Chapter 169: The Alpha Asked Twice

"The chief of police flagged it this morning," Captain Harlan answered. "Her bloodwork came back with traces of a scent-neutralizing agent in her system."

"Then why wasn’t she detected on the grid?" Alpha Thunderfang pressed. "The wards read body movement and heat signatures, not scent."

"That’s the bigger concern, Alpha." Harlan’s tone flattened out of the comedy entirely. "She was wearing grid tags. More than one." He scrubbed back, zoomed in. A cluster of small nodes banded around Celeste’s wrist, half-hidden under the sleeve of her robe. "Clearance signatures. She borrowed enough authorized profiles to read as staff on every checkpoint she crossed."

Poof. The transition from comedy to criminal investigation was so fast it gave whiplash. One second they were watching a princess fall down a laundry chute. The next, every face was stone at the table.

The elder who had called Celeste resourceful was staring at the grid tags on the holo feed with the expression of a man watching his own argument get autopsied.

"Whose?" Alpha Thunderfang asked.

Harlan pulled up the panel. Ten profiles fanned across the holo in a grid of faces. Eight omegas. Two guards.

Nova’s eyes moved across them, and her stomach dropped through the floor.

Carmen.

Next to her, Maria stopped breathing. She didn’t look at Nova, careful not to give anything away. Maria’s matebond did not care about that and neither did her mate. Tavian was staring straight at Nova with confusion on his face. His eyes flicked to Maria next with an expression that clearly said, what am I missing.

Alpha Thunderfang studied the panel of faces for a moment. "Bring all ten in. Every one."

"Already in progress, Alpha," Harlan answered.

Alpha Thunderfang turned to the table. "For the room: Carmen Vasquez was found dead yesterday. In the guest suite that had been assigned to Nova. Weapon unknown. That is an open investigation and it does not leave this room."

The sentence landed on every person at the table like a stamp on an envelope. Sealed. The room understood. The room was not going to test it.

Nova’s stomach went down again because her eyes landed on someone else’s face.

Jean.

The woman who had sat beside her bed, who had raised both Thunderfang brothers from pups, who had rewrapped her shoulder with hands that had clearly done it a thousand times on a boy who was now in a coma.

Her grey hair was pinned back in a bun, the steady eyes, the woman who’d fished her out of a bathing chamber doorway and said the Alpha has ten guards stationed outside this door. Why would Alpha Thunderfang want her questioned?

It had to be optics. He couldn’t exempt one omega and drag in the rest without the pack reading favoritism into it. That was all. That was the only version that made sense.

"Pull every one of their movements this week," Alpha Thunderfang ordered. "All ten. Full footage."

Nova’s eyes moved back to the head of the table and found him already watching her. She blinked a few times, running a quick audit on whether she’d done something, said something, breathed wrong.

The look between them lasted two seconds. In those two seconds, Alpha Thunderfang communicated something she couldn’t fully decode.

Every wolf at the table felt their Alpha’s focus shift and every body adjusted a fraction in the same direction, the pack instinct of animals who track their leader’s gaze without deciding to.

Tavian was fluent in Alpha Thunderfang in a way Nova was not.

"Nova, have you had any interactions with any of these omegas?" he asked without looking away from her.

A captain near the back of the room shifted his weight and the shift sounded like the loudest thing that had happened since the sentence landed.

Nova gave a single nod.

"Yes, Beta Voltcrest," she answered, defaulting to his formal title in this setting.

"Which ones?"

"J-Jean. And Carmen." The stutter was involuntary. It was the sound of a woman saying a name she didn’t want to say in a room that was going to do things with it she couldn’t control.

"Jean?" Harlan double-tapped the holo. Her face enlarged, rotating slowly in the air. "This one?"

Nova’s throat moved once before she spoke. "Yes."

"Explain," Harlan ordered with no warmth.

The whole table waited, an entire war room angled towards her. The quiet had the texture of a courtroom between the question and the answer, where every person present understands that what comes next is going to matter and no one can help the person saying it.

Nova could hear her own pulse and she was fairly certain the wolves at the table could too, which meant her composure was a visual illusion that every nose in the room had already seen through.

"After the fire, when I woke, she was in the room."

"What do you mean in the room?"

Nova couldn’t tell if this was a trap, if answering wrong meant she’d insulted a woman who’d shown her kindness and raised Derek and the Alpha. She was not about to throw anyone under a transport pod. But also this reaction felt very off.

"I woke and she was sitting in the room. She said she was there on the Alpha’s orders and unable to let me leave. And she mentioned that she had taken care of Derek and the Alpha when they were growing up."

The temperature in the room dropped. Whatever Nova had said was the wrong answer.

She looked at Maria, confused. "She mentioned you had stopped by to bring me clothes too. I assumed I was wearing one of your Thunderfang suits."

Maria shook her head no once, very slowly. "Not me, unfortunately. I would have stayed."

"Did she say she couldn’t let you leave?" Captain Harlan asked.

"Yes, Captain Harlan. She informed me that Derek was in the hospital. But I ended up leaving against her wishes because I wanted to go to him. I ran into Sierra on the main level and then the attack on the courtyard happened."

A few elders shifted in their seats. Nova was aware that probably sounded suspicious. It was the truth.

"We saw a hovercraft land from inside the Keep," Sierra cut in. "Armed men jumped from it. One of them was approaching a pup. So Nova ran outside to get the pup while I called Sebastian to see if it was a drill of some kind."

Nova appreciated her for that because at the moment she was feeling like she had done something wrong.

Alpha Thunderfang’s brows drew together. "After the fire would have been in my chambers. Confirm."

Nova’s face went hot. Just in case they hadn’t heard it the first ten times, here was another neon sign that said ’Nova slept in the Alpha’s chambers.’

"Yes, Alpha. I had woken up there."

"That woman." He repeated it back slow, each piece of it laid down separately. "Was in my chambers while you were asleep. She told you Derek was in the hospital. And she told you she’d raised Derek and I."

Every person at the table was looking at Alpha Thunderfang and every person at the table understood that the man repeating those words back was not asking for confirmation.

"Yes."