Page 26 of Curvy Sold Mate

“I’m going to talk to her.”

Olivia watched the objection travel across his face. He saw her see it—saw the moment her chin lifted by a fraction, the slight shift in her weight toward the front of the chair, bracing.

“Not an interrogation,” he said.

“Obviously not an interrogation. I’m going to have a conversation.” She uncapped her pen and held it loosely, a conductor’s baton for the argument she was about to make. “Women in this compound talk to me, Viktor. They bring me things—complaints, gossip, concerns about their children and their mates, and the way the patrol schedules leave them eating dinner alone four nights a week. I’ve been fielding it since I was twenty, and I know who trusts me and who performs trust in my presence and who avoids me because I’m Kahn’s sister and proximity to power makes them nervous.”

She tapped the pen against the folder once. “Maren has been nervous around me for three weeks. I thought it was about the kidnapping—everyone’s been on edge—but if she’s hiding something, I’ll hear it. People don’t guard their stories the same way around me that they guard them around you.”

“Because they’re less afraid of you.”

“Because they don’t think I’m watching.” The corner of her mouth shifted—an expression she hadn’t offered him before. “The advantage of being the Alpha’s sister instead of the Alpha’s Beta is that people assume my attention is social. They talk in front of me like I’m furniture, and I’ve learned more from one lunch in the dining hall than you’ve pulled from six weeks of patrol reports.”

He sat with that. She was right, and the rightness of it carried a secondary weight he hadn’t anticipated—the realization that Olivia had been running intelligence for years without calling it that, absorbing information through channels he didn’t have access to because the channels were social, informal, built on trust he hadn’t earned and couldn’t replicate. His approach was structural. Hers was human. Together they covered ground that neither could have reached alone.

“I’ll go this morning,” she said. “You stay visible—briefing room, patrol review, wherever people expect you. If Maren sees us together and then I show up at her door, she’ll connect it. But if I come alone, looking bored, asking about the luncheon schedule or the seating chart for next month’s council meeting, she’ll answer without thinking about what she’s giving me.”

It was a sound approach. The logic held at every joint, the operational awareness running deeper than instinct, the mind behind it trained on people instead of terrain, but applying the same discipline he applied to topographic overlays and patrol rotation schemes.

“And if she doesn’t give you anything?”

“Then she’s either innocent or better at this than we think, and we move to Brennan.” She stood, tucked the folder under her arm, and paused at the door. “I’ll report back by noon. Directly. To you. Not through Kahn, not through Chris. You’ll hear it first, the same way I should have heard the briefing first.”

The correction was precise, a scalpel rather than a hammer, and he took it without flinching because she’d earned the right to deliver it.

She left, and he went to the briefing room where he ran the patrol review with his usual focus while something at the back of his mind kept returning to the way she’d said I’ll report back by noon.

***

Olivia found Maren in the administrative wing at half past nine.

The woman was at her desk in the narrow room behind the main office—close enough to overhear the traffic through Kahn’s study corridor, far enough to be overlooked by anyone not looking for her. Eleven years of proximity had made Maren part of the landscape, one of those figures you nodded at without registering, whose reliability was assumed because questioning it would have meant questioning the system she maintained, and nobody questioned systems that ran smoothly.

Olivia knocked on the open door. “Maren. Do you have a minute?”

Maren looked up. Mid-fifties, iron-grey hair pulled back tight, reading glasses on a chain around her neck. Her expression assembled itself into professional warmth with a speed that Olivia noted—the quarter-second delay before the smile, the way her hands moved to center the papers on her desk, a tidying gesture that created the appearance of order rather than serving any functional purpose.

“Olivia. Of course. Sit down.”

She sat. Crossed her legs. Let the silence stretch for exactly long enough that Maren would feel the need to fill it.

“The council meeting next month,” Olivia said. “Kahn mentioned a seating adjustment—something about the visiting delegates from Silver Ridge needing a separate table. Has that come through to you?”

“Not yet.” Maren’s hands settled. “I’ve been buried in the quarterly supply logs. Everything’s been behind since—well. Since everything happened.”

The euphemism was standard. Since everything happened had become the compound’s shorthand for the kidnapping, the ransom, the marriage, the accumulating evidence that the pack’s defenses were thinner than anyone had wanted to believe.

“I can imagine,” Olivia said. “The filing alone must be a nightmare. I’ve been in the archives—the system down there needs an overhaul.”

“God, doesn’t it.” Maren’s shoulders loosened by a degree. The reading glasses came off the chain and were cleaned with the hem of her sleeve, a self-soothing gesture Olivia had seen her make a dozen times at pack functions. “I’ve been saying that for years. Nobody listens until the roof’s already leaking.”

“Some of the vault records are missing. Did you notice? Weeks six through nine—intake forms, ration returns, access logs. All gone.”

She delivered it casually, wrapped in the rhythm of the complaint they’d been building together—two women commiserating about administrative chaos—and she watched Maren’s face the way Viktor would have watched a tree line, tracking for movement, for the twitch that preceded the ambush.

Maren’s cleaning slowed. Her thumb pressed the lens of her glasses with slightly more pressure than the fabric warranted. The delay before she answered was less than a second, but Olivia counted it, and a second was a long time when you knew what to measure.

“Missing?” Maren put the glasses back on. “That’s—no, I hadn’t noticed. I haven’t been in the vault since—” She stopped. Adjusted. “Since before the recalibration, probably. It’s been a busy quarter.”