(Rhea POV)

Kieran's investigation team entered Silverpine at dawn. I wasn't there — that was the agreement. My presence on Silverpine territory would turn an investigation into a war, and Kieran made it clear that he preferred to collect evidence before destroying people. A measured approach. Foreign to me, but effective.

I got the reports in real time. Torren had connections I didn't ask about — former pack wolves, exiles who still had friends on the inside, the kind of network that forms when people leave a place but never fully stop watching it.

The birth records came first.

Lily's file listed Petra as the biological mother. Home birth, attended by Vera and a midwife whose name was listed but whose current location was marked as "unknown." No prenatal records — not in Silverpine's medical archives, not in any neighboring pack's clinic. No hospital certificate. Just a handwritten home birth document signed by Vera in ink that hadn't faded the way six-year-old ink should, because it had been written well after the fact.

My records were more interesting. Prenatal visits, documented from eight weeks through thirty-four weeks. Blood work, ultrasounds, the kind of thorough tracking you'd expect from a pack healer monitoring an Alpha's mate. And then — nothing. The file ended on the date of my exile. No delivery record, no discharge, no death certificate for the baby they told me hadn't survived.

The story was written in what was missing. A pregnant woman with thirty-four weeks of medical records and no delivery. A newborn with no pregnancy trail but a "home birth certificate" in grandmother's handwriting. Two files that, placed side by side, made a single narrative so obvious that a child could have connected them.

"Kieran's interviewing Petra now," Torren said. He was standing in the doorway of the war room, which was where I'd been since five in the morning, staring at a map I wasn't seeing.

"Alone?"

"With a Council witness. Standard procedure."

I nodded. I went back to not seeing the map.

The report from Petra's interrogation arrived forty minutes later. Twenty minutes of actual interview. The rest was documentation.

Kieran had separated her from Declan, from Vera, from anyone who could coach or pressure or remind her what the approved story was. Just Petra in a room with the Alpha King and a Council recorder, and whatever she'd been carrying for six years finally finding a surface it could land on.

She broke fast. That told me something — she'd wanted to break. People who've been holding a lie don't crack under pressure in twenty minutes unless they've been pressing against the seal from the inside, waiting for someone to give them permission to let it go.

I read the transcript.

"I knew she wasn't mine."

"From the beginning?"

"Vera brought her to me the night after the exile. Hours after. The baby was newborn — cord stump still fresh. Vera said, 'This is your daughter now. You will raise her. You will not ask questions.' I was twenty-two. I'd just married the Alpha. I was terrified of that woman."

"Did you ask questions?"

"Once. Early on. Vera looked at me and said, 'A loyal wife doesn't need answers.' I never asked again."