Free Web NovelChapter 5: What He Arranged
The she-wolves from Reyna’s pack had left by morning.
James didn’t remember their names. He was aware that this said something about the evening, though he was not interested in examining what, exactly. He had performed the expected functions of a host Alpha, offered the correct courtesies, sat through dinner with the appropriate attention. Afterward, when the social obligations had dissolved into the looser arrangements that late evenings in a pack house produced, he had excused himself early and gone to his room.
He had stood at his window for a long time, looking out at the eastern tree line, at the dark where the forest began and the grounds ended, and his wolf had been very quiet in a way that felt less like calm and more like patience.
He had slept badly.
By the end of the following week he had, through the kind of indirect and deniable information gathering that was one of the more practical applications of running a pack, established a pattern. It had required three separate conversations that appeared to be about other things, a casual question to one of the border patrol wolves about wildlife movement near the lake, a comment to the senior groundskeeper about the condition of the eastern path, and a passing observation to the omega Tiffany about whether the pack house evening schedules were running smoothly, which had produced, among other things, the information that the girl who did the cooking sometimes went to the lake on her own time when the crescent moon was up.
He filed this away. He did not act on it immediately.
What he did instead was pull the household records, which lived in a ledger that the pack’s administrative omega maintained and which covered, among other things, the supply and distribution of basic provisions to pack members at every tier. He went through it with the same methodical attention he brought to territory reports, and what he found sat in his chest with the cold weight of something he should have looked at sooner.
The girl had no provision line of her own.
Every pack member had an allocation. Food, clothing stipend, hygiene supplies, medical access. Even the lowest-ranked omegas had a line in the ledger. The allocation amounts varied considerably by rank, but they existed. They were documented.
Her name did not appear.
He went back through three years of records to confirm it was not a filing error. It was not a filing error. She had no documented status in the pack at all, which meant that she received nothing through official channels, which meant that everything she had, she had because someone gave it to her informally or because she went without.
He closed the ledger and sat with this for a long time.
He did not feel guilt. He was not, by nature or by practice, a man who spent significant time in guilt, and he was aware that the absence of it was not something that reflected particularly well on him. What he felt was the specific, cold clarity of a man who has looked at a system he is responsible for and found a failure in it, the kind of failure that is too consistent and too total to be accidental.
His father had done this deliberately. That was the conclusion the evidence supported. Whatever Alpha Drew’s reasons, and James had inherited some of them along with the title without fully examining their foundations, the outcome was a twenty-year-old woman in his pack house who had no documented existence and no provision allocation and wore a dead woman’s clothes.
James was many things. He had never claimed to be good. But he ran his pack with a precision that he took seriously, and deliberate gaps in the records offended him in a way that was easier to act on than the other, more complicated feelings currently occupying space in his chest.
He sent for Tiffany.
"The soap samples," he said, when she was seated across his desk. He had arranged it as a genuine distribution rather than a targeted gift, because a targeted gift would generate questions and attention that served no one. "I want every omega in the pack house to receive one. Make sure the full inventory is distributed."
Tiffany nodded carefully. She was one of the more perceptive of the domestic staff, which was why he had chosen her rather than the laundry omegas, who were too interested in hierarchy maintenance to be trusted with anything that required discretion. "Of course, Alpha James. I’ll see to it this afternoon."
"Good." He paused, which he rarely did, and Tiffany read the pause correctly and waited. "There was a returned item in the Delta’s daughter’s last online delivery. A dress."
Tiffany blinked. "I wasn’t aware of that."
"Speak to the Delta. The item isn’t returnable. I’d like it donated rather than discarded." He met her eyes briefly and then looked back at the report on his desk. "She mentioned the tall omega might have use for it."
The silence that followed had a quality to it that he chose not to acknowledge.
"I’ll pass along the message," Tiffany said, neutrally.
"That’s all."
She stood, smoothed her skirt, and moved to the door. James was already reading by the time she reached it.
"Alpha James." She stopped without turning fully around. "Should I make sure the kitchen workload tomorrow morning is manageable? We have several pack members traveling for the southern border meeting, so the numbers will be lower."
He did not look up from the report. "Use your judgment."
"Of course." A beat. "I’ll see to it." free𝑤ebnovel.com
She left, and James turned a page he had not read, and thought about crescent moons and the eastern path and the patience his wolf had been practicing for the better part of two weeks.
The next crescent moon was in four days.
He was already planning the patrol rotation.
