UNDER HIS ROOF

The Keep looks different walking back into it.

Same stone walls. Same torches flickering in their iron brackets.

But Lyra moves through the halls beside Kael and feels every eye that turns to watch them pass, and this time nobody looks through her. They look right at her, and none of the looks are kind.

"They're staring," she mutters, keeping her voice low.

"Let them." Kael doesn't slow his pace. "You're under my protection now. Nobody touches you."

"That's not really the comfort you think it is." She wraps her arms around herself, still cold from three days in the forest, still raw from everything that happened before it. "Being under an Alpha's protection didn't save my mother."

He stops walking. For a second something flashes across his face, something that looks almost like it hurts him to hear. "I'm not my uncle. And I'm not the wolves who followed his orders."

"You're still a Virelli—" She catches herself, shakes her head, annoyed at her own slip. "Still an Ardyn. Still part of the family that decided my whole bloodline needed erasing."

"I know what I'm part of." His jaw tightens. "I can't undo it. I can only tell you what I'm going to do now, and then actually do it."

She doesn't answer that. She just keeps walking, and he falls back into step beside her, close enough that she can feel the warmth coming off him despite the cold stone hallway, and neither of them says anything else until they reach a set of rooms near the Alpha's own private quarters.

"This is you," Kael says, pushing open a heavy wooden door. "Guards outside, day and night. Nobody comes in without going through me first."

The room is warm. A real fire crackles in the hearth, furs piled thick on the bed, a window that actually lets in light instead of drafts.

It's more comfort than she's had in her whole life, and something about that makes her chest ache instead of settle.

"Why does this feel like a cage with nicer furniture?" she asks quietly.

"Because it kind of is one, for now." Kael doesn't pretend otherwise. "I won't lie to you about that. Until we understand exactly what's hunting you and why, I need you somewhere I can actually keep you safe."

"And if I don't want to be kept anywhere?"

"Then we'll have that fight." His eyes hold hers, steady, unflinching. "But not tonight. Tonight, you eat something, you sleep, and tomorrow I answer every question you've got. All of them."

She studies his face for a long moment, looking for the lie she's sure has to be hiding somewhere in it. She doesn't find one. That unsettles her more than if she had.

"Fine," she says finally. "Tomorrow."

Tomorrow comes fast, and Lyra doesn't wait for him to offer answers. She goes looking for him instead, finding him in a small study off the Great Hall, maps and old ledgers spread across his desk.

"You said all my questions," she says, closing the door behind her. "I'm holding you to that."

Kael looks up, and something in his face almost looks relieved, like he expected her to run instead of confront him. "Sit down."

"I'll stand."

"Fine." He leans back, folding his arms. "Ask."

"When did you know something was wrong with how my mother died?"

He doesn't flinch from the question, which surprises her almost as much as the answer does. "I was seventeen. I overheard my uncle Severin — no. Wait."

He stops, corrects himself, frustration flickering across his face at his own mistake. "Seraphine. I overheard Seraphine talking to one of the Elders about a family that needed 'handling.' I didn't understand what that meant at the time. I asked my father about it once. He told me to forget I ever heard it."

"And you did."

"I was seventeen and terrified of my own father." His voice goes rougher. "That's not an excuse. It's just the truth. I buried it, the same way I buried everything that scared me back then.

I didn't think about it again until you walked into my Hall three nights ago and turned into something that shouldn't exist according to everything I was ever taught."

Lyra's throat tightens. "So you knew. For years. And you said nothing."

"I knew there was a family Seraphine wanted gone. I didn't know it was yours. I didn't know your mother had a daughter who'd grow up scrubbing my floors two rooms down from where I slept every night."

His voice cracks slightly on that, real guilt bleeding through the careful control he usually wears. "If I'd known, Lyra, I swear to you—"

"Don't." She holds up a hand, sharper than she means to. "Don't tell me what you would've done. You didn't do it. That's all that's real."

He goes quiet at that, accepting it without arguing back, and something about him not fighting her on it makes it a little harder to stay as angry as she wants to be.

A knock interrupts them before either can say more. Soren pushes the door open without waiting for an answer, dark brown hair falling into sharp green eyes, a stack of papers under one arm.

"Sorry to interrupt." He glances between the two of them, reading the tension in the room easily. "But you're going to want to see this."

"What is it?" Kael asks.

