Chapter 12: The Betrayal

The wolf's name was Corran. He had been in Silverbrook for four years, assigned to eastern patrol, reliable and unremarkable in the way that made him easy to overlook — which was, Grace now understood, probably not accidental.

She brought the evidence to Nolan privately, laid it out with the same methodical clarity she brought to all her briefings, and watched the Alpha's face move through the controlled progression of someone receiving news that was both shocking and, in retrospect, clarifying.

'How certain?' he asked.

'Completely,' Grace said. 'The information I fed him and only him appeared in Harrow's response pattern within seventy-two hours. There's no other explanation that fits.'

Nolan was quiet for a long moment. Four years was a long time. Long enough that Corran had built relationships, earned trust, become part of the texture of the pack. The betrayal was not just tactical — it was personal, in the way that all pack betrayals were personal, because a pack was not an organization but a family, and family betrayal carried a specific kind of wound.

'How do you want to handle the apprehension?' Nolan asked. His voice was steady. The steadiness of a man who had learned to separate the emotional response from the required action, not by eliminating the former but by making it wait.

'Quietly,' Grace said. 'If Harrow knows we've identified him, they'll accelerate their timeline. We have a window where they don't know we know. We should use it.'

They used it.

Corran was taken in the early morning hours of a Wednesday, efficiently and without incident, by Fen and two senior warriors who understood the value of quiet. He was brought to the Alpha's council room, where Nolan questioned him personally while Grace listened from a position that let her watch his physiological responses — the micro-expressions and scent-tells that were harder to control than words.

He held out for forty minutes and then he told them everything.

Harrow had recruited him before he ever arrived in Silverbrook — he had been placed deliberately, a long-game intelligence asset inserted into the pack's eastern patrol with the specific mandate of gathering territorial defense information. Vareck had been patient. Four years of patience, building toward a comprehensive picture of Silverbrook's vulnerabilities.

The planned attack, Corran said — with the specific relief of someone who had been carrying a secret too long and had finally been given permission to put it down — was scheduled for early spring. Not the probing raids of autumn but a full-scale territorial claim. Vareck believed that with sufficient intelligence advantage, he could overwhelm Silverbrook's defenses before Nolan could mount an organized response.

He had not, apparently, accounted for Grace.

She spent the remainder of that day and the following two days redesigning every aspect of Silverbrook's defense that Corran might have communicated. It was exhaustive and exhausting and absolutely necessary, and she did it with the focused efficiency of someone who had converted anger into fuel, which was a skill she had developed early and relied on heavily.

At twenty-seven weeks, the physical cost of the sustained effort was measurable. Amara appeared in the committee room on the second day with a look that was professionally concerned and personally firm.

'Sit,' Amara said.

Grace sat.

'You are doing extraordinary work,' Amara said, checking her blood pressure with brisk competence. 'You are also twenty-seven weeks pregnant and you have been operating at crisis intensity for seventy-two hours. These two facts are in conflict.'

'I know,' Grace said.

'What I am going to tell you,' Amara continued, 'is not a suggestion. You will sleep tonight. You will eat three complete meals tomorrow. You will work no more than six hours, and those six hours will not be consecutive.' She removed the cuff. 'Blood pressure is elevated but within manageable range. Lena's heartbeat is strong. Both of these things will remain true only if you cooperate.'

Grace looked at the doctor. Amara looked back with the particular unmovable calm of someone whose authority in their specific domain was absolute.

'Alright,' Grace said.

She slept that night with the profound unconsciousness of genuine exhaustion and woke the following morning with Lena engaged in what felt like a full cardiovascular workout against her internal organs, which she had come to understand as her daughter's way of expressing that everything was fine and she wanted breakfast.

'Good morning to you too,' Grace said, and got up.

The redesigned defense protocols were complete by the end of the week. Silverbrook was, Grace assessed, as prepared as she could make it with the time and resources available. The intelligence advantage Vareck had built over four years had been neutralized, the internal communication structure was now genuinely secure, and the pack's response capacity had been significantly expanded through the training protocols she had implemented over the past months.

They were ready. Or as ready as anyone could be for a war they hadn't chosen.

She was sitting in the committee room on a Friday evening, reviewing the final protocols with Fen, when he said without looking up from the papers: 'You should tell him.'

Grace looked up. 'Who?'

'Kaden Stone.' Fen met her eyes with his customary directness. 'Harrow Pack is moving against Silverbrook in early spring. You're twenty-seven weeks pregnant. He should know.'

The thought had occurred to her. She had been managing it carefully, keeping it at the edge of her consideration rather than examining it directly.

'He has no standing here,' she said.

'No,' Fen agreed. 'But Lena does. And if something happens —' He stopped. Restarted. 'If something happens and he didn't know, he'll spend the rest of his life not knowing. That's not justice. That's just more damage.'

Grace was quiet for a long moment.

'That is,' she said finally, 'an extremely reasonable point from someone who has an obvious personal interest in my continued distance from Kaden Stone.'

Something moved across Fen's face — not denial, not deflection, just the honest acknowledgment of someone caught being larger than their own interests. 'Yes,' he said simply. 'It is.'

She picked up her pen and went back to the protocols. But the thought had been named now and would not go back to the edge where she had been keeping it.

That night she wrote a letter. Not long — she did not have the energy for long, and it did not require length. The situation with Harrow. The timeline. The preparedness of Silverbrook's defense. And at the end, one sentence: 'Lena is healthy and strong and I am not asking for anything, but you should know.'

She sealed it and left it for the morning mail and went to bed and slept and did not dream about the clearing or the cold or the severed bond.

She dreamed about spring.