Claimed By Three Rival Alphas

Chapter 33: Truths

~RYLAND’S POV~

The thread on Voss’s death went cold within two days.

But while Cade was pulling at it, he found something else. The kind of thing that happens when you’re looking for one piece and your hand closes around a different one entirely.

The merchant’s name came up in the supply records, going back further than the current investigation. Cade tracked him back through three transactions, then four. Two of them matched the timeframe around the wolfsbane poisoning. One connected, at a remove, to a supply chain that had reached Matthew.

Not proof. Not anything that would hold in a council chamber. But enough of a thread to follow, and enough to make the knot in my chest tighten into something that had a shape.

Then the dismissed guard talked.

One of the men we’d let go from the original investigation, the ones cleared from the poisoning inquiry, he’d been sitting with something and finally handed it over to my investigator in a written statement. Father had been in contact with someone. A woman. The investigator pulled the description. Cross-referenced it against what we had.

It matched the woman from the letters. The ones Lyra had been collecting, the ones she’d shown me on the terrace weeks ago. The anonymous threat letters, the warnings, the escalations.

The timeline was forming. Slowly, piece by piece, like a picture you couldn’t see until enough of it was assembled. But the picture was assembling.

So I went to find my father.

—

He was in his study with the door ajar, reading something. He looked up when I came in and put the document down with the composed ease of a man who hadn’t been caught doing anything he’d planned to deny.

I closed the door behind me.

"The merchant," I said. "Tomas Reel. His supply records tie back to you."

Tyran said nothing. He watched me.

"The wolfsbane that put Lyra in the floor of this packhouse for two days," I said, "traces through his ledgers. And one of the guards we dismissed put you in contact with the same woman who’s been sending Lyra threatening letters for weeks."

Still nothing.

"So you had a hand in Matthew’s death," I said.

"No." He said it plainly, no hesitation. "I have no knowledge of that. Matthew was someone else’s operation."

I looked at him.

"The poisoning," he said. "In a way. Yes."

I heard the words. I stood there and let them land fully before I tried to do anything with them.

"In a way," I repeated.

"It was necessary, Ryland."

"Necessary." The word came out of my mouth and left a bad taste.

"You had a hand in poisoning a girl in her own bed, in her own packhouse, under my roof. Under my protection." I kept my voice even, because the alternative was something I wouldn’t be able to walk back from.

"And Lord Harlan?"

"That I have no knowledge of either," he said.

I looked at him for a long moment. "You’re telling me there’s a third party. Someone else entirely, working their own agenda alongside yours."

Tyran said nothing.

"Matthew. Harlan. Voss. You’re telling me not all of them are yours."

Silence.

"So while you were working against her," I said, "someone else was doing the same thing and you didn’t know who." I stopped pacing. "Or you knew and you let it run because it served your purpose."

"Exactly... but I told you I have no knowledge..."

"Then say it straight, father." I turned to face him fully. "You are telling me there is someone else in this building, or connected to this pack, who has been running their own operation against Lyra. Someone you can’t account for."

Tyran met my eyes. He didn’t say yes. He didn’t say no. The silence was its own answer.

I started pacing again because standing still wasn’t working. "Matthew. Harlan. Voss. An innocent girl who never asked to be any of this, who came here with nothing, and you spent months trying to remove her..."

"I was protecting this pack," Tyran said.

"Protecting what pack." I stopped. I put my fist down on the table between us. Not hard enough to break anything. Hard enough that he felt the weight behind it.

"Protecting it from what, exactly? From a girl who survived things that would have broken most wolves twice her size? From someone who held a wolf inside her for eighteen years without knowing and still somehow didn’t break?"

"From what she represents," he said. His voice was steady, which was the most infuriating thing about it. He wasn’t performing, he meant every word.

"That girl carries a bloodline that will destabilise everything we’ve built. I’ve made my research. I’ve read the records, Ryland. I know who she is."

I went cold.

"What records,"

He looked at me for a moment. Then he told me.

Damien. The lost Alpha. The one who disappeared before his arranged marriage, who ran with a common girl, who was never found. The timeframe, he said. The bloodline markers that matched the Moonborn emergence. The silver wolf, which hadn’t been seen in a generation. The only lineage that explained all of it, the only descent that produced what we were looking at.

Lyra was Damien’s daughter.

Which made her the rightful heir to the Moonstone throne.

I stood very still while he explained it, partially, strategically, the way my father always explained things, giving you enough to understand the conclusion while keeping back the pieces that would implicate him further. But the shape of it was clear. And it was devastating.

"If that becomes public knowledge," Tyran said, "every pack in this region will want her dead or under their control. I was trying to remove the problem before it reached that point."

"Remove the problem," I said.

I looked at him. My father, sitting across from me in his study, with the composed expression of a man who had made a decision he still believed in.

"You tried to kill her, For a theory. That explains the wolfsbane poisoning, you knew."

"I suspected, so when it worked it clarified she wasn’t wolfless."

I scoffed in disbelief

"I tried to protect what matters."

"She is what matters." The words came out flat and final, not raised, not broken, just completely certain in a way I hadn’t been about very many things in my life.

"She is exactly what matters. And you couldn’t see it because you were too busy protecting a structure that she was always going to be part of whether any of us wanted it or not."

Silence.

"Ryland, you’ll understand when..."

I was already at the door.

I pulled it open. Stopped. Didn’t turn around.

"When I have the formal evidence to take to the council," I said, "I will use it. Every piece of it." I paused. "Until then, stay out of this investigation. Stay out of her way. And don’t mistake my patience for forgiveness."

I walked out and pulled the door shut behind me. Harder than I meant to.

The corridor outside was empty. I stood in it for a moment, both hands at my sides, looking at the far wall and breathing.

He had done it. Not all of it, someone else was still out there, someone whose moves I still couldn’t fully trace, whose name I still didn’t have. But the poisoning. The contact with the unknown woman. The merchant. All of it tracing back to my father, sitting in my packhouse, convinced he was saving something.

I didn’t have enough for the council. Not yet. The thread was there but it wasn’t airtight, and a partial case against a former Alpha was more dangerous than no case at all.

But the relationship between us, whatever it had been, however complicated, however much I’d tried to make it work across all the years of distance between us, that was over.