Chapter 418

Tomorrow morning, the Elders Council would convene. My task was absolute: to present the digitally scanned and restored Founding Covenant — the very bedrock of Alpha King Dallas’s legal and historical authority over the territories. The physical document was too fragile to move, making this digital master file our only defense against property disputes.

“Pippa, I need the main hard drive. Now,” I called out, rubbing my aching temples.

Pippa, my young Omega assistant, scurried into the suite. Her scent — usually a mild chamomile — was spiked with the sour tang of severe anxiety. She handed me the sleek silver drive, her fingers trembling. She was desperate to prove herself, but her insecurities often made her reckless.

I slotted the drive into the primary port of my workstation and waited for the extraction sequence to finish.

Instead of the familiar, crisp high-resolution scans of the Covenant’s ancient text, the monitors violently flickered. A chaotic wave of corrupted digital code vomited across the screens. The intricate wax seals and signatures I had spent twelve hours painstakingly enhancing vanished into a black, lifeless void.

My blood ran cold. “Pippa… what did you do?”

“I — I was rushing!” she stammered, tears instantly spilling over her pale cheeks. “I didn’t run the safe removal protocol from the main server. I just pulled it out!”

A sob ripped from her throat and she collapsed to her knees. The piercing sound of an Omega weeping shattered the quiet focus of the entire floor. Heads snapped toward my glass suite, but I couldn’t look away from the ruined screens. My hands turned to ice. The project was dead.

Braydon POV

Across the city, in the sterile quiet of my secure safe house, my burner phone vibrated against the glass table.

I picked it up and opened the encrypted channel. A single message from Kael, the Rogue hacker I had on payroll: Covenant corrupted. The history is dust.

A dark, triumphant smirk stretched across my face. Dallas Marshall was already a crippled, mentally unstable Alpha King hiding in his penthouse. Now I would prove to the Elders that he couldn’t protect the Blackwood Pack’s most sacred legal documents. The accidental corruption by that careless Omega assistant was the perfect cover for Kael’s malware.

I dialed my primary informant within the Pack’s upper echelons. “Start the whispers,” I ordered the moment the line connected. “Tell the Elders there’s a technical delay with the Covenant presentation. Plant the seed that Dallas’s administration is falling apart. He is unfit to rule.”

I ended the call and snapped the burner phone in half. The dual crisis would break him.

Lena POV

Panic was a physical weight crushing my chest. For the past hour, the Pack’s IT specialists had run every recovery diagnostic available. Nothing worked. The file remained a graveyard of corrupted pixels.

With less than twenty-four hours until the Council convened, I had single-handedly doomed the Pack’s stability. Pippa was still inconsolable at her cubicle, and I was staring into the abyss of my ruined career.

Then a desperate, wild thought pierced through my spiraling dread.

Adella.

Before she became the Alpha’s wife, Adella Everett had been a prodigy in physical and digital document restoration — with an uncanny eye for historical patterns and chemical solvents.