THE WOLF WHO KNOWS

Riven finds me an hour after midnight.

I am sitting outside Kael's door, on the cold stone floor, because Nyra ordered me to sleep and I could not make my body listen.

Kael sleeps behind that door, finally, the fever broken, the wound closing the way a wound should close. I told myself I would just sit here a moment. That was three hours ago.

Footsteps come down the corridor, quiet, deliberate. I know it is him before I look up.

Wolves walk differently when they do not want to be heard, and Riven has spent his whole life learning how to move like that.

"You should be asleep," he says.

"So should you."

"I do not sleep well when someone I am supposed to be protecting turns out to be a walking secret."

He leans against the wall across from me, arms crossed, green eyes unreadable in the dim torchlight. "We need to talk, Rue."

My stomach drops straight to the floor. "Riven—"

"Not here." He glances at the guards stationed at the end of the hall, too far to hear a whisper but close enough to see two people talking too long outside the Alpha's door. "Come with me."

"Where?"

"Somewhere with fewer ears."

I should say no. Every careful, hunted instinct in me says do not follow the wolf who heard you almost say a dead woman's name, do not walk into the dark with someone who could end everything with one word to the wrong person.

But I am tired of being careful and getting nowhere. I am tired of carrying this alone.

I follow him.

He leads me down through the castle, past the kitchens gone dark and silent, down a narrow stair I did not know existed, into one of the old tunnels that run beneath everything, carved by hands nobody remembers.

Moss grows along the stone here. Glowstones set into the walls throw a low blue light that makes his face look carved from something colder than skin.

"This is where the Elders used to hold their private councils," he says, when he sees me looking around.

"Before the last war thinned their numbers down to five and made them careful about being overheard.

Nobody comes down here anymore. Nobody but me."

"Why do you come down here?"

"To think." He turns to face me fully, and whatever softness might have lived in his face during the day is gone now, replaced by something sharp and tired and much older than twenty-nine years should feel.

"And to keep the things I find somewhere nobody else can find them."

"What things?"

He reaches into his coat and pulls out a folded cloth, sets it on a flat stone between us, and opens it with careful hands, like whatever is inside might still be able to hurt someone.

Bones. Small ones. Finger bones, I realize, my stomach turning, each one carved with careful, deliberate symbols I do not recognize.

"I found these near where they found the second boy," Riven says.

"Buried just under the surface, like whoever left them wanted them found eventually, just not right away."

"What are they?"

"I do not know. That is the problem." He crouches down, studying the symbols like he has studied them a hundred times already and still cannot crack them open.

"But I know rogue packs do not carve bones and bury them like offerings. Rogues kill for food or for territory. This is not that. This is ritual."

The word lands heavy in the tunnel's damp air.

"Ritual for what," I ask, though some deep, cold part of me already suspects I do not want the answer.

"That is what I have been trying to find out for three weeks." He looks up at me. "And you are going to help me."

"Why would I—"

"Because you already know more than you are saying." His voice sharpens. "I heard you today, Rue. In that courtyard.

I heard exactly what you said to him, and exactly what he called you back.

I am not stupid, and I am not going to pretend I misheard a dying man call his attendant by a dead woman's name."

I go very still. My heart beats so loud I am sure he can hear it even over the drip of water somewhere deeper in the tunnel.

"You are going to tell someone," I whisper. It is not a question.

It is a certainty I have been carrying since the moment he walked away from that courtyard without a word.

"No." He says it flat. Simple. "I am not."

"Why not?" The question comes out sharper than I mean it, disbelief and hope tangled together so tight I cannot separate them.

"You could take that straight to the Council. You could have me arrested tonight. Why would you not?"

Riven is quiet a long moment, staring down at the carved bones like they might answer for him.

"Five years ago," he says finally, "I stood guard the night they executed a healer for poisoning the heir. I was young. New to the guard.

I believed the Council when they said she was guilty, because why would I not — they were the Council, and I was nobody, and it was not my place to ask questions." His jaw tightens.

"I have thought about her face every year since. Something about it never sat right with me. She did not look guilty.

She looked confused. Like she could not understand why nobody would listen to her."

