Chapter 155

Richard

The portrait arrived late in the evening, wrapped in linen and thick archival paper. The outer edge was stamped with Liora’s personal crest and sealed in wax that had cracked faintly during transport. There was a handwritten note pinned to the string in her tight, elegant script, but I didn’t open it until I had locked the office door behind me and drawn the curtains. The lights were dim. I turned off the comms, and even the internal cameras were on looped delay. I didn’t want to be interrupted, not for this.

Liora had retrieved it from the temple’s private archive, one of the last surviving originals painted before Serena’s death. It wasn’t new. It had simply been lost, hidden, intentionally omitted from the public record. Its absence had gone unnoticed for decades, because that’s what the temple had intended. It hadn’t been destroyed, just removed and forgotten by most, preserved by few.

I peeled the wrapping slowly, aware of the weight of it. I felt the scrape of linen against brittle paper, heard the faint crackle of time pressing between layers, and with each fold that gave way, it was like exhaling a breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding. When the final edge came loose, I stepped back instinctively.

Her eyes seemed to meet mine, not literally, of course, but the illusion struck with an unexpected clarity.

This wasn’t the Serena the public remembered, not the glossy war widow or the patron saint of diplomacy painted in palace records. And it certainly wasn’t the temple nurse the Elders had claimed she was.

There was poise in her shoulders, a deliberate composure in her bearing that suggested formal training. The line of her jaw, the tension in her mouth, the embroidery on her collar, each detail hinted at something more. Not just heritage, but status. This was a woman used to watching the room, not waiting to be dismissed by it.

She had been captured in oil and shadow. Her mouth was unsmiling but not severe. Her gaze was angled slightly to the side, focused and sharp. She looked like a woman who had known from the beginning that she was being studied. Whoever painted her had known her well enough to tell the truth.

The Mooncut emblem rested just beneath her collarbone, nestled in the pendant clasp of her chain. It was small, no larger than a thumbnail, but its shape was unmistakable. The design was clean-lined and deliberate, with no decorative variation or creative interpretation to obscure its meaning. It was the same symbol I had seen etched into the stair at the temple. The same one engraved in the hollow second seal inside the archive box we kept locked. The same one Amelia wore every day on her locket.

I didn’t call anyone or ask for help. I catalogued it myself, photographing it under four angles of light, adjusting contrast manually, and checking the sensor calibration twice before logging the file.

I made three copies of the final image. One went into the palace archives, sealed under a generic accession number with no name. One I transferred to Nathan for forensic analysis. The third I stored in the encrypted drive I carried on my person.

I logged the evidence under a neutral designation, with no mention of Serena and no metadata tying it to the temple. Even the image name was coded. Liora hadn’t seen it after the transfer. No one else had touched it.

We couldn’t afford exposure. Not when we were still this close to collapse.

That same afternoon, Nathan brought another thread to the surface. A temple finance clerk we’d flagged weeks ago but hadn’t yet questioned finally broke. Emma had paid her a visit. Afterward, the clerk agreed to testify under oath.

She outlined a pattern of redirection. Seasonal donations, temple tithes, and ceremonial tributes had been funneled not into temple upkeep or elder stipends, but into two holding firms with no clear owners. Those firms, on paper, looked clean. But their capital went directly into the Tower District.

We had already marked those properties. They had come up in the bell sabotage data. They overlapped with our Hollow tracking matrix. What we had assumed were shell fronts for laundering were, in fact, part of a scaffolded infrastructure.

The buildings were designed to move people and cargo. They were built to operate, not to house. Warehouses, relay centers, and transit hubs had all been positioned too strategically to be random.

Nathan followed the trail to a brokerage operating under a false identity. The name on the license belonged to a dead man. The signature style was a composite lifted from two archived records. The listed address had burned down in an electrical fire four years prior.

It hadn’t been done in haste; it was carefully constructed, each piece laid with precision. This level of detail indicated long-term planning and coordination. It hadn’t been improvised. It had been designed.

When the strategy team met in the briefing wing, no one bothered with small talk. Simon arrived still wearing a lab coat stained with reagent, his knuckles raw from exposure. Emma brought a stack of surveillance logs in one hand and a printed report from Brindell in the other. Amelia was the last to arrive. She stood near the maps, dirt streaked across her arms and jaw set tight. Her eyes scanned the room but avoided mine.

The holographic layout had been stripped of borders and politics. What remained were transmission paths, Hollow signals, and tunnel overlays. We weren’t tracking Pack control anymore. We were tracking infestation and networks of influence.

“We’ve been fighting the wrong war,” I said.

No one objected, and instead they continued writing, the weight of the words unspoken still heavy in the air.

Amelia didn’t speak. She remained standing, her hands tightening slightly at her sides. When I turned toward her a moment later, she was already looking away.

That evening, the press storm hit. It began with a blog post that was quickly amplified by three major outlets. None of them used the word I feared. None of them named Serena. But they asked about the pendant. About Amelia’s background. About the uncanny resemblance to the portrait that had been leaked just days before.

They framed it as historical curiosity, as coincidence, as polite speculation about heritage. But they knew exactly what they were implying.

Amelia didn’t respond. She ignored the calls, skipped two public appearances, and claimed to be managing relief work. I didn’t press. The more she said, the easier it would be to twist her words.

Still, I saw her jaw clench when she read the headlines. I saw her pause outside the media wing, inhale through her nose, and steady her hands before opening the door. Her scent didn’t change in any alarming way; it remained steady, calm, and deliberately neutral. That told me everything. She was controlling it.

Simon found me in the stairwell that night, winded and still holding his tablet. Molecular structures rotated on the screen.

“She’s doing it,” he said. “She’s regulating it consciously. The enzymes are syncing. The last batch wasn’t a fluke. It repeated.”

He showed me the data. The previously unstable enzyme activity was smoothing out. Not just chemically, but in a rhythmic way that suggested her body was adapting to a deeper kind of control.

“She’s not just triggering the shift. She’s harmonizing with it. Her body is showing us how to keep up.”

I didn’t answer, and he didn’t ask why.

“She doesn’t know yet,” he added. “Should I tell her?”

I shook my head. “Not yet.”

It wasn’t because I didn’t trust her. It was because the moment she understood, truly understood, what was happening, the world would change. She wouldn’t just be seen as a political asset anymore. She would become something else.

She might be Serena’s heir. She might not have a wolf. She might be something completely different, built across bloodlines and secrets we hadn’t fully traced. Until I understood exactly what that meant, I wouldn’t hand anyone the words they’d need to turn her into a weapon.

So I kept silent, and I watched her change.