The interview has been up for forty minutes when I find it.
I'm standing in the kitchen in my robe, coffee going cold on the counter, watching Amasten Zakiel look directly into a camera and say my name on national television like it's a simple thing. Like it costs him nothing. The host is trying to keep up and he's already three sentences past her, correcting the record with the specific calm of someone who decided exactly what he was going to say before he sat down and is simply delivering it now.
"To Benitova Marcel and her friends — I'm sorry. Please find it in your hearts to forgive me for my impudence and carelessness."
I stop the video.
I stand there for a moment. Then I put my phone face down on the counter, finish my coffee, and go upstairs to get dressed.
He followed through.
Which means every other thing he said at that dinner — he meant those too.
I need to do something with that information before it does something with me.
***
Veldstraat is forty minutes from the mansion. I take a cab to the territory boundary and walk the rest, which gives me forty minutes to talk myself out of this and fail.
Alexandra's maps live in my memory whether I want them there or not. The warehouse sits deep in Zakiel ground — not border, not disputed edge, the middle of it — and that's the point. Last month I handled his dealers because they crossed into ours. That was defense. Clean. Justifiable by pack law even if Alexandra didn't love my method.
This is a message. I want him to know the Marcel pack is still standing and that I make my own terms and that his follow-through, however noted, does not buy him anything from me.
That's what I tell myself for forty minutes.
I almost believe it.
***
There are four of them outside the warehouse. Four — and positioned differently than dealers usually position themselves, less bored, more outright, like they've been told to expect something.
Like someone called ahead.
I clock it too late.
The two I can see are the distraction. The two I can't see until they're already behind me are the ones that matter, and by the time I've processed that I'm already being moved — with the firm professional efficiency of people who have been told to bring her in without damage.
"You're going to want to stop," I say, very calmly.
"Miss Marcel." The one on my left has a decent grip and the decency to sound apologetic about it. "Mr. Zakiel would like a word."
They put me in a car.
There's no blindfold or no zip ties. Just a black car with clean seats and tinted windows and two of them in front not speaking, and me in the back doing a very controlled assessment of my options and arriving at the same answer every time: wait.
I still have the knife. They didn't search me, which is either an oversight or a message of its own. I leave it where it is.
We drive for twenty minutes. The city changes around the tinted windows — less foot traffic, more space between buildings, the particular quiet of somewhere that has been deliberately kept quiet. We stop at what looks from the outside like a converted industrial building, the kind that costs a significant amount of money to look like it doesn't.
Inside it's warm. Clean lines, high ceilings, the kind of space that functions as an office and a base and something more than both. There are people moving through it with the coordinated ease of a pack that knows its structure and trusts it.
Nobody looks at me with hostility. Several of them look at me with curiosity, which is somehow more unsettling.
I'm shown to a room — something in between a cell or conference room. A long table, two chairs, windows that look out onto an interior courtyard. A glass of water waiting.
I sit. I don't touch the water. I wait.
He comes in alone.
Dark trousers, a simple shirt, sleeves pushed to the elbow. The unhurried quality is still there but the restaurant performance is gone — this is him in his own space, which is a different thing entirely and I file that difference away carefully.
He looks at me for a moment before he sits.
"You knew they'd be waiting," I say.
"I had a feeling you'd come." He sits across from me. Sets something on the table between us — a small case, dark wood, the size of a jewelry box. Doesn't open it yet. "After the interview."
"I wasn't coming because of the interview."
"I know." The corner of his mouth moves. "You were coming to make a point. You made it. The Marcel pack is standing and you make your own terms." He looks at me. "I heard you the first time, Benitova."
"Miss Marcel."
He lets that sit for a moment. Then he reaches forward and opens the case.
Seven seeds.
Small, dark, faintly luminescent the way things are when they carry something older than their appearance suggests. They sit in a row in the velvet interior of the case like they've been waiting there a long time.
I look at them. Then at him.
"You know what those are," he says. Not a question.
I do. I've heard of them the way you hear of things in the wolf world that you're not supposed to want — in whispers, in the margins of conversations that stopped when I walked into the room, in the pack records I was never allowed to read and read anyway at fifteen because I've always been like that.
Seven seeds from the Lunara root. One taken at the dark of each moon for seven months. At the end — permanently, irreversibly, completely — human.
No shift. No pack bond. No frequency locked on some Alpha across a room that you can't explain and can't turn off. Just a woman with red hair who wants to be an actress and can walk onto a set and stay there without anything underneath her skin threatening to surface at the wrong moment.
Just a life that belongs entirely to her.
I look at the seeds for a long time.
"What do you want," I say finally.
"Access to Marcel land." His voice is even. "There's a specific site. Old ground, pre-pack, before your family claimed the territory. I need to get to it."
"For what."
"That's not part of this negotiation."
I look up from the seeds. "You want me to hand you access to Marcel territory — land my sister has been protecting for years — and you won't tell me why."
"I'll tell you why when we have an agreement."
"That's not how agreements work."
"It is when one party is offering something worth this much." He nods at the case. "You've wanted that your whole life. I know that. You know I know that. So let's not perform skepticism we don't both feel."
I hate that he's right. I hate the specific clarity of being known by someone who has no business knowing you.
"How did you find them," I ask.
"I've been looking for a long time." A pause. "For reasons that are also not part of this negotiation."
I look at the seeds again. Seven months. Seven dark moons. And at the end of it — everything I actually want. The life I've been building piece by piece outside the wolf world, the auditions and the callbacks and the career that was supposed to be mine before the casting directors' polite pity and the crash and Amasten Zakiel walking through every door I thought I'd closed.
"I need to think about it," I say.
"Of course." He closes the case. Slides it across the table toward me. "Take them. Think about it."
I look at the case. "You're giving them to me before I've agreed to anything."
"I'm showing you I trust you to come back." His eyes are steady on mine. "You're not the kind of person who takes something and disappears, Benitova. You'll always come back."
The room is very quiet.
I pick up the case.
It's lighter than I expected. The seeds shift faintly inside — not a sound exactly, more of a sensation, like something recognizing it's been picked up by the right hands.
"One more thing," I say, standing.
He looks up at me.
"The next time you have people waiting for me on a street — ask instead." I hold his gaze. "I'm not one of your pack. You don't collect me."
He opens his mouth to respond.
The door opens first.
One of his men. Urgent. Eyes moving from Amasten to me and back in the specific way that means something has happened and it can't wait and it involves both of us whether I'm supposed to be here or not.
"Sir." The man's voice is low. "It's the Marcel estate."
I go very still.
"There's been a breach."