Chapter 153

Richard

We breached the blood market at 03:07, three levels beneath the old textile district. No insignia, no front signage, just a freight elevator that opened into the back of a faux wine cellar.

The air hit thick and sweet, metallic and cloying in a way that clung to the roof of my mouth. There were crates stacked shoulder-high, most unlabeled, some marked only with crescent-burned wax seals. The scent was wrong before we even stepped out of the lift. Old blood. Burned plastic. Adrenaline, faint but present. And something else, something rancid, chemically preserved.

They didn’t fight. Most were too high to stand. The ones still lucid folded the second they saw the Royal Guard insignia. Or maybe it was me they recognized. Either way, it didn’t matter. They went down fast. No glamour. No last-ditch rituals. Just stunned looks and sloppy confessions, the kind that spilled out before they even realized they’d started talking. A few tried to lie, but even that broke apart fast. None of them had the spine to hold it together.

Simon cataloged the seized samples while Emma and the others cleared the back rooms. Over two dozen blood bags were pulled from cold storage, organized in makeshift bins. Some were marked wolf, others human, and some had no species designation, only batch codes or symbols I didn’t recognize.

A narrow shelf behind a false wall held six files, hand-bound, red string looped through brittle covers, pages yellowed and brittle from exposure to the wrong kind of cold. Inside were donor notes, phenotype logs, chemical enhancement studies, injection trials, failed conversions, and psychological fractures listed like side effects.

At least three of the files detailed healing responses and subject tracking through unauthorized Pack frequencies. One referenced a neurological conditioning test that mirrored the cognitive shutdown we’d seen in altered Hollow soldiers. These weren’t stray fragments of theory. This was a blueprint. A supply chain. And behind every sample, a body.

The files named Hollow branches I didn’t even know were still active. One contained a receipt for the same stabilization compound we’d intercepted six months ago, the lot number matching a batch linked to a rogue envoy we lost near the outer border. The seal on the footer matched Darius’s crest. Clean. Undeniable. Not implied. Not adjacent. Direct.

Under questioning, one of the dealers cracked. Said Darius funneled money and supplies through scattered labs with no consistent location. Said he never met him, only took shipments, stored them, redistributed through cutout couriers. Didn’t know what the blood was for, only that it had to be fresh, clean, pulled from wolves with unbroken lines. No infections. No altered genetics. He said the buyers paid well. Said the donors didn’t always survive. Some were compensated in drugs. Others were threatened into silence. At least one was a minor.

Simon ran the samples on-site using a portable rig. One vial, sealed, older, responded immediately under UV light. It curled like it was alive, like it was trying to escape. The movement wasn’t like blood. It didn’t separate under heat or light. It clung to itself. A thick, syrupy, coagulant. It didn’t clot like human plasma or settle like wolf serum. But it had markers. The same ones Darius’s old serum displayed. That distinctive cluster. The structural anomaly we’d thought unique to him.

Simon didn’t say anything. He just looked at me. And I didn’t need him to explain. I already knew what it meant.

We didn’t sleep. We didn’t go home. We went straight to Council. No warning. No delay. We walked into the chamber still in our field gear, blood on our boots, powder burns still clinging to the cuffs of our jackets.

The emergency session was closed-door and still for several long minutes after we presented the findings. Amelia sat at my left. Simon stood behind us. Emma moved between the aides and the projector with a clipped efficiency that dared anyone to interrupt. I laid out the files. Not all of them. Just enough.

“There’s no ambiguity anymore,” I said. “The war wasn’t civil. It was constructed. Orchestrated. These were vampires posing as wolves, using our ranks and our bloodlines as research material. We’ve been tracking ghosts that someone else created.”

Simon took over. “The samples we recovered share markers with Darius’s serum. His structure. His sequencing. This wasn’t rogue. It was funded. Coordinated. Systemic. They infiltrated Pack hierarchies, harvested viable traits, and used them to design infiltration strains.”

He passed out print copies of the selected reports. Three files. Enough to prove the claim, but not enough to expose all our evidence.

The Council didn’t argue. For once, no posturing. No appeals to legacy or precedent. No debate over jurisdiction. Just a motion. A vote. A restructure. Military intelligence consolidated under a central command. Hollow tracking reassigned to my office. Strategic clearance codes standardized. Field autonomy remained intact, but only under new oversight. The era of fractured intelligence was over.

Amelia took point briefing the captains. She laid out the new soldier identification procedures, detailing how to identify false Pack markers, how to intercept relay frequencies with inconsistent rhythm signatures, how to isolate behavioral mimicry in non-bonded units. She was precise. Sharp. Brutal in her clarity. And when she stepped back from the projection screen, I saw her hands curl briefly into fists before she tucked them behind her back. Not from fear. From recognition. From the ache of it finally making sense.

Later that evening, I found her alone in the strategy room, fingers moving across a frozen scan on the glass, tracing the signal like she was memorizing it.

“They used census data,” she said, voice low. “That’s how they picked targets. Wolves with incomplete transition logs. Orphan registrations. Outlier families. They didn’t just find people like him, Richard. They hunted them.”

I didn’t correct her. Because she was right. And because I had already known it.

“I think I was on a list,” she said, still not looking at me. “I think I was marked before I ever left the orphanage. Maybe before that.”

I moved toward her, but she didn’t acknowledge it.

“I used to wonder why the palace took me in. I thought it was luck. Or someone’s guilt. But maybe it was just the timing. Maybe I slipped through.”

“You didn’t slip through,” I said quietly. “You survived it. That’s not the same thing.”

That night, we held a public address. It wasn’t clean. It wasn’t rehearsed. It wasn’t even on the schedule. But the truth had already begun to move through the air like a current, and if we didn’t take control of it, it would control us.

Amelia stood beside me, without notes, without a press representative, and with only the strength of her voice. She was calm and unflinching as she introduced the new classifications, and I followed by outlining the implications. Together, we told them the truth of what this war had become.

It was not a civil war. It was not a Pack war. It was a war designed to make us destroy ourselves. Built by an outside hand. Sustained by our refusal to look past old patterns.

We told them to stop looking for enemies by bloodline. To start watching behavior. Intelligence. Affiliation. Signals.

We weren’t cleaning house anymore. We were unmasking it. And the war, as we knew it, had only just begun.