Chapter 267 It was not about revenge anymore
_Alaric’s POV_
Kasper’s laptop was open on the hospital’s small conference table, three of us hunched over it while the rest of the search teams stayed out in the field. I hadn’t slept, I wasn’t planning to until Rowena was found.
"Talk to me," I said. "What do we have?”
"Financial records first," Kasper said, pulling up a spreadsheet filled with numbers. "Kyle’s been moving money for weeks. Small transfers, spread across a dozen accounts, none of them big enough to trigger a flag on their own. But add them up, and we’re looking at a significant amount of funds moved somewhere off the books."
"Where
"That’s the problem. It’s routed through shell accounts. Fake names, fake business fronts. Whoever set this up knew what they were doing."
I leaned over the screen, scanning the list of transfers. "How long has this been going on?"
"Based on the earliest transaction we found, at least eight months. Maybe longer. We’re still digging."
Eight months?
That put it well before Ezekiel was attacked, well before any of us had reason to suspect Kyle of anything beyond being someone we didn’t particularly trust. He’d been planning this for a long time, moving pieces into place while the rest of us had no idea.
"What else," I said.
Kasper hesitated, which was never a good sign from him. "Properties. He’s got at least six we’ve confirmed so far, all registered under names that aren’t his. We’re cross referencing now to figure out which ones are legitimate businesses and which ones might be somewhere he’s actually using."
"The fairground," I said. "Has anyone reached it yet?"
"Team’s about ten minutes out."
Ten minutes felt like an eternity. I forced myself to stay still, to keep listening, because pacing wasn’t going to make the team move any faster.
"There’s one more thing," Kasper said, and something in his voice made me look up immediately.
"What?”
He turned the laptop toward me, on the screen was a folder, encrypted, the file names scrambled into meaningless strings of letters and numbers. "We found this buried in a server tied to one of his shell companies. Medical files. Looks like he’s had them stored for a while.”
"Whose?”
"Most of them we haven’t cracked yet. But one of them....” He hesitated again, and I felt my patience fraying down to nothing.
"Kasper."
"One of them has Rowena’s name attached to it."
The room went very quiet, I stared at the screen, at the file name that meant nothing to me on its own except for the letters that spelled out her name, sitting there in a folder that belonged to the man who’d put Ezekiel on a death bed and lied about everything apparently, had been keeping secret medical files on my mate for who knew how long.
"Open it," I said.
"We’re trying, Alpha. It’s encrypted at a level our people haven’t seen before. Whoever set this up wasn’t messing around. It could take hours, or even take days."
"I don’t have days."
"I know."
My hands curled into fists on the side of the table. Every new piece of information about Kyle made him look less like a bitter man acting on impulse and more like someone who’d been quietly building toward something for a very long time.
I knew he wasn’t doing this for Drake only. I could feel it.
Rowena’s name in a file he kept hidden and locked meant he’d had his eyes on her before any of this started, before Ezekiel and everyone else, maybe before Rowena and I had even claimed each other.
"What kind of medical file," I said. "Does it say?”
"The metadata’s limited, but it looks like lab results. Blood work, maybe. Hard to say more without getting inside it."
Blood work, my mind went immediately to the poison, to whatever Kyle had used on Rowena, and a cold thought settled into my chest that this file might not be new at all. It might be old.
It might mean he’d been testing something on her, or about her, for longer than any of us wanted to think about.
"Keep working on it," I said. "I want that file open the second it’s possible, day or night, I don’t care what hour it is."
"Understood."
Pierre, who’d been quiet in the corner of the room since we started, finally spoke. "This isn’t just about Drake alone. Whatever this is, it’s bigger than a man taking revenge for another man’s father."
"I know that," I nodded.
"I don’t think you do," Pierre said. "Not fully. Because if he’s had medical files on her for months, if he’s been moving money and setting up properties under fake names for longer than that, then this was never really about revenge alone. It was just an excuse he needed."
I didn’t want to hear that, but I couldn’t argue with it either. Everything Kasper had pulled up in the last hour painted a picture of a man who’d been planning something methodical, something that had started long before any of the reasons he’d given for hating me.
It could be one thing, he wanted to overthrow someone and take their position.
Could it be Drake? Was Kyle wanting to betray Drake?
My phone buzzed, I grabbed it so fast I nearly dropped it, and my heart lurched when I saw it was the team from the fairground.
"Report?” I said, answering before it finished ringing.
"Alpha, we found signs of forced entry into an old fun house structure. There are broken glass and blood on the floor. No sign of the victim currently in the building."
"Blood," I repeated, my stomach dropping. "How much?”
"Not a fatal amount, from what we can tell. There’s also a trail leading into the woods behind the property. We’re following it now."
"I’m coming," I said. "Don’t lose that trail. Do you hear me? Do not lose it."
"Understood, Alpha."
I hung up and was already moving toward the door before Pierre or Kasper could say a word.
"Alaric....." Pierre used my name instead of title, but I was too distracted to care.
"She’s alive," I said. "There’s a trail, she ran away. That means she’s alive, and I am not standing in this hospital one more minute while my mate is out there in the dark, hurt, and running from that bastard."
Kasper closed the laptop and grabbed his jacket. "I’m coming with you."
"So am I," Pierre added.
None of us said anything else, we just moved, fast.