Chapter 68: Chapter 68: Something missing (1)

“Are you going to tell Lucas?”

“What do you want to tell me?” Lucas asked.

He was leaning into the doorframe as if he belonged there, and he had a calm expression on his face that never indicated peace. It meant someone had tried to keep something from him and failed.

Trevor was at his back, close enough to be a shadow and a wall at the same time, all quiet menace and expensive restraint. On Lucas’s other side, Sebastian hovered with the look of a man who had wandered into the wrong room at the right time, curiosity sharp and unrepentant.

For a heartbeat, the office went still.

Even Ethan stopped performing.

Sirius didn’t move. He didn’t react like someone caught. He reacted like someone who had been expecting this moment since dawn.

Lucius’s jaw tightened, anger flashing again, at the timing, at the universe, at the fact Caelan could still manage to twist a knife from the grave.

“Lucas,” Sirius said, voice measured.

Lucas’s gaze swept the room in one slow pass – Sirius by the window, Ethan on the chaise, Lucius too close to the desk, and the file on the surface like a corpse that hadn’t been covered properly.

Then his eyes stopped on the folder.

“Don’t,” Lucas said softly, and it wasn’t a request. It was a warning. “Don’t do that thing where all of you pretend you’re protecting me when what you’re really doing is deciding what I’m allowed to know.”

Trevor’s presence behind him grew stronger. He didn’t speak, but the air around him did. A pressure that promised consequences if anyone tried to dismiss Lucas like he was fragile.

Sebastian stepped forward half a pace, brows raised. “Okay, but…” he started, then seemed to think better of it and shut his mouth, which was an achievement.

Sirius exhaled once. “Well, I’d rather you find out today,” he said, and finally moved. He took the file from the desk and placed it in Lucas’s hands. “Read first.”

Lucas didn’t hesitate.

He took it like it and opened it with the same level of caution he used in court when he was about to dismantle someone’s life with polite language. Trevor shifted closer immediately, reading over Lucas’s shoulder, his pheromones already shifting from controlling the room to shielding Lucas with their calm.

Ethan, after one look at Lucas’s face, reached for his own copy with a grim little huff and held it out to Sebastian.

“Here,” Ethan said. “So you can be traumatized too. Bonding activity.”

Sebastian blinked. “Is this the new family tradition?”

“Yes,” Ethan replied. “Congratulations.”

Sebastian took the papers anyway, because curiosity was a disease and because Dean was his brother and would kill anyone that would make him suffer.

The room fell into the kind of silence that only existed when people were reading something they wished had never been written.

Lucas’s eyes moved quickly.

At first his expression didn’t change much, because Lucas was practiced at reading poison without letting it show. But as the lines stacked up, as the phrasing became familiar in its cruelty – soft words, legal structure, implications tucked into ’contingencies’ – his anger started to rise.

A slow, intense anger that grew sharper with every paragraph.

Trevor’s gaze tracked the page too, his jaw setting in a way that made his face look carved. His hand, still on Lucas’s shoulder, didn’t tighten into a grip, but the air around him did. Like he was containing himself out of respect for Lucas’s control, and only that.

Lucas reached the section that referenced ’stabilization’ and ’imperial alignment,’ and his fingers stilled on the paper.

Then he exhaled once, very slowly, and the sound was colder than the winter outside.

“This,” Lucas said quietly, “is illegal.”

Sirius didn’t interrupt. He let Lucas keep reading.

Lucas’s eyes flicked lower. His jaw tightened.

Then he looked up, and the calm in his face had turned into something razor-edged.

“I enacted a law,” Lucas said, voice steady but vibrating underneath, “that made selling contracts illegal. Adopted globally. Countries that used to treat people like assets signed it because the pressure was international.” His gaze sharpened. “How is this even possible?”

Ethan made a small sound that was halfway between laughter and despair. “Because Caelan was allergic to the concept of consequences.”

Sebastian, reading in parallel now, swore under his breath. “What the hell is a ’legacy clause,’ and why does it sound like something that should be burned?”

Lucius – still standing too close to the desk, still too angry to sit – said, “It’s dressed up as anything but sale. That’s the trick.”

Lucas’s eyes snapped to him. “I see the trick,” Lucas said, and the way he spoke made it clear he didn’t mean it as praise. “I’m asking how he thought he could get away with it.”

Sirius finally spoke, voice calm, the way he sounded when he was explaining a battlefield.

“He wasn’t planning to ’sell’ Dean the way the law defines selling,” Sirius said. “Not on paper.”

Lucas’s gaze narrowed. “Explain.”

Sirius nodded once. “He planned to keep Dean in Palatine until twenty-one,” he said. “Not as a prisoner – publicly, it would look like ’family tradition’ and ’protection,’ reinforced by your own legal guardianship.” His jaw tightened slightly. “And while Dean remained physically in Palatine, the dominant alphas Caelan wanted involved would come to him. He was using our clauses with Alamina to his advantage.”

Trevor’s voice came low, controlled. “So he wanted to bring the wolves to the house and call it hospitality.”

“Yes,” Sirius said simply.

Lucas’s hands tightened on the file. “And that somehow avoids the law.”

“On paper,” Sirius said, “it becomes ’private arrangements’ between consenting adults, performed under Palatine jurisdiction, with the Crown’s blessing implied but never written. He wanted the other countries vulnerable to Palatine through the idea that if they wanted a stabilizing bond with a dominant omega, they would have to negotiate with Palatine’s old guard.”

Sebastian lowered his pages slowly, looking sick. “That’s…”

“Stupid,” Ethan supplied flatly. “It’s a stupid plan.”

Lucas’s eyes flashed. “It’s not only stupid,” he said, voice rising a fraction. “It’s obscene.”

Trevor’s presence behind him intensified, silent pressure swelling until the room felt too small for it. He didn’t touch Lucas more than he already had, but the message was unmistakable: Lucas was not alone in this anger. Lucas was not carrying it by himself.

Sirius held Lucas’s gaze steadily. “It’s stupid because it assumes everyone around Dean would be asleep,” Sirius said. “It assumes you’d be distracted. Trevor would be too far. I would be too bound by protocol. It assumes the law would scare you into inaction.”

Lucas’s mouth twisted. “He really believed that.”

Sirius exhaled. “He believed he could move in the grey spaces. And he was… used to people letting him.”

Ethan scoffed. “Not anymore.”

Sebastian’s voice went low and dangerous. “Not with Dean.”

Lucas looked back down at the papers, rereading a section like he couldn’t believe it existed.

“I built that law,” Lucas said, quieter now, and the quiet was worse. “I fought for it. I made it a global standard so no one could ever do to someone else what was done to me.” His eyes lifted slowly. “And he still tried.”

Lucius’s jaw clenched hard. “He did it because he knew,” he said, and that was all he needed to say. Everyone in the room understood what “knew” meant.

Lucas went very still again.

Then he placed the file down on the desk with extreme care, like if he slammed it, the rage might become uncontrollable.

He looked at Sirius.

Sirius didn’t look away. “Those are the two options,” he agreed. “Either something escaped us – some mechanism, some network, some leftover leverage we haven’t uncovered yet… or Caelan finally started believing his own mythology and thought he could do anything.”

Ethan let out a bitter laugh. “He always thought he could do anything.”

Trevor’s voice came like a quiet vow. “We should operate as if we missed something.”

Lucas nodded once, slowly. “Yes,” he said. “Because if we assume it was only madness, we leave room for someone else to pick up the plan.”

Sebastian raised his head, his green eyes filled with answers he didn’t want to know. “Arion knew about this.”

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