Gideon’s vendetta against me always had the shape of personal ambition. This has the shape of something colder.
"Kieran," I say. "Has he come around?"
"Enough to talk."
The holding room is in the lower east wing — stone-walled, dry, a cot and a lamp and a guard rotation that changes every four hours.
Kieran sits on the cot when Ciaran and I enter, forearms on his knees, dark hair still falling across his forehead. He looks younger without conviction propping him up, more wrinkles and less imposing.
He tracks me across the room with wary eyes. "I'm not going to beg."
"I'm not asking you to." I pull the single chair close and sit. "I'm asking you to tell me what your father promised you."
Kieran scoffed. "Alpha position. Once you were dealt with." He says it flat, like the words have lost the weight they carried when his father first delivered them.
"He told you he could guarantee that."
"He said the council would recognize it. That with you gone and the pack destabilized, an Alpha transition would require a strong bloodline to step into the gap." He looks at his hands. "He said I was ready."
"Did he tell you about the syndicate?" I ask.
Kieran's eyes come up fast. "What syndicate?"
Ciaran sets the decoded printout on the cot beside him without comment. Kieran picks it up, reads the first page, reads it again. Whatever color was in his face drains out of it steadily.
"He didn't tell you," I say.
"No." Kieran's voice is quiet. "No, he—" He stops. His hand tightens on the paper. "These are land acquisition orders. They're not even about the pack. They're about selling the territory."
"Or destabilizing the governance structure enough that the land reverts to a legal gray area," Ciaran says. "Which has the same practical effect."
Kieran sets the printout down carefully, like it's fragile. "He told me this was about the pack's strength. About removing weak leadership." I recognize his expression. "He used me."
"Yes," I say. "He did." I let that sit for a moment before I continue. "What I need from you right now is confirmation. On record, before witnesses—that Gideon directed you to abduct Cassidy. Testify to everything." Neither of us are willing to look away. "You give me that, and the execution order comes off the table. Trial, exile, something with a future in it."
Kieran is quiet for a long moment. "And if I don't?"
"Then you face the full weight of what you did without anything on the other side of it." I stand. "I'll give you an hour."
I find Gideon in the main courtyard.
He's not hiding, which is either confidence or strategy, and with Gideon the distinction is rarely clear. He's speaking with two of his older loyalists when Ciaran and I cross the yard, and he finishes his sentence before he acknowledges us.
"Alden." His voice carries the same composed ease it always does. "And Ciaran. This feels like a formal visit."
"We found your phone," Ciaran says.
"I have several phones."
"This one was under the floor of a hunting cabin that also contained two military ammunition caches, internal patrol maps with your authorization seal, and a kidnapped woman." Ciaran holds the printout up. "The messages link you to a Wyoming hunting syndicate with documented land acquisition activity."
Gideon looks at the printout without reaching for it. His expression doesn't change in any way that a stranger would notice. But I've known him for twenty years, and what moves behind his eyes in the half-second before he resets is not surprise. It's calculation.
"Fabricated," he says.
"Decrypted from a phone recovered from your operational site," Ciaran replies.
"My alleged operational site." He turns toward me. "This is exactly what I expected. You're building a case rather than fighting one, and you're using your human biologist's unverified claims as the foundation." He steps slightly closer, lowering his voice without dropping it entirely. "The pack is watching, Alden. And what they're seeing is an Alpha who responds to a formal challenge by assembling accusations instead of stepping into the ring."