Pursuing My Rejected Luna by Cara Anderson novel Chapter 218

Chapter 218

Nicolai

As soon as Skye’s heat breaks, I start making calls. I should probably be in bed, catching up on sleep and ensuring my mate does the same. But I’m too wired to sleep. By Friday, Savin’s network is going to understand what it means to have drawn my attention in a very bad way.

I don’t move impulsively.

I never do. Impulsive men make errors that require correction, and correction is inefficient. What I do instead is plan-carefully, thoroughly, with the patience of someone who has been managing complex systems for fifteen. years and understands that the most permanent damage is done not through sudden strikes but through the slow, methodical removal of everything a man has spent his life building.

Petyr Savin waited twelve years for his opportunity. I give him considerably less time than that.

The network first.

His operation in the eastern territories runs on three things: supply routes, allied packs who look the other way, and the perception that Savin is a man worth fearing. I address all three simultaneously, which is the advantage of having two Alpha networks rather than one.

My network handles the Woolf Family allied packs while Jaxon’s contacts in the eastern territories-the relationships built over years through Ironwood’s different methods, the wolves who owe favors to the Vale name –they begin making certain business arrangements significantly more difficult for Savin’s people. Routes close. Suppliers become unavailable. The operational infrastructure that took years to build starts developing problems that can’t be traced to any single source.

There are conversations. Some of them are very short. All of them are clear. The message, in every case, is the same: the arrangement you had with Savin’s operation is no longer available to you. You have a choice about what arrangement you’d like to have with the Woolf family instead.

Most of them choose wisely.

“Savin himself?” Dimitri asks, mid-week.

“Not worth the noise,” I say. “A dead Alpha in the eastern territories creates questions. Questions create investigations. Investigations create complications.” I look at the map on my desk-the one with the territories marked, Savin’s network overlaid on it in red, the red shrinking daily as the pieces are removed. “A living Petyr Savin watching everything he spent twelve years building become irrelevant-“I pause. “That’s worse. For him specifically.”

Dimitri accepts this with a nod. “He’ll know it was you,” he says.

“Yes,” I say. “That’s the point. And if he comes for me and I put him down, that noise is easily explainable.”

Volkov is different. Volkov is business. But what his daughter did in that basement room is personal.

I spend two days considering my options before I make any moves on the Volkov situation-two days of being very precise about the difference between what I’d like to do and what I’m going to do, and making sure the gap between those two things is exactly as large as it needs to be.

Because I can’t afford any mistakes when it comes to avenging my mate. What I do now sends a message to my enemies about what it will cost them if they come for her again. I want that message to ensure they never fucking think about trying again.

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I remember what Skye told me Tatiana said about Benji. What she said about being there to comfort me. The way She set her up to be attacked by coercing her father’s men and leaving the door open for them.

I know what would have happened to Skye if we hadn’t gotten there when we did. I know this in specific détail because Skye told us, quietly and clearly, shaking in my arms as my brave girl relived her trauma. She told us with the strength of a woman who had decided to not carry it alone-who had decided that we were hers to tell.

I’ve been holding onto that information since the moment she revealed it to me. I take it out now and let the fury it raises in me guide my decision. Then I make the decision. And once again I decide death is too easy.

Volkov loses his eastern trade routes-all of them, in a coordinated series of moves that take ten days to complete and look, to anyone watching, like natural market shifts rather than orchestrated dismantling. He loses two allied packs who receive better offers from the Woolf family and make the reasonable choice. He loses a credit arrangement that’s been propping up his primary business for four years, which dries up in ways that will take him years to trace to its source.

He will not recover from this. Not fully. And nothing is worse for a man like him than a destitute, powerless existence.

The same is true for Tatiana. The position she’s been leveraging-the social standing in allied pack circles, the access to certain networks that her family name has provided, the specific geography of influence she’s been building for years while pretending to be simply a well-connected Alpha’s daughter-

I remove it. Carefully. Permanently. And when I’m done, she is her father’s daughter in a family that has lost its standing. Nothing else. And no one will have her.

She wanted to raise my son. I want her to understand, for the rest of her life, that she is precisely as consequential as I’ve decided she is. Less than the dirt on the bottom of Skye’s designer shoes.

“Done?” Dimitri asks, when I finalize the last piece of the Volkovs’ demise.

“Not even close,” I tell him.

Because there is still the matter of the packs that turned their backs when we needed them, who refused their help.

This is more complicated, because some of them closed doors for reasons that were understandable even if they were wrong-they read the situation as weakness, made a calculation, chose the side that looked safer. Wolves have been making that calculation for centuries. I can’t hold them to a standard they didn’t know they were being held to.

But I can restructure what our relationship looks like going forward.

Some are brought back-on new terms. The terms are clear and non-negotiable and reflect the reality of what the Woolf family actually is now rather than what they mistakenly assessed it to be.

Two Alpha networks. Two operational intelligence systems working in concert. Two sets of relationships, in different territories, covering different geography.

What they declined to support was not a weakened Alpha managing an embarrassing domestic situation. What they declined to support was something they didn’t understand-an arrangement that doesn’t fit the conventional frame but that turns out to be significantly more formidable than the conventional frame.

I give them the opportunity to understand that now. Some take it. Some are cut loose, forced to find protection from sources who will never provide the way I did.

The Woolf family’s alliances look different when I’m done than they did before any of this started-smaller in

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some ways, more solid in others. Less surface area, more load-bearing.

But the message is clear:

Fail me, fail my family… there will be no clean death, no easy way out.

Just a long life of misery and regret.

Cara Anderson Author

Thank you for reading!

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