Chapter 152

Richard

I couldn't sleep that night after I locked the pendant scan away. If I did, it was only in shallow fits, chased by dreams I couldn’t fully remember but woke from with my pulse climbing and a tightness in my chest that didn’t release until well after sunrise.

It wasn’t fear exactly, but something adjacent to it, an unease that pressed against my ribs and settled behind my sternum, lingering even as I forced myself into motion.

The palace was already awake when I stepped into Nathan’s wing. He was finishing a call, nodding as he jotted something on a tablet. When he looked up, he didn’t waste time on pleasantries. He never did when I showed up unannounced like this, especially with that look I hadn’t even realized I was wearing.

“You want more compartmentalization?”

“I want a net no one can see. I want every surveillance log pulled off the grid and stored on air-gapped drives in the lower vault. I want every file that even glances at the locket, or at her, quarantined and tracked, no exceptions.”

Nathan didn’t argue. He was already drafting the protocol. “I’ll reroute the intel teams. Everything sensitive gets tagged with fresh access logs and hand‑walked. Nobody touches it alone. I’ll assign a triple confirmation protocol for physical transfers. I’ll tighten access around the evidence room too.”

“Make sure the evidence room is included. I don’t want that seal anywhere near the main system. No backups, no mirrors, nothing cloud-based. I want it buried.”

“It’ll be cold storage by nightfall,” he said, already pulling up the list of clearance holders on his screen. “And we’ll sweep the vault weekly for anything anomalous, even if it looks like a glitch.”

While Nathan set the foundation for silence, Amelia was building something loud. Transparency reforms, public-facing and sweeping, designed not to distract from the chaos but to disarm it entirely. This wasn’t some PR tactic or political gamble, it was a full reversal of how the palace had operated for years.

She rolled out vendor audits and public expense reports. She cut through bureaucratic red tape and started releasing old budgets with plain-language annotations, opening a tip line that was independently staffed and legally shielded from palace oversight.

She didn’t just post numbers, she narrated them, made them legible. She stood at press briefings and explained line items until the reporters stopped trying to trip her up and started asking real questions. The Council didn’t know how to react. Some praised her clarity and called it long overdue. Others accused her of theatrics or desperation. But the people responded. The press responded. And it worked.

Emma worked in the margins. She flipped one of David’s moles in the Council wing, a junior aide who had been quietly leaking vote logs and agenda drafts in exchange for debt forgiveness. Not only did she shut the leak down, she seeded a canary phrase into the aide’s final document, a specific set of fiscal terms and internal phrasing disguised as bureaucratic filler. If that exact language showed up somewhere else, we would know who passed it along and when. It wasn’t flashy, but it was precise. And it gave us something to monitor that wasn’t wrapped in emotion.

But none of that settled the storm sitting beneath my skin.

Simon came to me privately that evening. He brought a set of Amelia’s older samples, the ones collected months ago when she first arrived. He didn’t sit. He didn’t ask permission. He just opened the case on the table and looked at me.

“I ran them again,” he said. “This time against hybrid panels.”

“And?”

“There’s a match. Not complete, but consistent with mixed lineage. It’s not just wolf. There’s something else in the structure. The markers are mutating slightly under stress, which explains the inconsistencies in her cycle and scent. And the memory gaps. And the sensory overcorrection.”

“Do you know what the other half is?”

He shook his head, slower than usual. “It could be a human offshoot. Or a long-dormant mutation from an old bloodline. It might be something latent that only triggered recently. There’s too much genetic overlap across species lines to make a clean call this early.”

“You’re guessing.”

“I’m trying to be careful. But her body is resisting influence. Mentally, hormonally. That tracks with hybrid resilience. What you’ve been seeing, what we both thought was lingering heat, it’s a realignment.”

“So she’s not just wolf.”

“She might be part wolf and part human, or part something close to wolf but no longer coded as Pack. She might not even have a wolf the way we define it. It could be an adaptive strain, a mutation, or a misclassified hybrid phenotype. Her symptoms are too clean to be random, but too chaotic to trace to one known origin.”

It wasn’t confirmation, and I didn’t want it to be, not yet. But it explained too much to ignore.

She’d felt it, too. That was the worst part. She knew something was off. She’d been watching me in meetings, watching Simon when he passed her in the hall. She didn’t push, but her silence was sharp. Her eyes lingered when I avoided a question. Her voice shifted when she asked about Simon’s work. She noticed the locked doors. She noticed me hesitating.

She cornered me in the strategy room late that night, after the others had cleared out and the lights were low. Her voice was soft but not tentative.

“You’re hiding something.”

“There’s nothing confirmed yet.”

“That’s not the same as nothing.”

I looked at her. She was wearing one of my jackets again, sleeves pushed up. Her expression didn’t accuse me, but it didn’t let me go either. I could feel the edge of it pressing into me like she was bracing for a truth she couldn’t name.

“You’ve been different lately,” I said.

“So have you.”

I took a step closer. “There’s enough uncertainty that I want Simon to run a full medical workup. Nothing invasive. Just imaging, blood panels, neural scans.”

“I’ve already done testing, I did it when I first got here.”

“Not like this. Not with everything we’ve seen lately.”

She didn’t answer right away. She looked down, then back up, jaw set. “If I do this, we’re honest about what we find. You don’t keep me in the dark.”

“I won’t. Not once we have real answers.”

“That’s not enough anymore.”

“Then we’ll do it together.”

She exhaled through her nose, the tension in her shoulders barely shifting. “And what about us?”

“You’ve been struggling with control. We don’t know what’s causing it. I talked to Simon, and he doesn’t have a clear read on it yet. Until we know more, I think we need to take a step back.”

“You talked to Simon without telling me?” Her voice was sharper now, and her eyes narrowed as she took a half-step back. “You’re making decisions about my body, about what I need, and you didn’t think I should be in the room for that?”

“I wasn’t making decisions. I was trying to understand what was happening to you.”

“You should have told me.”

“I gave you the opportunity to go on your own so many times, Amelia.

“You just want me to stop acting like this.”

She moved toward me slowly, stopping just shy of contact. “If we stop, I don’t know what I’ll turn into.”

I almost touched her. I wanted to. But I held still. “Then I want to be there when you find out. With your head clear.”

She nodded. Barely.

We didn’t kiss. We didn’t touch. We just stood there, suspended in a choice we hadn’t wanted to make, and for once, we didn’t break it.

And just like that, we agreed. No touching until Simon had answers. No more waking up in tangled sheets, no more slipping into each other out of fear or craving. No more pretending the bond hadn’t blurred into something biological, dangerous, and entirely beyond our control.

But as I watched her walk away, every instinct in me screamed at the loss. Not just because I wanted her, not just because my body craved hers like breath, but because I didn’t want to know who she’d become without me keeping her grounded. And maybe I was wrong to think I ever had. Maybe she didn’t need grounding at all. Maybe she needed space to evolve into whatever she already was, and I was the one who couldn’t bear what that might look like.

Because the truth was, she might be the Alpha heir. She might not even have a wolf. She might be something else entirely. And none of us, not even her, knew what that would mean yet.