Claimed By Three Rival Alphas

Chapter 32: Distractions

~RYLAND’S POV~

We questioned the ones still in the building that same night.

It was late and nobody was at their best, including me, but waiting until morning felt like handing time to whoever was responsible. Cade ran the questions while I watched. Three people had been in the packhouse during the relevant window, a supply runner, one of the elder’s own aides, and a kitchen staff member who’d been working a late shift. All three gave accounts that checked out against what we could verify. No inconsistencies that held up under pressure. No visible tells.

We let them go and told the ones who’d already left to return in the morning.

I went back to Lyra’s room after. She still hadn’t woken. I sat in the chair beside her bed for a while in the dark and listened to her breathe, and eventually I closed my eyes.

—

Morning came faster than it had any right to.

The ones who’d left the previous day arrived in ones and twos through the front entrance, brought through to the small interview room off the east corridor where Cade had set up. I stayed for most of it. Standard questions, standard answers, nothing that opened into anything useful until we’d been at it for nearly two hours.

Then Lizabeth arrived.

She was a woman in her early twenties, plain-featured, the kind of person who didn’t naturally occupy much space in a room. She sat down across from us and looked between me and Cade with the careful expression of someone trying to figure out the shape of the situation before committing to any particular response.

Cade started. "We’re speaking to everyone who was present in the packhouse yesterday. We appreciate you coming back."

She nodded. Said nothing yet.

"You left the packhouse grounds," Cade said, "approximately fifteen minutes before Elder Voss’s death was reported."

She blinked. The confusion on her face was immediate and I watched it, looking for the moment it became something else, something calculated. It didn’t shift.

"I didn’t know that," she said slowly. "I mean, I didn’t know about Elder Voss until just now. When they told me at the gate this morning."

"Why were you here yesterday?" I said.

She looked at me. "I came to see my sister. Mira. She’s the pack healer."

"For what purpose?"

"She had herbs I needed. She’d been holding them for me for a week, I kept missing the chance to pick them up."

She paused.

"Is that... am I being accused of something?"

"We’re asking questions," Cade said. "Did you have any other reason for being here? Did you speak to anyone other than Mira? Go anywhere other than the healer’s quarters?"

"No," she said. "I came in, went straight to Mira’s room, collected the herbs, spoke to her for maybe twenty minutes, and left." She held the line without wavering. "That’s all."

"That’s exactly what someone who’d done something would say," I said.

She looked at me steadily. "I didn’t do this, Alpha."

"That’s also exactly what they would say."

The door opened behind us. Mira came in without knocking, which under most circumstances I would have addressed, but I let it go. She looked at her sister first, then at me, then at Cade.

"What’s happening?" she said.

"Your sister left the packhouse shortly before Elder Voss died," Cade said. "We’re trying to establish whether that’s relevant."

Mira looked at Lizabeth. Something passed between them, the kind of look that only worked between people who had known each other their whole lives.

"What if it’s a coincidence?" Mira said, turning back to me. "Or someone using her timing as a frame. It’s possible. You’ve considered it."

"We’ve thought about that," Cade said.

"But the record made this conversation necessary," I said. "We don’t have the luxury of ruling things out without following them. Not anymore."

"Then let me help," Mira said, and her voice had shifted into something more direct, the way it did when she was working rather than asking. "A locator spell. Object tracing. Something that might actually tell us who was near Voss when it happened. I can do that."

"Whoever did this was careful," I said. "More careful than last time. We found nothing in the room. No traces, no physical evidence, nothing that would give a spell anything to read."

Mira’s jaw tightened slightly. She wasn’t giving up, I could see that, but she was processing the limits of what she had to work with.

"My sister didn’t do this," she said, looking directly at me. "And I think somewhere you already know that."

I looked away from her for a moment. At the window, the grey morning light, the courtyard below. She wasn’t wrong, and I didn’t intend to lie about it.

"Right now," I said, "this is all we have. Until something else surfaces, until another lead opens up, we work with what’s in front of us." I looked back at her. "That’s not an accusation. It’s a position."

Lizabeth had been quiet through all of it. Now she let out a breath that was almost a sound, not quite a sob, but close.

"How did I get into this," she said, to no one in particular. Just quiet and shaky, the voice of someone who had woken up that morning thinking it was an ordinary day.

Mira moved immediately to her sister’s side, one hand on her shoulder. She looked at Lizabeth directly.

"Hey. Liz. Look at me." She waited until Lizabeth met her eyes. "It’s okay. I’m going to get you out of this. Alright?"

Lizabeth nodded, but her eyes were wet. Mira kept her hand where it was and didn’t look away from her.

The room held that for a moment.

I watched them and thought about what Mira had said. She isn’t wrong. I know she isn’t wrong. Lizabeth didn’t have the profile of someone running an operation this deliberate. She had the profile of a woman who’d visited her sister at an inconvenient time and was now sitting in a room with the Alpha because a record had her name on it.

"Mira," I said.

She looked at me.

"Stay here. Keep doing your work. Keep your eyes open and if anything comes to you, anything that looks off, anything Lizabeth remembers that might point somewhere, you bring it to me directly."

I paused.

"And look after yourself. Both of you. Be careful."

"Thank you, Alpha," Mira said. The gratitude in it was real and measured.

I nodded once. Then Cade and I left.

—

The corridor outside was quiet. We walked it in silence for a few steps before Cade spoke.

"Someone’s pulling our attention sideways," he said. "That’s what this feels like."

"Definitely," I said.

"Voss’s death, Lizabeth’s timing, whoever arranged this knew we’d pick at it. Knew it would cost us hours. Days, maybe." He kept his pace steady alongside mine. "While we’re looking at this, we’re not looking at something else."

"Which means whatever the actual next move is," I said, "it’s already in motion."

Cade said nothing to that.

Neither did I.

We walked back toward the main wing, and I turned the shape of it over in my mind, the careful framing, the clean room, the perfectly timed exit. Whoever was doing this wasn’t improvising anymore.

They were several steps ahead.

And we were still catching up.