Chapter 86: Chapter 86
Ivy’s Point of View
Lady Otessa collapsed completely. She kept begging, her voice high as she sobbed out excuse after excuse, talking non-stop to save her household from utter ruin.
"Alaric, please, you must understand the pressure we are under!" Lady Otessa wailed, her hands clutching at the air toward the Alpha. Alpha Alaric hissed.
"The royal capital expects so much from Khalid and me! The dresses, the banquets, the political gifts—our current allowance doesn’t even cover half of it! If we didn’t inflate the palace ledger prices, we would have been the laughingstock! We only took what we needed to maintain the family honor!" Her voice was loud.
Mrs. Margot stood right behind her daughter-in-law, her face tight but her chin held high, silently backing up the desperate plea.
Instead of executing them for treason, Alpha Alaric let out a long breath, his shoulders slouching with the burden of family ties. He couldn’t just slaughter his half-brother’s wife and his stepmother without tearing the entire pack alliance apart in front of the royal court.
After listening to her weeping, Alpha Alaric crossed his arms firmly. "Enough, Otessa," he barked, his deep voice instantly cutting through her loud sobbing!
"I will not have my family begging like common rogues. I agree to increase the monthly rate and the allowance of the whole pack family by ten percent. But hear me well—this is your final warning. If you or Khalid become greedy even one more time, we will split up the family permanently. You will be stripped of your titles, cast out of the Silvermoon territory, and left to survive on the borders with nothing."
Realizing they had successfully escaped a death sentence, Mrs. Margot and her daughter-in-law quickly bowed their heads. Lady Otessa scrambled to her feet, wiping her tear-stained face with a handkerchief. Without wasting another second before the Alpha could change his mind, the two women hurriedly turned on their heels and left the grand hall.
The moment the hall cleared of them, I didn’t waste any time. While the guards were preparing to remove the chest of stolen goods, I stepped over to the table where the deceased steward Edna’s personal belongings were piled. I opened her private leather pouch, using a small silver rod from my medical kit to sort through her secret stash.
My breath hitched slightly as I uncovered three small, distinct glass vials hidden in a false lining. I uncorked them one by one, bringing them close to my nose to analyze the chemical properties.
"Alpha, Luna, look at this," I called out, as they walked over. "I just checked the belongings of the deceased steward, and she wasn’t just carrying contraceptive powder. I found exactly three poisons hidden here: highly concentrated hallucinogens, chronic soft tendon powder designed to permanently weaken a warrior’s muscles, and the reproductive contraceptive drugs."
Luna Helena looked down at the three deadly vials. The deep betrayal of having her head manager secretly poison her household for years was completely breaking her heart.
"I cannot believe this," Luna Helena let out, her voice cracking with deep emotion. "Edna was with me for over a decade, Alaric. I trusted her with my clothes, my food, my private rooms. I am filled with so much regret. For many years, I have been inviting demons straight into our house, completely blind to the snake sleeping right under our roof."
Alpha Alaric wrapped a arm around his wife shoulders, his eyes locking onto the glass vials on the table.
"This wasn’t the work of a simple, greedy maid, Helena," the Alpha muttered. "The way she took that black pill the exact second she was cornered... it proves she was a well-trained spy. Someone trained her to choose death over interrogation."
I stood across from them, my mind pieceing together the family timeline. The contraceptive drugs had kept Luna Helena infertile, the soft tendon powder had likely been slipped into the guards’ rations, and the whole plot seemed perfectly designed to push Bastian with Vivienne into the heir position.
I looked toward the door where Dominic sat quietly in his wheelchair, and then I turned back to the Alpha. I decided to voice a terrifying thought that had been nagging at my shamanic instincts for weeks.
"Alpha Alaric," I began boldly, keeping my voice low so the passing guards wouldn’t overhear our conversation.
"If Edna was a deeply planted spy to ruin your lineage, we have to look at the bigger picture. Given how desperate the enemies are trying to push Dominic out of the way, I must boldly speculate... is it possible that Bastian might not be your child? What if his blood doesn’t actually belong to your lineage at all?"
The moment the words left my mouth. Alpha Alaric stiffened, his eyes widening in a sudden flash of panic.
"No! That is completely impossible, Ivy!" Alpha Alaric immediately denied the claim, his voice rising loudly as if he were trying to convince himself. "Vivienne was thoroughly vetted by the pack elders before she entered my quarters. Bastian carries our physical traits. He is my son. Do not speak of such treasonous things again."
But even as his mouth shouted the denial, the twist was right there in his body language. His eyes wandered nervously away from mine, flickering toward the floor. He was terrified of the truth. Deep down inside his soul, the Alpha had already suspected the exact same thing, but acknowledging that his own concubine had brought a bastard child into the royal pack house was a humiliation he couldn’t bear to face.
I didn’t push him further on Bastian’s bloodline, knowing the seed of doubt had already been planted deeply in his mind.
Instead, I reached back into the manager’s pouch, my fingers brushing against a piece of metal that had fallen out of her secret scroll stash. I pulled it out into the torchlight.
"There is more," I said, holding up a gleaming gold bracelet. "I also found this gold bracelet marked explicitly by the palace seal in the searched items. Look at the engraving on the inner band."
Luna Helena stepped closer, squinting at the royal crest. Her breath hitched. "This is a custom piece from the King’s private collection. Ivy... what does this mean?"
"It implies that the steward also had secret dealings with the king’s princess—Margot’s daughter, Aithusa," I revealed calmly. "The manager was receiving gold and instructions directly from the royal capital to destabilize our territory."
The political hurt was massive. Alpha Alaric’s own family network was entirely infected by the capital’s greed. She stood up straight, her tears drying instantly as a fierce, Alpha-female resolve took over her features.
"I will not let my home be destroyed by the capital’s snakes," she declared fiercely.
Luna Helena immediately ordered the guards to lock down the estate and began to rectify the internal affairs of the palace. She stripped the keys from Margot’s remaining servants and placed the ledger books firmly on the center table.
To ensure the accounting was completely transparent, I and Seraphina assisted in verifying the prices of every item coming into the pack house, checking the numbers line by line. Seraphina was quiet and tense, working quickly to prove she wasn’t part of the treasonous plot.
We spent hours comparing the inflated ledger numbers against the actual market prices from the lower village square, as we calculated the massive amount of pack funds that had been stolen.
By the time the sun began to set, Seraphina dropped her quill in shock, looking at the final tally sheet before us
Our systematic audit had worked perfectly, discovering that five major kitchen supervisors and palace suppliers were actively cheating the pack, leading Alpha Alaric to immediately fire them and greatly reduce the daily expenses of the palace by thousands of gold coins.
The victory felt hollow... knowing that while we had cleared the kitchen, the true mastermind was still watching.
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