Page 27 of Curvy Sold Mate

Since before the recalibration. The vault’s internal access stamp said otherwise—seven visits in twelve weeks, three after dark.

Olivia let it go. Didn’t push, didn’t probe, didn’t let her face show what the discrepancy meant or where it pointed. Instead, she redirected the conversation to seating charts and delegate protocols. The kind of administrative minutiae that Maren handled with genuine ease and visible relief. They talked for another fifteen minutes about nothing that mattered, while the thing that did matter sat beneath the conversation, humming.

When she left, she walked back to the study at a pace that would look unhurried to anyone watching, and found Viktor at the desk with patrol reports spread in front of him.

She sat across from him. “Maren lied.”

He set the report down.

“I asked about the missing vault records—casually, buried inside a conversation about filing. Maren said she hasn’t been in the vault since before the recalibration. The access stamp has her there seven times since, three of them at night.”

“She could have forgotten.”

“She didn’t forget. I watched her when I mentioned the missing records. There was a pause—short, less than a second—where she had to choose what to say, and a person with nothing to hide doesn’t need to choose. She picked the answer that put the most distance between herself and the vault.”

Olivia opened the folder and found the access log, smoothing it flat across the desk so they could both see the columns. “She also anchored her answer to a specific event—since before the recalibration—which sounds natural but can’t be pinned to a date. If she hadn’t already been thinking about the timeline, she would have said a while ago, or I don’t remember. She chose a landmark, and she put herself on the far side of it.”

Viktor was looking at her. The pen lay untouched beside the reports, his hands still on the desk, and whatever he was doing behind those grey eyes involved something more than reassessing the suspect list.

“You got that from a fifteen-minute conversation,” he said.

“I got that from eleven years of watching people construct their answers in kitchens and hallways and across dining tables, because when you grow up as the Alpha’s sister, everyone is performing something in front of you, and you either learn to read the performance or you spend your life believing the script.” She closed the folder and leaned back. “Maren’s script slipped.”

“We bring this to Kahn tomorrow,” he said. “Together.”

“Together,” she agreed.

Chapter 17 - Olivia

The news arrived with breakfast, tucked into a corner of Kahn’s briefing that no one had expected to matter.

Olivia was at the table, halfway through her tea, when Kahn set down his mug and said, “Damian’s coming back.”

The sentence landed in the dining room with the weight of a stone dropped into still water. Olivia’s spoon stilled against the rim of her cup. The clink it made echoed in the sudden silence.

“Damian?” Caitlynn looked up from her porridge, her spoon hovering. “Viktor’s brother?”

Kahn nodded once, a gesture that contained paragraphs of unspoken history. “Three days. He sent word through the northern patrol. Said he’s been traveling, wants to reconnect with family.” His eyes cut briefly to Olivia, then away. “He didn’t specify a reason.”

Olivia took another sip of tea. The liquid was too hot now—she’d let it cool while Kahn spoke, and the temperature had dropped enough that she noticed the bitterness at the back of her throat. She set the cup down with care, centering it on the saucer, giving her hands something to do while the rest of her caught up.

“That’s interesting,” Caitlynn said, the word carrying a weight that suggested she was already constructing theories, filing them alongside the things she knew about Olivia’s history, about Viktor’s family, about the quiet spaces in the pack’s social architecture that had never fully closed. “It’s been what—three years since he was here last?”

“Four,” Olivia said. The number came out clean, factual, stripped of the freight she could feel pressing against the inside of her ribs. “He left after the eastern territory negotiations.”

Kahn watched her. She could feel his attention like a physical presence across the table—her brother, who had never been good at hiding his concern and had never tried to be. “He’ll be in the guest quarters. Eastern wing, far end of the corridor.”

“Smart,” Caitlynn said. “Away from the family rooms.”

The comment was aimed at Olivia, a kindness wrapped in strategy. She acknowledged it with a slight tilt of her chin.

Viktor sat at the other end of the table. He had been silent throughout the exchange, his posture unchanged—one hand on his coffee, the other flat beside his plate, the arrangement of a man who did not let news visibly affect him. But Olivia had been watching Viktor Hale for eight years, and eight years was long enough to learn that the absence of reaction was itself a reaction.

He didn’t ask why Damian was coming back. Didn’t ask when, or for how long, or what his brother wanted. He simply nodded once, the way Kahn had nodded, and took a drink of coffee.

Olivia cataloged it. Filed it alongside the other data points she’d been collecting about Viktor’s face, about the things he didn’t say and the spaces between his words. The folder in her mind—the one labeled Things I Notice That I Wish I Didn’t—grew heavier by the day.

“I’ll have Elena prepare the rooms,” she said, because saying something was better than saying nothing, and because the administrative work of hosting was a channel she could direct her attention through while the rest of her sorted itself. “He’ll need clean linens. Towels. Someone should check the plumbing in that wing—it’s been months since anyone’s used those showers.”