’Are you threatening me?’
Daisy kept her composure locked in place throughout the mind link, even as her pulse did something she absolutely did not appreciate — that traitorous, uneven thing it had started doing the moment the morning stopped going the way she’d planned.
She kept her face exactly where it needed to be, her expression smooth and unbothered for anyone watching, while underneath it her mind moved fast and quiet. ’Do you honestly think Ravyn would take your word over mine?’ She asked through mind link as she pulled back slightly, smoothed the edges of it, and gave the response a little more room to breathe. ’Play this right and I might be able to work on him about easing the punishment.’
Audrey’s reply came back without a single beat of hesitation, and the steadiness of it was far worse than anger would have been.
’He doesn’t seem to value you the way you think he does. If anyone’s reading this room honestly, he’s falling for his ex-wife. She’s the only one he seems afraid of now.
The link landed somewhere deep and tender inside Daisy, the kind of place that doesn’t have armor over it because you never thought you’d need any there.
She felt it move through her the way a crack moves through glass, quiet and invisible on the surface but structural in every way that mattered. Her chest tightened around it before she could stop it, turning it over once, twice, holding it up against everything she’d watched unfold this morning.
The way Ravyn’s eyes had gone apologetic when they found Seraphine, the way he’d stood in front of his entire pack and rearranged the whole morning around her without flinching, without checking Daisy’s face once to see how it landed.
Could it be true?
She didn’t get the chance to sit with the question. Audrey’s voice came back through the link before the silence between them had fully formed.
’Say something to defend us right now, or we tell the Alpha everything.’
The words found something Daisy had been keeping carefully untouched and pressed directly on it. She held her face exactly where it needed to be and pushed back. ’Then you clearly don’t know him the way I do. I am the only one who holds his attention.’
’If that’s actually true, Audrey’s link returned, flat and unconvinced, prove it. Get us out of this mess. Because of you, the entire pack is taking a salary cut. And nobody even knows what she’s charging for the cure.’
Daisy had run completely out of cards. She moved to the only practical ground she had left. ’Stay focused on the pay issue. Give me time to work on Ravyn about the running. Just give me time.’
Audrey ended the link and pushed her voice out into the open air of the gym, clean and carrying, like she’d been saving it for exactly this moment. "Alpha, isn’t it only fair that we know what the cure is actually going to cost?"
Ravyn took exactly as long to consider it as it took him to arrive at his answer. "No. Because I intend to double the amount before I make the deduction."



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