(Rhea POV)

The white flag appeared on the north ridge at midmorning.

One wolf. Human form. Walking at an unhurried pace down the slope toward our gate with his hands visible and a strip of white fabric tied to a staff. Behind him, nothing. No escort. No backup visible on the ridge line.

Sera was the first to say it. "Trap."

"Maybe," I said. "Let him reach the gate."

He reached the gate. A middle-aged wolf, somewhere between forty-five and fifty, with graying temples and the well-maintained appearance of someone who'd never missed a meal or slept outside. He wore traveling clothes that were a little too clean for three days on the road. His boots had mud, but only on the soles.

"My name is Harlan," he said. "I carry Council credentials and a message for the Alpha of this territory." He produced a leather wallet and opened it. Council seal. Official dispatch authorization. The kind of documentation that took weeks to forge and seconds to verify if you knew what to look for.

Kieran knew what to look for. He was standing beside me, close enough that I could feel the tension radiating off him like heat.

"Let him in," I said.

Kieran didn't answer. Not then.

* * *

He answered in the command room, after I'd told Torren to put Harlan in the guest cabin and post two wolves outside.

"I know that man," Kieran said. He shut the door. "Harlan Voss."

"Voss? Related?"

"Distantly. The name is common in Council families. But it's not the name that matters." He put both hands on the command table and leaned forward. "Harlan isn't a diplomat. He's Aldric's intelligence staff. He ran the information analysis unit for fifteen years. He briefed me every week when I was Alpha King."

"So he's here to spy."

"He's here to map your territory, count your fighters, assess your defenses, and report back to Aldric. The diplomatic offer is a door. What walks through the door is a camera."

I watched Kieran's face. He was doing the thing he did when his past and his present collided — holding very still, processing the conflict between the man he'd been and the man he was becoming. The intelligence officer who'd sent people like Harlan into enemy territories was now standing in the territory that Harlan had come to assess.

"Then we turn him away," I said. Testing.

"Yes."

"And Council says we refused diplomatic contact. We're the ones who won't negotiate. The aggressive rogues who reject peace."

Kieran paused.

"That's the other half of it," I said. "If we turn him away, Council uses it. 'We sent an envoy and they refused.' Every neutral pack that's wavering gets a reason to stay away from us. The embargo tightens."

"And if we let him in, he maps everything we have and reports it to Aldric."

"So we let him see what we want him to see."

The silence that followed had weight. Not the silence of agreement. The silence of two Alphas standing on opposite sides of a decision, each right about something, neither wrong enough to concede.

"You want to play intelligence games with Aldric's personal analyst," Kieran said. "A man who's been doing this for longer than you've been alive."

"I want to control the information he takes home. Show him strength. Hide the gaps. Let him report that we're bigger, better supplied, and more organized than Council expects."

"And if he sees through it?"

"Then he sees through it. But he'll still have seen what we showed him, and some of it is real. The walls are real. The fighters are real. The alliance is real."

Kieran looked at me across the table. The map between us, marked with territory lines and supply routes and the careful notations that had become the architecture of our daily life. He wanted to protect. I wanted to use. Both instincts were correct.

"This is our first real argument," I said.

Something shifted in his expression. Not a smile — Kieran didn't do smiles in tactical conversations — but the subtle loosening of tension that meant he'd moved from opposition to assessment.

"It won't be our last," he said.

"No. But in this territory, two Alphas means two votes. I'm not pulling rank."

He was quiet for a moment. Then: "Show him the training yard. Full strength. Show him the walls — they'll hold up to inspection. Show him the population count. Don't show him the supply stores. Don't let him near the south cabins where the new refugees are."