Chapter 4

POV: Kieran

"You have five seconds to tell me you are joking," my father said, "before I decide you are not, and this becomes a very different kind of night."

I had five seconds. I used all of them saying nothing, because there was no version of the truth that would sound less like a declaration of war than the silence did.

The hall had gone from murmuring to a low, dangerous roar, Duskmoor wolves on one side rising half out of their seats, Ashveil wolves on the other looking between me and my father like they were waiting to be told which way to break. Elara had not moved. She stood exactly where I had left her, spine straight, face unreadable, and something about her stillness made the moment worse, not better.

"Everyone sit," my father said, and though his voice did not rise, the command in it hit the room like a physical wave. Two hundred wolves sat. "This ceremony is paused. Not ended. Paused."

He turned to me, and for the first time in my adult life I watched my father look at me like I was a stranger who had wandered in wearing his son's face.

"Walk with me," he said. "Now."

I walked. Dorian fell into step half a pace behind us, close enough to intervene if it came to that, which told me exactly how badly this was already going. We ended up in the war room off the main hall, maps of both territories still pinned to the walls from the last border council, and my father shut the door himself instead of leaving it to a guard.

"Say it," he said. "All of it. Now, where no one else can hear it."

"I felt the mate pull," I said. "Tonight. Before the feast. It was not a mistake, and it was not something I can undo by pretending it didn't happen in front of two hundred witnesses."

"Who." One word, flat, terrible.

I hesitated, and that hesitation told him everything.

"A Thornwolf," he said, before I could answer, and something in his face aged ten years in a single breath. "Alaric, tell me it isn't a Thornwolf Omega."

He was talking to himself, I realized. Using his own name like a man bracing for news he already suspected.

"Her name is Rhen," I said. "And before you say the word curse, I already know the story. I was raised on it same as you raised me to fear it. I am telling you the pull happened anyway, because it doesn't ask permission, and I am not willing to spend the rest of my life next to someone it never chose."

My father sat down heavily in the chair at the head of the war table, and for a long moment he looked less like an Alpha and more like an old man carrying something he had carried alone for a very long time.

"Do you know why I have spent thirty years making sure this never happened again," he said quietly.

"Because of Isolde and Corin. Because of the curse."

"Because Isolde was my aunt." The words landed in the room like a dropped blade. "My father's sister. I watched what the red moon did to this pack when I was younger than you are now. I watched half our warriors die in a single night because two people could not wait for the world to be ready for them." His hands, steady in every crisis I had ever seen him face, were not steady now. "I am not telling you this to frighten you, Kieran. I am telling you because I need you to understand that I am not protecting a treaty tonight. I am protecting you from watching what I watched."

Dorian, silent until now, shifted his weight, and my father's eyes cut to him. "You knew," he said. "Before tonight. I can see it on you."

"He came to me this afternoon," Dorian admitted, and I heard the guilt in it, the loyalty split clean down the middle. "I told him to bury it. I told him what it would cost."

"And yet here we are." My father's voice had gone dangerously quiet. "In a war room, with a Duskmoor bride standing alone in a hall I now have to walk back into and explain."

"Let me talk to her," I said. "Elara. She deserves to hear it from me before anyone else decides what to tell her."

My father studied me for a long moment, and something in his expression shifted from fury into something wearier and more complicated. "You will talk to her," he agreed finally. "And then you will do something else for me, something I never thought I would have to ask my own son to do."

"What."

"You will stay away from the Thornwolf girl until I understand exactly what we are dealing with." He rose, straightening his coat like he was preparing to put a calm face back on for the hall outside. "Because a pull is not proof the curse stays asleep, Kieran. A pull might be exactly what wakes it."

I opened my mouth to argue, and Dorian's hand landed on my shoulder, a warning and a plea both.

"There's something else," Dorian said slowly, and both my father and I turned to look at him. "Something I found out tonight, before the feast. About the girl. About a locket she wears that I don't think either of you is ready to hear about yet."