I spend the morning getting the children settled—Luna with noise-canceling headphones and a weighted blanket, Phoenix in the garden gripping rocks instead of furniture, Orion with math textbooks that give his probability-hungry brain something safe to chew on.
Band-aids on fractures.
I'm staring at cold coffee when Caroline appears in the doorway. She's changed into borrowed pack clothes that hang wrong on her frame, blonde hair pulled back in a braid.
"Can we talk?" she asks.
"If this is about Lysander, he's on patrol—"
"It's not," she pulls out the chair across from me and sits without waiting for an invitation.
The confidence should irritate me. Instead, it registers as something familiar—the directness of a woman who builds cases for a living.
"I want to help with the investigation. The traitor hunt."
I set down my coffee. "You've been in this compound for two days. Half the pack thinks you're the security breach."
"Which is exactly why I have fresh eyes. Everyone here is drowning in suspicion and fear, looking at people they've loved for decades and trying to imagine betrayal. I don't have that emotional weight. I can look at the evidence without the personal history clouding the analysis."
"You're a family law attorney, Caroline. Custody disputes and divorce settlements. This is a military intelligence operation."
She leans forward, elbows on the table.
"I've spent my career finding patterns in behavior that people try to hide. That's exactly what you need right now."
I study her. The earnestness is there, along with something sharper—hunger, maybe. The need to prove she belongs in a world that keeps telling her she doesn't.
"Thalia, I know you don't trust me. I know my last name makes everyone in this compound want to bare their teeth, though I still don’t understand why. But I've been sitting in that guest room for two days doing nothing while people die, and I can't stomach it anymore."
She holds my gaze. "Let me be useful. If my analysis is garbage, you've lost nothing. If it's good, you've gained an asset your enemy isn't expecting."
Four wolves dead, every avenue leading to dead ends…
"Show me what you've got," I say finally. "But this stays between us. Nobody else knows you're involved until I decide otherwise."
"Agreed."
She reaches into a folder she's been carrying and spreads documents across the kitchen table. Attack timelines, patrol schedules, security incident reports she must have pulled from the communications hub while everyone else dealt with this morning's chaos.
"I've been working through these since yesterday," Caroline arranges the papers with practiced efficiency. "The attacks aren't random or purely destructive, but sequential. Each one is designed to test a specific element of your defensive capability."
"Kieran identified the pattern in the first war council."
"He identified that they're coordinated. I'm saying they're diagnostic." She taps the first incident report. "Look—”
“—the home invasion tested your Alpha response time and the effectiveness of the chemical compound. The safe house attack tested whether your communication blackouts actually limited intelligence flow. The school fence breach tested perimeter response protocols..."
She lines them up chronologically, and the pattern snaps into focus with a clarity that makes my stomach turn.
"Each attack probed a different defensive layer. And it gave them a data point about how you'd respond, what you'd change, how quickly you'd adapt."
She looks up at me. "These aren't the main assault, Luna. These are reconnaissance missions. They're mapping your entire defense architecture, preparing for something bigger."
"How much?"
"If I were planning a full-scale assault on this compound, I'd want to know exactly what you've told me these attacks have revealed," she counts on her fingers. "They now know all of that. Whatever's coming next will use every vulnerability they've identified."
My coffee has gone from cold to irrelevant. "When?"
"Based on the interval between probing attacks—roughly seventy-two hours each—I'd estimate the main assault within the week. Possibly sooner if they've gathered enough data to feel confident."
"You got all of this from incident reports and patrol schedules?"
"And the intelligence briefings Lysander shared with me during the drive from Colorado. Your enemy is methodical, Thalia. That level of discipline suggests professional military training with a hierarchical command structure and centralized intelligence processing."
I stare at the documents on my kitchen table and feel something shift—the reluctant recognition that this woman is seeing things my wolves haven't. Her analysis isn't just competent; it's surgical.
Like a hunter’s heir usually acts, I suppose.
"There's something else," Caroline pulls a separate sheet from the folder. "The attack vectors follow a doctrine. There's a protocol governing what targets are acceptable and what's off-limits—notice how they've never targeted children directly, only sent proximity threats."
"You're describing a military manual."
"I might be," she pauses, and something crosses her face—confusion, maybe recognition. "The tactical framework feels familiar, and I can't explain why. Like I've seen this structure before, in a different context, without knowing what I was looking at."
"Where would you have encountered military tactical doctrine?"
"That's what's bothering me. I'm a family law attorney who grew up in a corporate household," she runs her thumb along the edge of the folder. "But my father had files in his office, things I assumed were related to his corporate security consulting. What if they weren't?"
The question settles between us. Robert Montgomery's encrypted files. The daughter who reads hunter strategy like a native language she didn't know she spoke.
"Caroline," I choose my next words carefully. "How does an attorney identify force reconnaissance patterns in a werewolf pack's incident reports?"
Her blue eyes meet mine, and what I see there isn't deception—it's fear. The particular terror of someone whose own competence is revealing things about herself she doesn't want to know.
"My father taught me things... Chess strategy, risk assessment, pattern recognition. He called it preparing me for corporate leadership. But the frameworks he used, the language, the way he thought about conflict—"
She stops and swallows hard.
"What if he was training me for something else? I never questioned it."
I look at this woman—Lysander's mate, a Montgomery by blood, a hunter's daughter who deconstructs military tactics like someone raised on them—and feel the ground shift.
She's valuable. Her analysis proves that, but the questions her instincts raise don't have comfortable answers.
"Keep working on the intelligence reports," I tell her. "Map every attack pattern, every tactical signature, every behavioral indicator you can find. And Caroline?"
"Yes?"
"Start with your father's files. Whatever he was hiding, I think you deserve to learn it by yourself."
She nods, gathers her documents, and leaves. I watch her go—a walk that carries inherited confidence she's only beginning to understand.
My wolf stirs with something that isn't suspicion and isn't trust.
Something in between. Something that watches and waits and wonders how a woman raised by wolves' oldest enemy reads their playbook like she wrote it herself.