My throat closes. I remember that night with a clarity that still steals my breath, five years later, in someone else's body.

I remember exactly how confused I was. How certain that someone, anyone, would realize the mistake before it was too late.

Nobody did.

"You watched me die," I say, before I can stop myself, and the words hang in the tunnel between us, finally, terribly spoken out loud.

Riven does not flinch. He does not look surprised, either. He only nods, slow, like a piece finally locking into place.

"I watched Elara Veyne die," he says. "For a crime I am no longer sure she committed.

And now a girl who was not there three weeks ago wakes up talking in her sleep about the same water, flinching at the same things, healing wounds like she has done it a hundred lifetimes, and the Alpha looks at her like the sun rose twice."

He meets my eyes. "I am not going to be the reason it happens again. Not if there is even a chance I helped kill an innocent woman once already."

Relief crashes through me so hard my knees nearly give out. I sit down hard on the cold stone, and for a moment neither of us says anything at all.

"Thank you," I finally manage.

"Do not thank me yet." His voice turns businesslike again, though something gentler lives underneath it now.

"Because if I am right, and this ritual is connected to whoever framed you five years ago, then someone brought you back for a reason.

And I do not think that reason is love, Rue — or whatever your real name is."

The words settle over me like cold water.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean rebirth is not something that happens by accident."

He taps one of the carved bones. "Someone did this on purpose. Someone spent five years and a great deal of dark magic bringing you back into a body that was not yours.

Nobody does that out of kindness. They do it because they need something only you can give them."

I think of Seraphine's cold green eyes at court. I think of her voice against my ear. I know who you are, little ghost. And I know why you came back.

"Seraphine," I say.

"Maybe." Riven wraps the bones back in their cloth, careful, almost reverent. "Or maybe someone even more dangerous than her.

I have heard rumors of rogue packs past the mountains — ones who do not believe in rebirth as a gift. Ones who see it as a tool. A key." He looks up at me.

"You need to be careful, Rue. More careful than you have been. Because whoever wanted you back is not going to wait forever for you to figure out what they want from you."

A chill runs down my spine that has nothing to do with the damp tunnel air.

"What do they want," I whisper.

"I do not know yet." He straightens up, tucking the bones back into his coat. "But I intend to find out. And I would rather do it with you than around you, if you will let me."

I stare at him — this wolf who suspected me, watched me, cornered me in kitchens and hallways for three weeks — and find, for the first time, something that feels almost like an ally standing where a threat used to be.

"All right," I say. "Together, then."

Something that might be the beginning of a real smile touches the corner of his mouth. "Together."

We climb back up through the tunnels in silence, and by the time we reach the corridor outside Kael's door again, the sky through the high windows has gone the pale gray of almost-dawn. Riven leaves without another word, disappearing down a side passage the way he came, and I am left standing alone outside a door I have no right to walk through and every reason to want to.

I do not go in. I go to my own small room instead, exhausted down to my bones, ready to collapse onto the cot and sleep away whatever hours the day has left to give me.

I push the door open.

And stop.

Something sits on my cot that was not there this morning. Small. Pale. I cross the room slowly, my pulse climbing with every step, and pick it up with hands that have already started shaking before I even understand what I am looking at.

A bone. Carved, like the ones Riven showed me, but larger — a rib bone, old and yellowed, etched with symbols I do not know and one line of careful, ancient script I somehow, impossibly, can read, like the knowledge lives somewhere older in me than this life or the last one.

Remember the Altar, or lose everything again.

My blood turns to ice.

Someone was in this room. Someone walked past the guards, past the wing reserved for the Alpha's own household, into a room three doors down from where Kael sleeps, and left this on my cot without a single soul raising an alarm.

I spin toward the door, half expecting to find someone standing there, watching me find it. The corridor is empty. Silent. Wrong.

I look back down at the bone in my trembling hands, at words carved by someone who knows exactly who I am, exactly what I lost, exactly what waits for me in a forest full of fog and voices that call my name.

Someone out there is done waiting for me to remember on my own.

And somewhere past these castle walls, in the black trees where no birds sing and no animal walks, something has just made its first move to make sure I do.