Chapter 81: THE SLEEPING REPORT
CALLUM’S POV
The meeting had started at noon.
It was now quarter past six in the evening.
I looked around the table at the elders and thought about the kind of tiredness that came from six hours of sitting in a room with people who all had opinions and felt strongly that all of them should be heard.
"The joint project timeline." Elder Garic was saying. He had a document in front of him and reading glasses on and had been going through it line by line since half past four. "If we assign the eastern corridor oversight to the infrastructure team they’ll need additional personnel. Which means—"
"Which means a budget allocation request." Elder Thorne interrupted. "Which goes through the finance committee."
"Which I chair." Elder Malik said. "And I can tell you right now the current quarter’s allocation is—"
"Gentlemen." I cut them off.
They looked at me.
"The project timeline." I said. "Page four. I’ve already marked the resource allocation notes. Garic’s team handles eastern corridor oversight, Malik’s committee approves the budget in the first session of next month, implementation begins after sign off from Coldridge." I looked around the table. "Is there anything on that page that is unclear?"
A brief silence.
"No." Garic muttered under his breath.
"Good." I said. "Next item."
Dane, standing at the side of the room, caught my eye briefly with an almost imperceptible smile.
I ignored him.
We moved through the remaining proposal items. The electricity routing agreement, the toll structure, the review period clauses. Each one requiring discussion, each discussion requiring management, each managed discussion producing three new questions that required further management.
Osric had been quiet for most of the afternoon, which I had noticed. He contributed when directly addressed, asked some careful questions about the border security integration, but otherwise sat with his hands folded on the table watching the room with a blank stare on his face. Like he was thinking about something else.
I had been taking note of him taking note of things.
"The border matter." I said, when we reached the last agenda item. "The intruder activity on the estate that threatened a member of this pack. I want it formally documented and assigned."
"Assigned to whom?" Thorne asked.
"Security." I said. "Full review of all access points, residential path coverage, checkpoint protocols." I looked at the table. "Someone has been moving through this estate with knowledge of our patterns. That’s an internal problem and it needs to be treated as one."
"Do we have any indication of who?" Garic asked.
"We have lines of inquiry." I said carefully. "Nothing confirmed."
Osric leaned forward slightly. "The insecurity on the estate." He said. "Is it contained to the estate itself? Or is there reason to believe it extends to the wider pack?"
I looked at him.
"That’s a good question." I said. "I’d like you to look into it. Full security assessment of the pack’s outer residential areas. Report back to me."
Something moved through Osric’s face but just briefly. "Of course." He said. "I’ll begin tomorrow."
"Tonight." I told him.
A pause.
"Of course." He said again.
The meeting ended shortly after. The elders filed out while I waited until the room was empty and then looked at Dane who had remained.
"Walk with me." I told him.
We went to the corridor outside the hall and I kept my voice low. "Vanessa, her father and Osric." I said. "Tonight and tomorrow. All three of them. If they’re working together on whatever this is, they’ll make contact when they think nobody is watching."
"I’ll put people on it." He assured. "People they don’t know."
"Good." I said. "Nothing obvious. Nothing that tells them we’re looking."
He nodded. "The intruder." He noted. "Osric’s reaction when you gave him the assignment."
"I saw it." I said.
"He didn’t like being put on the spot." Dane said. "He was expecting to observe, not to be observed."
"Exactly." I said. "Let him be uncomfortable. Uncomfortable people make mistakes."
Dane looked at me for a moment. "You’ve been planning that assignment for a while."
"Since the meeting started." I smirked.
He almost smiled. "Noted." He said. He straightened. "I’ll get on it."
He left.
I stood in the corridor for a moment in the quiet of the empty hall behind me and thought about everything.
Soon.
I turned back toward my office.
My receptionist was at her desk pulling her coat on but she looked up when I came in.
"Alpha." She straightened up. "I was about to leave you a note. There’s someone in your office." She paused. "She’s been waiting about two hours. I tried to tell her you’d be a while but she said she’d wait." She paused again. "She fell asleep about forty minutes ago."
I looked at my office door.
"Fell asleep?" I frowned.
"In the chair." She said. "I checked on her twice. She seemed— comfortable."
I looked at the door for another moment. "Goodnight." I said to my receptionist.
"Goodnight, Alpha." She said.
I crossed the reception area, pushed my office door open quietly and stood in the doorway.
Keisha was in the chair across from my desk with a folder on her lap, her head dropped forward slightly, her eyes closed and her breathing slow and even.
Her bag was on the floor beside her and her coat was still on and she had clearly sat down to wait and simply— gone.
I stood there.
She had a small crease forming on her cheek where her face had been resting against her own shoulder and her hands were loose in her lap around the folder and she looked younger like this.
I crossed the room quietly and sat in the chair beside her rather than behind the desk and looked at her for a moment.
Then I reached into my breast pocket, took out my handkerchief, leaned forward carefully and pressed it gently to her forehead where a faint sheen of sweat had formed.
She didn’t wake.
I sat back and looked at her.
She had asked a question at the pool, and I thought about the answer I hadn’t given her.
The answer I owed her.
I looked at the folder still loosely held in her sleeping hands, reached over carefully and eased it out without waking her and set it on the desk and opened it.
Mrs Velaris’s end of day report. I read through it, made two corrections in the margin, signed the bottom and set it aside.
Then I sat back in the chair beside her and waited for her to wake up.
No matter how long it took.
