POV: Evelyn
At 8:17 on Monday morning, I found a sixty-thousand-dollar payment that should not have existed.
Red Cedar Biologics had sent it to North County Recovery four days before Kara disappeared. The description contained only two words—RESEARCH MATERIALS—and a patient number I did not recognize.
I opened the transfer ledger from the night of the mountain crash and searched the digits.
One result appeared.
Not Kara's number.
Mine.
A second sixty-thousand-dollar payment had cleared the morning Grant drove my car through the guardrail. Whoever authorized it had paid North County before I was ever placed inside an ambulance, examined by a doctor, or admitted to any facility.
I stared at it until the digits stopped looking like numbers and began looking like a price tag.
“Do you want me to close the file?” Maeve asked.
My new office occupied a glass-walled corner above the repair floor. The walls allowed me to see the exit, the mechanics below, and Silas pretending not to watch me from beside a motorcycle lift.
“No.”
“That was not the question.”
I looked at Maeve.
“I don't want to stop. I also don't want to look at my own price.”
“Both can be true.”
She turned the monitor away from me without closing the file.
“Five minutes,” she said. “Then you decide again.”
Grant had never understood that consent could expire, renew, or change shape. The Blackwoods treated choice like something living.
I went downstairs, bought a terrible coffee from the vending machine with my own card, and returned before the machine finished complaining about exact change.
“Open it,” I said.
The state investigator had authorized me to review financial records through the victim-assistance legal team because I was identifying transactions, not conducting police searches. Every conclusion went to a licensed forensic accountant for verification.
His name was Owen Price.
He arrived at nine carrying two laptops and wearing a navy suit too neat for a motorcycle garage. He was about my age, with dark curls, rimless glasses, and the unwise confidence of a man who had never met Ronan.
Ronan intercepted him below the stairs.
“Weapons?”
“No.”
“Drugs?”
“No.”
“Receipts older than thirty days?”
Owen hesitated.
“Search him,” Ronan called.
I leaned over the railing. “Let the accountant through.”
“He admitted nothing, which is suspicious.”
Owen looked up at me. “Is this a normal workplace?”
“No. But the coffee is criminal, if that helps.”
Silas watched Owen climb the stairs.
The bond gave me one clear impression.
Dislike.
I bit the inside of my cheek.
Owen shook my hand. “Evelyn Reed? Your transaction map saved us two days.”
“It is incomplete.”
“The best ones are.”
Below us, a wrench hit the concrete.
Silas had not dropped anything in the previous thirty-three days.
Maeve glanced down, then at me.
“That should be educational,” she murmured.
We worked.
Red Cedar had been formed in Nevada, dissolved, then reappeared in Delaware under a different parent company. The directors were nominee firms. Its laboratory address belonged to a mailbox. The payments originated from a private bank used by several wolf-owned corporations.
The black-crown account was not a name. It was an internal authorization mark.
Owen enlarged the wire image. “Can you identify the crest?”
I could not.
Silas could.
He had come upstairs without making a sound.
“House Rusk,” he said.
Owen turned. “You must be Mr. Blackwood.”
“Silas.”
The word did not sound like an invitation.
I pointed at the empty chair. “Sit down, Silas.”
His eyebrows rose.
“Is that an employment instruction?”
“No. It is a request from the woman whose name is in the ledger.”
He sat.
“Who is House Rusk?” I asked.
“An old wolf bloodline. Wealthy. Politically protected. Gideon Rusk controls three seats at the Winter Council through allied packs.”
“Does he run Red Cedar?” Owen asked.
“I don't know.”
“Would he buy women?”
Gold entered Silas's eyes.
“I said I don't know.”
Owen leaned back.
I touched Silas's wrist beneath the desk. His pulse struck hard.
“Tell me what you do know.”
“Rusk believes wolf populations are weakening because too many bloodlines remain dormant in human families. He funds fertility clinics, ancestry research, and pack-matching programs.”
“Publicly?”
“Publicly, he calls it preservation.”
“And privately?”
“Privately, men like him think consent is a modern inconvenience.”
The room became very quiet.
Owen rotated his screen. “Red Cedar made eight payments marked acquisition bonus. Seven women were transferred. The eighth was Evelyn.”
“Failed transfer,” I corrected.
“Yes.”
“Then the money should have been returned.”
Owen looked at me.
“It wasn't,” he said.
There it was.
The discrepancy.
I pulled the original contract summary beside the payment ledger. North County earned half at acquisition and half after thirty days of “continued placement.” My sixty-thousand-dollar payment had been made in full before I ever entered their custody.