Page 25 of Curvy Sold Mate

She crossed the room. Picked up the folder. The weight of it surprised her—heavier than she’d expected, the accumulated mass of days’ worth of work, some of it his and some of it hers, bound together in a package she should have seen before Kahn did.

“Tomorrow morning,” she said, “we go through this together. All of it. And the next time you bring something to Kahn, I’m in the room.”

“Understood.”

She turned toward the door and stopped.

“Viktor.”

He waited.

“Thank you for saying I was right. I know what that cost you.”

She did not give him a chance to respond. She left with the folder under her arm and didn’t close the door behind her.

Chapter 16 - Olivia

Olivia arrived at six-thirty with the folder and two cups of coffee, one of which she set on his side of the desk without ceremony.

Viktor looked at the coffee. Looked at her. She was already seated, the folder open, three coloured tabs marking sections she’d added overnight—he could tell they were new because the ink was fresh and the handwriting had the slightly uneven pressure of someone working by lamplight after midnight.

“I reworked the timeline,” she said, pulling the first tab forward. “You had Brennan’s market trips mapped by date. I remapped them based on what else was happening in the compound on each trip—patrol rotations, ward maintenance, anything that created movement or noise. There’s a pattern.”

He sat. Took the coffee. It was black, no sugar—Olivia knew how he drank it. He directed his attention away from that and toward the folder.

“Show me.”

“Brennan’s first trip—March fourteenth—coincides with the ward recalibration on the eastern boundary. Caitlynn was running the new frequency tests, which meant half the compound was watching the tree line or standing around the anchor points. Maximum distraction, minimum oversight on internal movement.”

She traced the timeline with her pencil, and he followed the line of it—her annotations precise, her reasoning visible in the connections she’d drawn between events that, separated, looked innocent and, together, looked coordinated.

“The second trip—March twenty-eighth—falls during the southern patrol rotation gap. The one I flagged at the briefing. Anyone moving north through the compound during that window would have passed through unmonitored territory for twenty minutes.”

“And the third?”

“April ninth. The morning Kahn called the full pack assembly to discuss the new ritual.” She tapped the date with the eraser end. “Every wolf in the compound was in the great hall. Every pair of eyes pointed inward. If you wanted to move a message or a package out of the territory without being seen, that was your morning.”

Viktor leaned forward. The coffee sat untouched beside his elbow, and she continued without looking up, which told him she already knew she had his full attention and didn’t need him to confirm it.

“You cross-referenced these against the ward breach reports,” he said.

“Against the breach reports and the patrol shift-change logs. The breaches you identified in the overnight reports last month—two of them fall within forty-eight hours of Brennan’s trips. I don’t think that’s a scheduling coincidence.”

He drank the coffee while the silence held—a working silence this time, two minds running the same problem from different angles, the space between their conclusions narrowing toward a point.

“That narrows Brennan,” he said. “What about Maren?”

“Maren is where it gets complicated.” Olivia turned to the second tab. “I went through the archive access logs—the ones I pulled from the vault last week. Maren’s name appears seven times in the twelve weeks before the kidnapping, which isn’t unusual for someone in her position. She handles scheduling, correspondence, filing. But three of those visits are logged outside business hours.”

“Late entries could be overflow. Administrative catch-up.”

“They could.” She looked at him, and her eyes held that steady, assessing quality he’d been learning to navigate. “Except the sign-in log doesn’t match the vault’s internal record. Maren signed in at eight p.m. on the eleventh. The vault’s access stamp shows the lock engaged at seven-forty-two and disengaged at seven-fifty-one. She was inside for nine minutes before she logged her entry.”

“She was in the vault before she logged herself in.”

“Which means she either forgot to sign in when she arrived and backdated it—sloppy, but possible—or she deliberately delayed the log so the timestamp wouldn’t match security rounds.” Olivia closed the folder. “I don’t have enough to prove which, but I know how to find out.”

“How?”