Sable POV
The call comes at eleven forty-seven at night and I answer it because I always answer calls I am not expecting.
You never ignore the calls that could become problems. You answer them. You find out exactly how big the problem is. Then you make it smaller.
"Sable."
I recognize the voice immediately. Dax. Stone Pack senior tracker, twelve years with the pack, steady and dependable and not someone I would have expected to be calling me at midnight. I made sure of that. Three weeks ago when I was building the account calibrating the witness statements, making sure every story aligned Dax was the easiest one to manage. He was grief-shocked and exhausted and he trusted what I told him because I was Lyra's best friend and who lies about something like that.
Apparently he has been thinking.
"I've been going over that night," he says. No greeting. His voice has the careful quality of someone who practiced what they were going to say and is now slightly off-script. "What I actually saw. And there are things that don't match up with what you described."
I sit down. I keep my voice warm and steady the way I always do warm and steady is the most disarming combination in existence. "Dax. You were in the middle of a raid. Fire, enemy wolves, chaos on every side. Memory does strange things in situations like that. It fills in gaps, rearranges the order of things "
"I know what I saw."
A beat. I let it sit. Then: "What did you see?"
"I saw her running. The Ashfall girl. She was running toward the south quarter, toward where Lyra was. The fire cut her off there was a second ignition point nobody expected, it came from the east wall, and it blocked the corridor she was using. She tried to go around twice. She couldn't."
My hand tightens on the phone. Just slightly. Not enough to show.
"Grief does strange things to memory," I say again, more gently. "What you're describing doesn't match what three other people saw. It doesn't match the memory crystal. Your mind is trying to make sense of something that doesn't "
"I've been a tracker for twelve years," Dax says. "My memory is the job. I don't fill in gaps."
The warmth in my voice drops by exactly one degree still warm, just with something underneath it now. "Dax. I hear you. But think about what you're suggesting. You're saying that everyone else who was there is wrong and you alone remember it correctly? After everything that happened? You need to be very careful before you take something like that to the Alpha. Think about the timing. Think about how it looks."
Silence.
I wait. I know how to wait. Silence is where people talk themselves out of things if you just let it stretch long enough.
"Think about the other things I know about you," I say quietly. Gently. The way you say something that is a threat without ever technically being a threat. "Your private business. The arrangement you have with the Caldwell pack that Caius does not know about. The money that goes somewhere it should not go. Think about whether a twelve-year tracker with questions about a closed case is more valuable to this pack than a twelve-year tracker who has some things to sort out privately. Think about which version of you Caius meets."
The silence that follows is a different kind.
"I'm not sure," Dax finally says. Quieter now. The practiced speech is gone.
"I am," I say. "I'm very sure. Get some sleep, Dax."
I end the call.
I set the phone face-down on the table and sit in the quiet of my apartment and breathe. In through the nose. Out slow. The way you breathe when something almost went wrong and didn't and you need to let the near-miss settle before you can think clearly again.
I look at the memory crystal on the table in front of me.
It is beautiful work. Genuinely. Three weeks of careful construction every magical detail calibrated, every shadow correct, every second of footage precisely placed. I had to find a crystal artist who worked without questions, which cost a great deal and required a favor I will not describe, and then I had to study the layout of the south quarter for a week before I could reconstruct it accurately. I showed Caius a version of that night where Wren Ashfall stands perfectly still in a corridor with a clear path to Lyra, watching, doing nothing, while Lyra's voice goes quiet.
I have watched it twenty times. It is perfect. I believe it myself.
I pick it up and turn it in my fingers and think about Caius.
I think about the night after the raid coming to find him in that dark office, broken in a way I had never seen him broken, grief stripped down to just raw edges and nothing holding them together. I sat beside him for six hours without asking for anything. I have been sitting beside him through every dark thing for four years. I know what he looks like when he is falling apart and I know how to be exactly what he needs and I have been patient and present and I have never once pushed for what I wanted because I knew eventually he would look up and see me standing there and understand.
Then the auction happened.
He could have let her go to any buyer. Could have let the rogue system take her. Instead he paid a million dollars to bring her into his home and I knew the second he told me, I knew it was not about revenge. A man who wants pure revenge does not pay a million dollars. He watches from a distance and feels nothing.
The bond is the reason. I knew it the moment he said her name.
I cannot let the bond win.
I open the message thread with Caius and type: I heard she's recovering. Don't let her manipulate you. Remember what the crystal showed.
I watch the screen. Thirty seconds. Forty.
His reply comes.
I remember everything.
Three words. I read them twice. They should reassure me they say exactly what I need them to say. He remembers. He is not forgetting. The crystal is holding.
But I have known Caius Stone for four years and I have read his messages for four years and I know the difference between the way he writes when he is certain and the way he writes when he is saying the certain thing because someone needs to hear it.
I remember everything.
He is saying it to me.
Or he is saying it to himself.
I set the phone down and look at the crystal and for the first time the very first time since I built it I feel something cold move through my chest.
Dax is not the only one starting to ask questions.
I open my laptop and pull up everything I have on the Ashfall girl.
If she starts talking, I need to be ready.
And if Caius starts listening
I need to make sure there is nothing left for him to hear.