"Records. Old ones, from the archive vaults under the east wing." Soren drops the papers on the desk.

"Seraphine ordered a purge of pack documents eighteen years ago. Officially logged as routine maintenance. Except nothing about it was routine. Whole sections just gone.

Birth records, death records, territory claims going back generations."

Lyra steps closer, scanning the pages even though half the writing means nothing to her. "You're saying she didn't just kill my mother. She erased the proof my family ever existed at all."

"That's exactly what I'm saying." Soren's eyes flick to her, something careful and assessing in his gaze. "I'll be honest, when you first showed up, I didn't trust you.

Thought you might be exactly the kind of complication this pack didn't need."

"And now?"

"Now I think you're the complication this pack's needed for eighteen years and didn't know it." He almost smiles.

"Whoever your family really was, Seraphine went to a lot of trouble to bury it. People don't burn that much history over nothing."

Mira finds her later that same day, in the healer's quiet room down the hall, sunlight falling soft through a narrow window.

"Kael asked me to check you over properly," Mira says, gentle in a way that makes Lyra's guard drop almost against her will. "Just routine. Nothing that hurts, I promise."

Lyra sits still while Mira works, pressing careful fingers to her wrist, checking her eyes, murmuring soft instructions under her breath. Then Mira goes quiet, frowning slightly at something.

"What?" Lyra asks, tension creeping back into her shoulders instantly. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong exactly." Mira holds up Lyra's arm gently, showing her faint markings under the skin near her wrist, silvery and strange, almost like veins that shouldn't be visible at all. "I've just never seen anything like this before.

It's not an injury. It's not a marking anyone gave you. It looks like it's always been part of you, just waiting."

"Waiting for what?"

"I don't know yet." Mira's voice stays calm, but her eyes hold real curiosity now, sharp and focused. "But I'd like to find out, if you'll let me keep looking."

Lyra studies her a moment, weighing the offer. There's something in Mira's face that doesn't feel like the wary distance most of the pack still gives her. It feels like actual care.

"Okay," Lyra says quietly. "You can look."

Mira smiles, small but genuine. "For what it's worth, I don't think whatever's in your blood is something to be scared of.

I think it's something somebody was scared of, which is a very different thing."

By evening, word has clearly spread through the whole pack, because when Lyra crosses the courtyard, Ronan Ash falls into step beside her without asking permission, arms crossed, scar pale in the fading light.

"Heard you nearly got yourself killed out past the mountains," he says, no warmth in his voice, though no real hostility either.

"I noticed."

"Elara's tough. Not many wolves survive going up against three trained hunters and walking away." He glances sideways at her. "You screamed loud enough to wake half the forest, from what the guards say."

"Is there a point to this conversation?"

"Point is, most wolves in your position would've frozen completely. Would've just let it happen." He shrugs, like the observation costs him something to admit. "You fought. Even scared out of your mind, you fought."

"I didn't have much choice."

"Everybody's got a choice." Ronan stops walking, studying her properly for the first time since she's known him.

"I thought you were trouble the second Kael brought you through those gates. Still might be, for all I know. But you're not weak. I got that wrong."

Before she can figure out how to respond to that, Elowen comes barreling across the courtyard toward them, dark red hair flying loose, energy radiating off her like heat off a fire.

"There you are!" She grabs Lyra's arm without hesitation, like they've known each other for years instead of days.

"I've been looking everywhere. Come eat with me, please, before Ronan bores you to death with warrior talk."

Ronan huffs something that might almost be a laugh and walks off without another word.

"He likes you," Elowen says, watching him go. "Trust me, that's rare. He barely tolerates most of us."

"He has a strange way of showing it.

"Everyone around here does." Elowen loops her arm through Lyra's, pulling her toward the Great Hall. "Come on. You look like you haven't had a real meal in days, and I want to hear everything.

All of it. Starting with what it actually feels like to turn into a wolf the size of a small horse."

For the first time since she can remember, Lyra laughs, short and surprised, like the sound has been sitting unused somewhere inside her for years.

"It's terrifying," she admits. "And kind of incredible."

"Good." Elowen grins, pulling her through the Hall doors. "That sounds about right."

Behind them, unnoticed by either girl, Soren watches from the shadow of a doorway, papers still tucked under his arm, expression thoughtful and unreadable, already turning over exactly how much more of the truth still waits buried somewhere in this Keep.