All Chapters of CLAIMED BY THE ENEMY ALPHA : Chapter 21 - Chapter 27

The second cup had been on her site table every morning for three days.The first morning she'd noticed it and assumed one of the workers had left an extra. Then she'd seen him come through the east wing archway with two paper cups and set one down at her end of the table and she'd understood. She'd said nothing. She'd kept working.The second morning she'd arrived before him and the table had been empty and she'd felt the absence of the second cup before she could stop herself from feeling it, which was information she did not want to have and filed away quickly under not thinking about this.The third morning she sat down and drank her own coffee and looked at her blueprint for the west courtyard drainage and thought about water flow and load-bearing walls and the specific challenge of a building that had been patched and re-patched across four centuries. She thought about the work. She did not think about the second cup.He came at seven forty-five. Same as the previous two days. T

The envelope arrived at nine in the morning and he left it on his desk until eleven.He knew what it was. He'd been waiting for four days since he'd sent the samples to the pack doctor's private lab — no hospital record, no shared system, just a clean result delivered to him and no one else. He'd done this because Katya didn't need to find out through a document that had gone through half a dozen hands before reaching her. She'd find out because he told her.He worked until eleven. He read the Helsinki manifest. He answered two messages from the Riga office. He looked at the border patrol report Irina had left on his desk. He did all of it normally, efficiently, one thing after the other.At eleven he opened the envelope.One page. Lab letterhead. Technical information across the top half that he read quickly. A number at the bottom.99.9%.He put the page down on his desk. He put both hands flat, one on either side of it, and looked at it.He had known. He'd known from the first mome

The meeting Irina wasn't supposed to know about happened on a Tuesday at two in the afternoon in a private dining room above a restaurant on the east side of the city.She knew about it anyway, because she had sources and Gregor did not know about all of them. One of the waitstaff at that restaurant had a sister who ran a supply account with Volkov shipping. Small connections. Irina had spent twelve years building a web of small connections, and right now that web was telling her things she did not enjoy knowing.Three men in that room: Gregor Malshin, regional council chair, sixty-one years old, a wolf who had been building quiet power in this region for two decades by finding other people's soft spots and pressing on them. Beside him, the Petrov pack representative, young, nervous, mostly there because Gregor had something over his family going back eight years. And across the table, two senior wolves from the Shashin pack, who had wanted a larger cut of the river trade routes for t