The person who had told Lena the lie was still in the Halcyon compound.
This was the thing I had not anticipated. The mechanism, as Callum had described it, was usually deployed by people passing through — contacts from the informal network, wolves who moved between territories spreading the ideology without formal affiliation, leaving the suppression installed and moving on before it could be traced back.
This person had stayed.
Brynn found out within two hours of my conversation with Lena.
She came to the room where Darius and Cole and I had been waiting — the specific purposeful walk of a woman who has found something she did not expect and is managing the finding.
"I know who it was," she said.
She looked at Darius.
At me.
"He's been in the pack for six years," she said. "He ar
