Page 28 of Curvy Sold Mate

Kahn’s mouth shifted at the corner—the closest thing to a smile he’d offered all morning. “Always practical.”

“Someone has to be.”

The conversation moved on. Patrol rotations, ward maintenance, the continuing investigation into the mole—the work of the pack continuing around the news, absorbing it, making room for it without letting it derail the machinery. Olivia contributed where she was expected to contribute, noted the scheduling adjustments for the eastern patrol that would accommodate Damian’s arrival, and drank her tea while the knot in her chest loosened and tightened and loosened again.

Damian. Coming back.

She wasn’t dreading it. That was the strange part—the thing she would have to sit with later, in the quiet of her room, when the day had ended, and the mask could come off. She wasn’t bracing for his arrival the way she might have braced for a confrontation or an old wound reopened.

She was dreading what it would stir up.

The memories, for one. It had ended quietly. Mutual, they’d called it.

Now he was coming back.

She finished her tea. Stood. Collected her plate and cup with the methodical attention she gave to tasks that didn’t require thought, because not thinking was a temporary reprieve from the work of sorting through what Damian’s return meant for a woman who was now married to his brother.

“Olivia.” Kahn’s voice stopped her at the door. “You good?”

She turned. Her brother’s face was open in a way it rarely was in public—the Alpha mask slipped, the man underneath visible in the lines around his eyes, the set of his mouth. He was asking as her brother, not as her Alpha, and she answered the same way.

“I’m fine,” she said. “It’s been four years. We’re both different people.”

The words were true. They just weren’t the whole truth, and Kahn heard the gap the way he always heard gaps in her stories.

She left the dining room. Walked the corridor toward the administrative wing, her footsteps measured, her mind already shifting to the day’s work. The investigation into Maren Holt was progressing—they had enough now to bring her in for questioning, though Viktor wanted more before they moved, and Olivia agreed. Patience was the difference between catching a mole and scaring one underground.

She passed the archive door. Paused. Something about the morning light through the high window caught her attention—the angle of it, the way it fell across the filing cabinet in the corner, illuminating a stack of papers she hadn’t noticed before.

She stepped inside. The archive smelled of old paper and the mineral tang of the stone basement, familiar now after weeks of work. The stack on the filing cabinet was new—or not new, exactly, but rearranged. She had left the eastern patrol logs in a specific order three days ago, color-coded by week, the tabs aligned with military precision.

The stack on the filing cabinet was new—or not new, exactly, but rearranged. She had left the eastern patrol logs in a specific order three days ago, color-coded by week, the tabs aligned with the precision she brought to every system she touched. They were still color-coded, still in order, but the stack had been shifted two inches to the left. The top file—week six, the critical gap in the record—had a corner that was bent, as though someone had lifted it in a hurry and set it back without care.

She stood still. Counted her breaths. Someone had been in the archive, had looked at the files she and Viktor had been working through, had focused on the very week that mattered most.

She pulled the file. Opened it. The patrol rotation schedule for week six lay inside, annotated in her handwriting. Nothing was missing, nothing added, but the file had been handled recently—she could smell it, the faint trace of soap that belonged to neither her nor Viktor, the lingering warmth of hands that had held the paper and returned it.

She closed the file and knelt beside the lower drawers, pulling the ration returns she’d been sorting before Kahn’s announcement had rearranged her morning. The work was sequential, methodical, the kind of attention she could provide while the rest of her mind turned over what Damian’s return actually meant—and here, in the mineral quiet of the basement, she could afford to be honest about it.

She wasn’t afraid of seeing him. She tested the prospect the way she’d test a bruise, pressing against it to gauge the depth, and the fear she expected wasn’t there, or at least it wasn’t shaped the way she’d anticipated. It wasn’t Damian himself she was bracing against. It was the version of herself he’d known—the twenty-two-year-old who’d mistaken being desired for being understood and had let the mistake run for three months because correcting it would have meant admitting what she actually wanted, and what she actually wanted had been standing at Kahn’s right shoulder with grey eyes that gave away nothing and held everything.

She was halfway through the ration returns for the third week when she found it.

A requisition form, stamped and filed with the routine supply orders, buried between two legitimate requests for medical stores. The handwriting was Maren’s—she recognized the careful, upright lettering, the way Maren formed her sevens with a crossbar, a European habit none of the other administrative staff shared. The form authorized a supplementary transport to the northern market town on March twenty-eighth, the same date as Brennan’s second trip.

She’d seen the trip in Viktor’s files. She’d cross-referenced it against the patrol schedules and the ward maintenance calendar. What she hadn’t seen—because Viktor’s analysis had focused on the trips themselves rather than the paperwork authorizing them—was the requisition that made the trip official.

The form listed medical supplies. Standard items: bandages, antiseptic, the fever-reducing herbs that the pack healer ordered monthly from a supplier in the north. Everything checked out against the inventory records she’d already reviewed.

Except that the form had been filed in the wrong section.

Standard requisitions lived in the main administrative drawer, sorted by date, accessible to any staff member running a supply check. This one was in the miscellaneous section of the eastern archive, wedged between expired insurance documents and a building inspection report from three years ago. It hadn’t been misfiled—it had been buried, placed in the one section of the records that nobody opened unless they were doing precisely what Olivia was doing: pulling every sheet of paper out of every drawer and reading them all.

She held the form up to the archive’s overhead light. Turned it over. The back was blank, but the paper itself was heavier than the standard requisition stock—thicker, slightly textured, the kind of paper that held up to handling and didn’t show marks from folding. The kind of paper you’d use if the document was going to travel, if someone other than the filing clerk was going to hold it.

She set it aside. Made a note in her book—date, location, filing anomaly, paper weight—and kept pulling files, because one form in the wrong drawer was a detail. Details only became evidence when they connected to other details, and the connection required patience, which she was willing to spend.

By noon, she had three more anomalies. A gate log with a smudged timestamp that could have been altered. A transport manifest listing a cart driver who hadn’t been on the roster for the date in question. A memo from Maren to the gate officer authorizing early departure for a supply run that, according to the schedule, wasn’t due for another week.