The will contest goes public faster than Spencer predicted. By Monday the entire building knows, and I can map the perimeter of the information by the way conversations collapse when I round corners—mid-sentence, mid-laugh, the silence arriving a half-beat before my body does.
People don't stare—staring would be honest. What they do is worse: a flicker of attention, quick and lateral, the way you'd glance at a car accident while pretending to check your mirrors.
I feel it in the atrium, the elevator, the break room where someone shifts their coffee cup when I reach for the creamer like my legal status might be contagious. "You're imagining it," I tell my reflection Tuesday morning, and the lie is so transparent my own face doesn't argue.
By Wednesday the whispers have developed structure—not random gossip anymore, but a narrative forming around me like scaffolding around a condemned building. The same three words follow me through hallways like footprints I cannot wipe clean: half-blood, will challenge, Wallace brothers.
The pack council announces the hearing date at two o'clock that afternoon. By two-fifteen Maya Reed is blocking the bathroom door like she was waiting for the notification before cornering her prey.
"Bailee." She says my name the way her mother does—as an opening statement, not a greeting. "I heard about the hearing."
"The entire building heard about the hearing." I dry my hands with a calm I'm manufacturing in real time. "You're not bringing me breaking news, Maya."
"I'm bringing you a reality check." She steps closer, and the pretence of civility drops immediately and with a metaphoric loud noise of glass breaking. "This is just the beginning."
"Is this the part where you deliver the villain monologue?" I lean against the counter. "Should I look frightened, or can I just stand here?"
"My mother will dismantle that will clause by clause." Her smile arrives—surgical, assured, Celeste's smile on a younger face. "Your little arrangement here goes with it."
"Arrangement." I fold my arms because they need a barricade to hide behind. "That's a creative word for employment."
"The Wallace brothers' protection has an expiration date." She examines her nails with a boredom so polished it had to be rehearsed. "Once the pack sees what's really happening, they'll drop you to save themselves."
"And what does the pack think is really happening?" I keep my voice level, my spine straight, my hands where they can't betray me.
"Everyone can see it, Bailee." She tilts her head with a pity so calibrated it could only be manufactured. "A woman with nothing leveraging the only thing men will always pay attention to."
"That's poetic." My jaw aches from the effort of holding flat. "Did your mother write that, or did you workshop it yourself?"
"The oldest game in the world." She moves toward the door, pausing with her hand on the frame—a gesture so like Celeste it makes the back of my neck prickle. "And you're not even playing it well."
"Maya." She stops, and I let two seconds pass because I need them—and because making her wait is the only weapon I have left.
"When this hearing is over, I want you to remember you stood in a bathroom and bet against me."
The door swings shut. I grip the edge of the sink until my knuckles turn the colour of the porcelain beneath them.
The accuracy of that accusation is sitting in my stomach like a stone. Not because she's right about the reasons—she doesn't know the half of it—but the shape of what she's describing is close enough to draw blood.
I collected their DNA in napkins while they bought me coffee and reviewed contracts. The mechanics are different. The optics are identical.
My reflection stares back—composed face, white hands, the faint swell beneath my blazer that nobody has clocked yet because nobody looks below the scandal. I wash my hands again because I need something to do with them.
I walk out with steady heels and a composure held together with nothing but habit and dental-grade jaw clenching. That's all anyone needs to hear—the sound of a woman not running.
By the time I reach my desk my hands have stopped shaking. I open the Kellerman file, pretending to not be a woman who has just been rudely informed that she is the oldest game in the world.
That evening I sit at mom’s kitchen table with a cup of ginger tea going cold beside my elbow and the will challenge spread in front of me like a map of hostile territory. Mom watches the news with the volume low enough to eavesdrop on my silence.
I'm supposed to be outlining a strategy for the hearing, but every path I sketch leads to the same locked door—the one with my medical records behind it.
The math is impossible. If this baby carries wolf blood, the inheritance clause validates itself—proof of standing, the argument Celeste can't survive. But revealing the pregnancy turns my child into a chess piece before it draws its first breath.
Ammunition for a hearing room of wolves who already consider me an aberration. I press the pen into the legal pad hard enough to dent the next three pages and the calculation circles back to the same locked door.
"You're grinding your teeth," Mom says without looking from the screen. "I can hear it from here."
"I'm strategising." I set the pen down. "Strategising sounds like teeth grinding to the untrained ear."
"It sounds like teeth grinding to a mother who's listened to it for twenty-four years." She mutes the television and turns to me. "How bad is it?"
"Scale of one to ten?" I press my palms flat on the table. "Eleven, with potential for twelve by Thursday."
She watches me with her particular brand of assessment—the kind that sees through every wall I've built and most of the ones still under construction. Her hands are steady around her own mug, and I envy that steadiness with something that aches.
"You'll find a way." She says it like fact, not hope. "You always do, even when the way is ugly."
"Thanks, Mom. Inspirational." But my throat closes and I look away before she sees what her confidence costs my composure.
"Bailee." Her voice softens, and I hear the chair creak as she leans forward. "Whatever the ugly way is—you take it."
"Pride is a luxury," she adds quietly, "for people who aren't fighting to survive." Her hand covers mine on the table, warm and steady, and I let it stay.
I nod once, because speaking right now would be structurally inadvisable. My phone buzzes against the table and we both look at it.
Results ready for pickup. Reference number attached. Available during business hours.
The screen goes dark. The answer to a question I've been running from for weeks is sitting in a building twelve minutes from this kitchen table, sealed in an envelope, waiting for me to come get it.
Mom unmutes the news. I pick up my pen and pretend to write. Neither of us mentions the tremor in my hand, and the twelve-minute drive sits between us like a door I'm not ready to open.
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