Claimed By Three Rival Alphas

Chapter 90: Silver Spear

~LYRA’S POV~

We pulled records for the rest of the day and into the night.

Eren went to the deep archive. Cade went to the Silverclaw security records, the oldest sections, the ones that predated the current filing structure and had to be read in the original ledger format. I sent a rider to Shadowfang immediately and Dravec arrived by the following morning, his face when I explained the Huntsmen mark said he’d heard the word before, even if he hadn’t connected it to anything current.

We spread everything across the strategy table and assembled the picture from the pieces.

—

The Huntsmen called themselves the Silverhand.

Formed three generations back. Eren found the founding records in a pre-archive document that had been categorised under historical mythology rather than operational intelligence, which was probably deliberate on someone’s part at some point in the past. Twin brothers, original founders, and that wasn’t incidental. The organisation operated specifically through male twin bloodlines. The ability, the weapons, the methodology, and the mission were passed from founding pair to founding pair, generation to generation. The structure was designed for continuity. You couldn’t dismantle it by taking out individuals. The next pair was always already trained before the current pair became visible.

They’d been quiet because there’d been no threat large enough to mobilise them fully. Their specific mandate, the suppression of what they called the wolf ascendancy, the prevention of pack power from consolidating beyond manageable levels, had been in dormancy because the packs had been fragmented and manageable and none of the old warnings had been triggered.

The last time they were significantly active, Eren said, setting down the document he’d been reading, there had been a Moonborn walking the land.

The room went very quiet.

"Which means they’ve been waiting," Ryland said. His voice was quiet in the particular way it got when he was holding something large and processing it carefully.

"Waiting for her," Dravec confirmed. He had the look of someone who had just confirmed something he’d hoped not to confirm. He didn’t look at me directly when he said it, which I noted and didn’t comment on.

Cade had been running numbers silently while the historical picture was assembled. Now he set down his ledger with the expression of someone who had finished an accounting they hadn’t wanted to complete.

"The guard deaths," he said. "Eastern border. Over the past several weeks." He looked at me. "We attributed them to rogue wolf incursions. The wounds were consistent with rogue attacks at first assessment."

He paused.

"They’re not. The wound pattern matches. Same silver-wolfsbane method, same external seal, same internal burning. We were looking for wolves. We weren’t looking for humans who had spent three generations learning how to look like wolves."

"They were mapping us," Eren said. He set down his notes with the specific deliberateness he used when he was saying something he wanted everyone to attend to fully.

"Systematically. Testing response times to border incidents. Identifying leadership positions and movement patterns. Determining which parts of the perimeter had consistent coverage and which had gaps." He looked around the table. "They’ve been inside our perimeter at least four times that we can now confirm. Possibly more."

Cade ran the full revised count. At least a dozen Silverclaw wolves killed over the preceding months, written off as rogue incursions, that now fit the Huntsmen pattern. Probably more from Shadowfang and Moonveil territory that hadn’t yet been re-examined.

The weight of that landed on Ryland in a visible way. Not a collapse, Ryland didn’t collapse but a settling, a gravity that moved through his expression as he understood that twelve of his wolves had died and they’d been mourned as rogue casualties and the people who had actually killed them were still out there and had been watching the response to every death from the treeline. freёwebnovel.com

He sat with that for a long moment without speaking.

I let him have it.

—

The rider from Shadowfang arrived late in the afternoon.

I was at the table when Cade brought in the message, sealed with the formal Shadowfang council mark, the urgent seal rather than the standard one. The kind of seal that meant the content required immediate attention and the sender knew it.

I opened it.

I read it once. Then I read it again, more slowly, making sure I had understood every word with the precision it required.

My expression didn’t change. I was aware that everyone in the room was watching me read it, and I was aware that my expression not changing was the most information I could give them about what I was doing with what I was reading, and I chose to give them that rather than the alternative.

I set the letter down. I picked it up. I held it for a moment.

Then I passed it to Ryland without a word.

He read it.

The Shadowfang council was requesting a formal session. The letter was precise and carefully worded in the way that things were carefully worded when the people writing them understood they were writing something that could be read as treasonous and were trying to frame it as something else. Several council members, the letter did not specify how many had reached the conclusion that the Huntsmen’s campaign was specifically targeted at the Moonborn. The wolves dying were dying because the Huntsmen were attempting to destabilise the packs as pressure to deliver Lyra. The argument, as the letter presented it, was that if Lyra was handed over, the killing would stop.

They wanted to discuss terms.

The room had been quiet before. It went quieter now, the specific quiet of people who had read or heard something and were waiting to see what happened next.

I looked at Dravec.

He was looking at the floor. The particular quality of a man who had been asked to carry something uncomfortable and was carrying it by looking somewhere that wasn’t the person it concerned. freёweɓnovel.com

"How many of them feel that way?" I asked.

He didn’t answer immediately.

The silence stretched.

I watched him stand there, Kael’s Beta, the man who had stood up at the unification council and said Kael would have voted yes, the man who had been managing Shadowfang with a quiet steadiness that had made me believe the pack was finding its footing.

He was still looking at the floor.

"Dravec," I said. Not with heat. Just with the clarity of someone who needed the actual number, not the managed version of it.

He looked up. His jaw was tight. "Enough that the council felt they needed to bring it formally," he said. "Enough that I couldn’t tell them not to without losing the ground I’ve been holding."

I held his gaze for a moment.

"That’s the answer," I said.

He nodded, once, and looked away again. Not at the floor this time, at the window, at the territory outside, at something that wasn’t any of the people in this room. The expression of a man carrying the weight of what his pack had just done and understanding exactly what it cost and not having a clean way to put it down.

I picked up the letter from where Ryland had set it back on the table. I read it one more time. Completely and carefully, the way you read something when you were deciding exactly what it meant and what it was going to require.

Then I folded it.

I set it down.

The room waited.

"Schedule the session,"