Page 51 of Curvy Sold Mate

She closed the folder.

“The evidence has been reviewed by the Alpha, the Beta, and the advisory council. The supply discrepancies, the vault access records, the requisition anomalies, the financial pressure on Brennan Cole—each piece is documented, cross-referenced, and available for the pack’s review.” She stood straight, the folder against her hip, and the hall was silent with the specific, weighted silence of a pack absorbing a betrayal it would take months to metabolize. “The woman who filed my schedule gave it to the man who put a shard in my arm. That is the cost of what happened here, and the pack deserves to see it clearly.”

Kahn stood. The movement drew every eye in the room—the Alpha rising from the front row with the deliberate authority of a man who had heard the case and reached his judgment and was now delivering it in the way that judgments were delivered in a pack: publicly, irreversibly, with the full weight of his office behind each word.

“Maren Holt.” His voice was flat, scrubbed clean of everything beneath the surface—the brother whose sister had been sold, the Alpha who had trusted the wrong person, the man who had watched Maren arrange the flowers at Eli’s funeral and thanked her for the care she’d taken. “The evidence is sufficient. You will be held in secure quarters pending the council’s formal sentencing. The nature and extent of the sentence will be determined after consultation, but you should understand that this compound’s mercy, while not exhausted, has limits that you have tested.”

He gestured to two wolves from the inner guard—broad-shouldered, grim-faced, wolves who had trained under Viktor and moved with the same economy of force their Beta had instilled in them. They took Maren by the arms, and she went without resistance. The sound she made as they led her toward the eastern corridor was quiet, continuous, the thin keening of a woman whose eleven years of service and eleven years of betrayal were collapsing into each other.

Kahn left without looking back. The pack filed out behind him, the hall emptying in the reverse order it had filled—families first, then the ranked wolves, the inner circle lingering at the edges, processing in clusters of two and three, voices low, faces holding the particular blankness of people who would need days to form the opinions they’d carry forward.

Viktor stayed.

The hall was nearly empty when he crossed the distance between the dais and the table where Olivia stood with the folder pressed against her ribs, her hands steady, her jaw set against the tremor that was working its way through the rest of her—the delayed reaction, the cost of standing in front of a hundred people and laying open a wound while keeping her voice level and her facts in order.

“You were good in there,” he said.

“I know.”

The corner of his mouth moved, and she caught the full expression—the warmth, the almost-smile that had become more than almost in the weeks since she’d stopped running and he’d stopped hiding, the face of a man who had watched the most competent person he’d ever met prove it in front of the people who needed to see it most.

“You were going to say I was impressive,” she said. “You can say it.”

“I was going to say the weight discrepancy section was particularly well-structured.”

“Particularly?”

His mouth compressed at the corners, and the compression held warmth the way a closed fist held a coal—contained, hot, visible in the tight lines around his eyes. “Exceptionally.”

“There it is.”

They stood in the emptying hall with the ward candles burning low and the evidence sitting on the table in its folder. She felt the bond between them carrying something new—the shared weight of work completed together, the partnership visible now in a room that had watched them stand side by side, and the evening light fell through the high windows and touched the stone floor and touched her face and touched the place on Viktor’s jaw where the muscle had been clenched for an hour and was only now beginning to release.

Chapter 30 - Viktor

The intelligence arrived in pieces throughout the day, carried by the northern patrol in coded relay signals that Viktor decoded at the briefing table while the compound absorbed the aftershock of Maren’s detention.

Chris brought the first piece at noon—a sighting report from the far scouts, three unfamiliar wolves running in formation along the northern ridge, moving east with the disciplined spacing of a trained unit rather than the loose scatter of strays. The second came from Kiera at two, relayed from her observation post near the river crossing: vehicle tracks on the far bank, fresh, the tread pattern matching military surplus transport. The third arrived at four, carried by Jonas himself, who had run from the eastern boundary at a speed that left him grey-faced and breathing hard in the briefing room doorway.

“Full mobilization on the northeastern approach,” Jonas said, bracing one hand against the door frame. “Thirty wolves, possibly more, moving south in two columns. Heavy formation, not a probe. They’ve got supplies on their backs.”

Viktor was already at the map. “Time to the boundary?”

“Six hours, if they maintain pace. Less if they’re running a vanguard ahead of the main body.”

Kahn arrived thirty seconds later—the speed of his entrance a measure of the intelligence network he and Viktor had built, the information reaching the Alpha before the runner’s breathing had steadied. Chris came in behind him, the door closed, and the four of them stood over the briefing table with the maps, overlays, and ward schematics spread between them. The room contracted into the tight, focused space where decisions about survival were made.

“Marcus spent the ransom,” Viktor said. The overlay he’d drawn at three that morning—the crossing screen, the moving pairs, the infrastructure of a defense designed for a subtler threat—was already obsolete, and he pulled it from the table and replaced it with a fresh sheet. “Thirty wolves is more than he had after the battle. He’s been recruiting, equipping, training. The rations and the ward components Maren moved for him—he’s been building toward this for months.”

“The timing isn’t coincidental,” Kahn said, his voice carrying the flat, controlled register that the pack recognized as the Alpha preparing for war. “We detained his mole twelve hours ago. Either he moved up his timeline because he lost his inside line, or Maren triggered the assault before we took her.”

“Or both,” Chris said. He’d spread the sighting reports across the table and was tracing the trajectory with his index finger—the converging vectors, the two columns moving south in a pattern that Viktor recognized because it was a pattern he’d designed, years ago, for exactly this kind of approach. “The northern ridge sighting and the vehicle tracks on the far bank—if you draw the line through both, it points to the eastern boundary. Primary breach point, maximum force.”

“With secondary probes at the south and northwest to stretch our coverage,” Viktor finished. He was drawing as he spoke, the pen moving across the fresh sheet with a speed that turned the map into a living document—positions, vectors, the defensive formations taking shape under his hand with the fluency of a mind that had been preparing for this assault since the morning he’d traced Maren’s requisition forms and understood that Marcus’s ransom had been an investment, not an endgame. “He’ll hit east first to draw our strength, then exploit the gaps we create by responding.”

Kahn studied the emerging diagram. “Defensive positions?”

“Full perimeter is impossible—we don’t have the numbers to hold all three breach points at strength while maintaining a reserve. We have to choose.” Viktor’s pen stopped on the eastern boundary marker. “We hold east with our strongest unit. You and me, the inner guard, the front-line patrol. Everything we have that can absorb a primary assault and keep standing.”