks after her work.
She earned it by being useful and honest and entirely herself.
Hector watches it happen from the doorway. When Sophie throws a balled-up napkin at me for stealing the little left of the coffee, he almost smiles.
"She's still a problem," he murmurs as I pass.
"I know."
"Just so we're clear." He claps my shoulder, and the warning's still there, but underneath it something has shifted. "Your mother's going to love her. God help us all."