Chapter 124 The Visit

Eira had the pinecone wind chime in her hand when the doorbell went off.

Lila was on the screen with her arms crossed, staring straight into the camera like it had personally wronged her.

Eira blinked at it.

Lila was the only person she knew who hadn’t sent her anything since yesterday. Not last night, not this morning. Not one word.

She opened the door.

Lila stood there and gave her a look that was somehow furious and not furious at all. Her eyes went in a full circle. Then her whole face broke open.

"Oh my GOD."

She got both arms around Eira and squeezed hard enough to lift her off her heels.

Eira couldn’t breathe. She was smiling anyway.

"I thought you were mad at me," she said when she got loose. "You didn’t answer anything I sent."

"Do not get me started." Lila waved that off and went straight for the couch like she lived there. "That’s Professor Chase. I was two hours deep into reading every single article written about you, having the time of my life, and he pulls me into the lab. I got out forty minutes ago. I came here first. I haven’t even eaten."

Eira sat down next to her and handed her a juice box.

Lila drank the whole thing in one go and turned around with her eyes lit up.

"Okay. I knew you were smart the day I met you. You read my thesis like it was a menu." She waved the empty box around. "But this? My entire family lost their minds. And I mean the whole pack."

Eira smiled a little. "You’re exaggerating."

"I am absolutely not. " Lila dropped back into the cushions. "Oh, and I heard something. Your ex and that Serena woman both got picked up yesterday. Is that real? Because if it is, somebody is sitting on it hard. There’s nothing out there. Not a word."

"It’s real." Eira nodded. "Sebastian got cleared and sent home. Serena didn’t."

Anything that touched the Initiative came to her the same hour it happened. That update had come in around ten.

Serena had met with her attorney at eight.

--

Vincent Crawford walked into the field office at eight with a leather briefcase and the same face he wore into every room. Calm. Unhurried. Like he’d already read the last page.

They gave him a private room with Serena.

Anybody who followed either world knew the name.

Crawford Pack was one of the four first tier packs on the continent, and Vincent was the current Alpha’s son.

He could have taken a seat on that council at twenty-two and never worked a day in his life.

Instead he went to law school, then qualified in both systems—human and Council—which maybe three attorneys in the country had ever bothered to do.

Fourteen years in and he’d never lost one that went to trial. Human juries liked him. Council tribunals respected him, which was rarer and worth more. When a pack got into something it couldn’t buy its way out of, somebody in the room always said the same thing.

Call Crawford.

He hadn’t taken a case for the money in years. He took the ones he wanted.

And he’d been on a plane six hours after Serena called him.

Twenty-three hours had taken the polish off her. Her hair hung flat. Her eyes were red at the rims.

The second she saw him her face came apart.

"Vincent." Her voice shook. "I didn’t think you’d actually come."

"You called me. Of course I came."

--

They’d met in Prague four years back.

A guy at the bar dropped something in Vincent’s drink. Serena caught it and said it in Spanish, low and fast, right as he reached for the glass. The guy didn’t speak Spanish. He just kept smiling and kept holding it out.

Vincent’s face went cold half a second later.

When the guy put it together he called her something ugly and threw the drink. Vincent got an arm up and wore it instead.

They traded numbers that night. He took her to dinner to say thanks. They had a week.

Then Alpha Sebastian flew out for her birthday and she took the call standing three feet from Vincent.

"Boyfriend?" he asked, careful about it.

And she knew right then.

"Take a guess."

He backed off after that. Kept his distance and kept in touch. Something showed up every holiday, never flashy, always something he’d thought about.

She was glad she never chased him. Lawyers are careful people.

But she never let the line go slack. You don’t cut a rope like that.

--

"Vincent, I didn’t do this." Her voice broke. "I would never leak classified material. Not in a million years."

"Okay." He laid the briefcase flat and opened a legal pad. "Start at the top. Don’t clean anything up for me. The parts you think make you look bad are the parts I need first."

She walked him through it. Every week since she’d come onto the Sovereign Processor Initiative. Cut out of meetings. Left off the distribution lists. Handed work you’d give a first year grad student and no one to complain to.

"And the video." Her hands wouldn’t hold still. "I know how it looks. But somebody asks me one basic question about my own project and I can’t answer it? On my own team? I should know something."

The pen stopped.

"Did you ever have access to the data?"

"No." Her mouth went tight. "I told you back in the spring. Eira’s had me locked out since day one and the whole team takes their cues from her."

He wrote that down and let it sit.

"Then why would Dr. Crawford flag you as a leak risk to begin with?" His voice stayed level. His eyes didn’t. "Does she know about you and Sebastian Hale?"

There it was.

"I swear to you I didn’t know he was mated when we picked things back up."

Vincent’s head came up.

He’d known who Eira Crawford was since the plane. Everybody with a phone did by now. Lead engineer, twenty five, federal medal. Nobody had bothered to mention she was married to Alpha Sebastian Hale.

"Sebastian Hale is mated to Eira Crawford. And you’re seeing him."

"I’m not seeing him." Fast. "We were together when we were kids. I went abroad, we ended it, and while I was gone he married her out of nowhere. I didn’t find out until the day of the presentation."

He didn’t write that one down.

"She knew about me the entire time. I didn’t know about her." Serena leaned in, eyes wet. "Not until it was already too late."

He was quiet a beat.

"Hale lied to you."

A tear went down her cheek. He slid the tissue box across.

"Thank you. For coming."

She didn’t say yes. She didn’t say no. She let the quiet do it for her.

Then she switched tracks.

"You should know Eira has a relationship with Killian Sterling. During the blackout period she spent a month working as his personal assistant. Ask anybody at Sterling Group, they all know her."

The pen started moving again.

"So your position is that Alpha Sterling and Dr. Crawford put this together between them. He takes out a competitor’s bid. She takes out the woman sleeping with her husband."

Serena nodded. No hesitation at all. Her eyes were still red but her voice had gone level.

"Yes."

Vincent looked at her for a long moment.

Then he closed the notebook.

"I’ll get you out of here," he said. "You have my word on that."