’Are you threatening me?’

Daisy kept her composure locked in place throughout the mind link, even as her pulse did something she absolutely did not appreciate — that traitorous, uneven thing it had started doing the moment the morning stopped going the way she’d planned.

She kept her face exactly where it needed to be, her expression smooth and unbothered for anyone watching, while underneath it her mind moved fast and quiet. ’Do you honestly think Ravyn would take your word over mine?’ She asked through mind link as she pulled back slightly, smoothed the edges of it, and gave the response a little more room to breathe. ’Play this right and I might be able to work on him about easing the punishment.’

Audrey’s reply came back without a single beat of hesitation, and the steadiness of it was far worse than anger would have been.

’He doesn’t seem to value you the way you think he does. If anyone’s reading this room honestly, he’s falling for his ex-wife. She’s the only one he seems afraid of now.

The link landed somewhere deep and tender inside Daisy, the kind of place that doesn’t have armor over it because you never thought you’d need any there.

She felt it move through her the way a crack moves through glass, quiet and invisible on the surface but structural in every way that mattered. Her chest tightened around it before she could stop it, turning it over once, twice, holding it up against everything she’d watched unfold this morning.

The way Ravyn’s eyes had gone apologetic when they found Seraphine, the way he’d stood in front of his entire pack and rearranged the whole morning around her without flinching, without checking Daisy’s face once to see how it landed.

Could it be true?

She didn’t get the chance to sit with the question. Audrey’s voice came back through the link before the silence between them had fully formed.

’Say something to defend us right now, or we tell the Alpha everything.’

The words found something Daisy had been keeping carefully untouched and pressed directly on it. She held her face exactly where it needed to be and pushed back. ’Then you clearly don’t know him the way I do. I am the only one who holds his attention.’

’If that’s actually true, Audrey’s link returned, flat and unconvinced, prove it. Get us out of this mess. Because of you, the entire pack is taking a salary cut. And nobody even knows what she’s charging for the cure.’

Daisy had run completely out of cards. She moved to the only practical ground she had left. ’Stay focused on the pay issue. Give me time to work on Ravyn about the running. Just give me time.’

Audrey ended the link and pushed her voice out into the open air of the gym, clean and carrying, like she’d been saving it for exactly this moment. "Alpha, isn’t it only fair that we know what the cure is actually going to cost?"

Ravyn took exactly as long to consider it as it took him to arrive at his answer. "No. Because I intend to double the amount before I make the deduction."

The sound that moved through the room was immediate and uncontained, groans, scattered protests, voices overlapping with the particular energy of people who had just watched a bad situation get considerably worse.

Ravyn let it run its course without expression, giving it exactly the amount of weight it deserved, which was none.

"That’s the penalty," he said, when the noise had thinned enough to speak through, "for whatever working relationship this pack might have eventually built with Seraphine, you’ve now made significantly harder to establish."

A female warrior near the middle of the room, Estella, one of the ones who had stayed quiet through most of the morning cut through the lingering noise from a different angle entirely. "Alpha, you’ve said she’s a major figure in the human business world."

There was something genuinely curious in her voice, something that hadn’t been performing or positioning itself. "Can you actually tell us what it is she does?"

Ravyn glanced at Damon.

Damon gave him one clean, unhurried nod. "We’re going to need a projector."

Someone moved for it immediately, the particular speed people find when an Alpha has already begun expecting something to be finished. From the bench, Seraphine let out a yawn she didn’t especially try to conceal, tipping her head back slightly with the unbothered ease of someone who had long since stopped performing alertness for other people’s comfort. "One hour gone."

The projector came up. Damon connected his phone, pulled up what he’d put together, and the footage began moving across the wall of the gym. News coverage of MindNest, real coverage, the kind that came from outlets that didn’t run stories unless they were worth running.

The building. The board presentations. The numbers. The faces of people in suits talking about Seraphine Walker the way people talk about someone who has changed the shape of something important.

The room went completely, instantly quiet.

Not the quiet of people waiting for something to happen. The quiet of people in the middle of something happening to them, something that was rearranging the way they understood a morning they thought they’d already figured out.

When the footage ended, the wall went blank, and for a moment nobody moved.

Ravyn’s voice was the first sound in the room. "Training. Those serving punishment outside. Right now."

No matter what, somebody had to pay for ruining his changes. The moment the opportunity came for Seraphine to produce the cure for them, he planned to have friendship with her and yet, his part members destroyed his effort with ease.

There was a beat of silence, and then Kevin’s voice sounded, something in the tone had changed, mirroring remorse as if he had been sitting on top of before but only now decided to voice it.

"Alpha." He paused like he was deciding whether to say the rest of it. Then he said it anyway. "Can’t we have our Luna back?"