Claimed By Three Rival Alphas

Chapter 27: The Letter

~RYLAND’S POV~

It came in with the mid-morning correspondence.

Nothing about it announced itself. It was tucked inside the regular bundle that Cade brought to my desk every morning, pack reports, trade requests, border updates, the usual stack. The Harrow Pack letter was near the bottom, formal seal pressed into dark wax, embossed edges, the kind of envelope that arrived already expecting to be taken seriously.

I picked it up, broke the seal, and read it.

Then I set it down on the desk with a particular kind of stillness that had nothing to do with calm.

The succession ball. Three weeks ago it had been marked on every relevant calendar in the packhouse, flagged in the correspondence ledger, noted in the forward planning Cade kept for formal obligations. Then the poisoning happened. Then Matthew. Then the silver wolf, the training sessions, the full moon bearing down on us like something that had no interest in our schedule. The ball had slid clean off the edge of everyone’s attention, including mine, which was exactly how things like this became problems.

The Harrow Pack hosted it every three years. Every senior Alpha in the allied territories attended. It wasn’t the kind of event you were invited to, it was the kind of event you were expected at, and the distinction mattered.

Cade appeared at my shoulder before I’d finished processing it. He read quickly, the way he read everything, and when he straightened up I could see him already running through options.

"Can’t you skip?" he said. "Send a representative, cite security concerns, there’s been a poisoning here, that’s not a fabrication, that’s..."

"Not possible." I kept my voice even.

"The Harrow Pack are formal allies. Old relationship, long history. A no-show without extraordinary justification gets read as a political statement." I looked at him.

"We can’t afford that right now. Not with the council still unsettled from Harlan’s death, not with Tyran’s investigation still open. We show weakness at a formal ally’s event right now and everyone in three territories hears about it within a week."

Cade absorbed that. "So we go."

"So we go."

He didn’t sound thrilled, and I didn’t blame him. Neither was I.

"How’s training sitting?" he said, after a moment.

"Improvements," he said, because it was true and Cade always started with what was true. "The first two nights were rough. She’s not disappearing anymore. She’s holding the control through most of the session without losing the thread."

He paused.

"But is it going to hold at a formal gathering?

Unfamiliar wolves, unfamiliar territory, scrutiny from every direction, people testing her because that’s what people do at these things."

"No," I said. "It’s not enough for that."

He waited.

"But we don’t have a choice," I said. "We go and we manage."

Cade nodded slowly, the way he nodded when he was accepting something he’d prefer to argue against but could see the logic of clearly enough not to bother. He picked up the letter, looked at it again, and set it back down.

"There’s something else," he said.

I looked at him.

"Tomorrow." He said it carefully. "The full moon, Alpha."

I looked back at the letter.

The full moon. Tomorrow. The Harrow succession ball was also tomorrow, which meant we were travelling earlier at latest if we wanted to arrive with any preparation time at all.

This will be the first full moon since Lyra’s wolf had started surfacing on its own, the first one she’d have to navigate with some degree of control rather than none, and she was going to have to do it with everything else already in motion around her.

Cade didn’t say anything else. He just stood there and let me work through it, which was one of the things I appreciated most about him, he delivered information and then gave you the space to think rather than filling every silence with his own voice.

I thought about the training sessions. The first night she’d disappeared twice, slipped away before Eren could redirect her, and both times it had taken longer than I’d liked to find her and bring her back. The second night, once, but she’d been turning back on her own when they reached her. The third night she’d held the thread through, fragile, shaking by the end of it, but unbroken.

Fragile and unbroken.

Tomorrow’s full moon was going to be the real test of what these trainings had actually built.

Not a clearing at the edge of the estate grounds with only Eren and myself to witness it. The full moon pulled harder than anything we’d managed in training. The wolf inside her had been moving freely for a week. A full moon was the moon at its most direct, the thing the whole mythology was built around, the pull that the Moonborn bloodline had always been connected to most completely.

If she held through it, we had something to work with at the ball.

If she didn’t, we had a different problem entirely.

I thought about sending her ahead of us, or leaving her here while I attended with Cade and a reduced party, and dismissed it immediately. Leaving her here without Eren, without me, with the investigation still open and whoever else might be working the same agenda that had already poisoned her once, no. That wasn’t a conversation I was willing to have with myself.

She will come with us. We’ll manage whatever the full moon gives us, we will travelled as early as possible, and we’ll arrive at the Harrow succession ball as a unit with Lyra beside me as my Luna, which was what she was and what the world needed to see clearly if we were going to survive the political fallout of Harlan’s death with our credibility intact.

I looked at the letter one more time.

Then I folded it carefully and placed it with the correspondence that required a formal written response before the end of the day.

"Get the carriages ready," I said.

Cade didn’t move immediately. "You want to tell her about the ball, or should I..."

"I’ll tell her," I said. "This afternoon. After she’s slept."

"And the full moon?"

"Make sure no staff are in the eastern grounds after nightfall. I don’t want audience."

"Already handled," Cade said.

Of course it was.

He took the letter, added it to the response pile, and moved toward the door. Then he stopped.

"For what it’s worth," he said, without turning around. "She’s further along than I expected.

After six nights."

"I know,"

"Eren thinks she’ll hold."

I looked at the desk. "I hope he’s right."