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Gideon’s gaze went somewhere distant, past the two of them, past the walls of the office.

“She was standing in the doorway. Six years old. Small for her age, I remember that, all elbows and knees, wearing a nightgown even though it was the middle of the afternoon.” He paused. “I’ve thought about that detail for twenty years and never understood why it bothered me. A child in a nightgown at two in the afternoon. Now I understand it fine.”

Kahn said nothing. Chris kept his eyes on Gideon, waiting.

“She didn’t cry,” Gideon continued. “Every other child I’ve seen watch their father dragged off a property has cried, screamed, run after him, something. Sloane stood in that doorway with her hands folded in front of her and watched us take him to the tree line, and when he looked back at her, hoping for some show of grief I imagine, she didn’t give him one.”

“She was relieved,” Chris said.

“I know that now. I suspected it then and told myself I was wrong, because suspecting it meant asking what kind of man makes a six-year-old relieved to watch him banished, and I didn’t want the answer badly enough to go looking for it.” Gideon’s hands, folded on the desk, tightened around each other. “We closed the file. Territorial violations, insubordination, a clean banishment with witnesses. I went home that night and told my wife it was a good day’s work. I believed it, for a long time.”

“When did you stop believing it?” Kahn asked.

“When Chris brought me that name and I finally let myself finish the thought, I started the day we dragged Garrett off that porch.” Gideon looked up at Kahn directly. “He wasn’t just a bad father. I think we all knew that on some level and filed it under things that weren’t our business. He was dangerous, and the pack’s failure wasn’t in banishing him. It was in never once asking why a child looked glad to see him go.”

The room held quiet for a moment. Chris felt the old anger stir again, not at Kahn this time, not even fully at Gideon, but at the whole shape of what had happened, a house full of adults who’d had every reason to look closer and hadn’t.

“You said you suspected it then,” Kahn said. “What stopped you from acting on it?”

“Cowardice, mostly. And the fact that Garrett was already gone, and it felt easier to let the matter close with him.” Gideon’s voice had gone rougher than Chris had ever heard it. “I’ve sat with that for two decades, Alpha. I won’t sit with it any longer than I have to. If there’s anything else I can give you, ask it now.”

“The forces you saw that day,” Kahn said. “Would you recognize any patterns in how he operates? Anything from back then that matches what we’re seeing on the boundary now?”

Gideon considered it, and for the first time since they’d entered, something in his posture shifted toward the practical. The man who’d run security assessments for thirty years reasserted himself over the man who’d just confessed a failure he’d carried alone.

“He was patient even then,” Gideon said. “He didn’t fight us at the house because he’d already planned his exit. He wanted witnesses to see him lose so no one would look past the surface of it.” He picked his glasses back up, turned them over once. “If he’s the same man, and I suspect he is, everything he’s doing now has a second purpose underneath the first. Watch for that. Don’t take anything he shows you at face value.”

Kahn nodded slowly. He looked at Chris, and something in his expression had eased, not fully, but enough that Chris recognized the shift.

“Thank you, Gideon,” Kahn said.

“Don’t thank me.” Gideon put his glasses back on and pulled the stack of reports toward him again, though his hands weren’t quite steady doing it. “Go find that girl and tell her someone in this pack finally asked the right question, twenty years too late. It won’t fix anything. But she should know it happened.”

Chris was already moving toward the door before Kahn finished nodding.

Chapter 20 - Sloane

Sloane heard Viktor’s voice through the door before she reached the corridor.

“Eastern approach,” he said. “Same window as last time.”

She slowed. Stopped a few feet from the frame, close enough to hear but not close enough to be seen if the door opened. Kahn’s voice followed, low, then Gideon’s, rougher, dragging over a name she caught only in pieces.

Garrett.

She stood there and counted the voices. Kahn. Gideon. Viktor. Caitlynn, once, brief. She waited for her own name and it never came.

She too had sat at that table and told them how her father moved. The room had gone quiet enough to hear the map paper shift under Viktor’s pen. She’d walked out certain the room had shifted for good. Apparently it had only shifted for as long as it took the next crisis to arrive. The old habits reasserted themselves without anyone deciding to bring them back.

A door opened further down the hall. Damian stepped out with a folder under one arm and nearly walked into her.

“Hey.” He glanced at the closed door behind him, then at her. His face went careful. “You’re not in there.”

“I noticed.”

“They’re going over what Gideon dug up. History stuff. I think Kahn wanted to keep the room small.”

“Small enough to leave out the one person who actually knew him.”