chapter 5

POV: Rhen

"You shouldn't be here, and I shouldn't have come looking for you, and neither of those facts is going to stop me from asking what happened in that hall." Sable's voice cracked like a whip across the empty ruins behind the Ashveil training grounds.

I had run there without deciding to, the way your feet sometimes know where you're going before the rest of you does. The old ruins sat half swallowed by ivy at the edge of Ashveil land, older than the pack house, older than the treaty, a single standing wall all that remained of whatever had been here before either bloodline claimed the valley.

"I don't know what happened," I said, which was not entirely a lie. "He looked at me. He stepped away from her. Then guards pulled him out of the hall and I ran before anyone decided I was the reason and dragged me somewhere worse."

Sable exhaled hard through her nose, hands on her hips, scanning the tree line out of old habit even here, this deep into land we technically were not supposed to be walking without an escort. "Rhen. Do you understand what you just watched happen. An Alpha heir just publicly refused his arranged bond in front of both packs. That is not a scandal. That is a border incident."

"I didn't ask him to do that."

"I know you didn't." Her voice gentled, just slightly. "That's what scares me. The pull doesn't care what either of you asked for."

I turned toward the standing wall, half to have something to look at that was not Sable's worried face, and the torchlight I'd carried caught something in the old stone I had walked past a dozen times without ever really seeing.

A carving. Weathered, softened by a century of rain, but unmistakable once the light hit it right.

Two wolves circling a full moon, noses almost touching.

My hand went to my collar before I even decided to move it, fingers finding the locket through the fabric, and the cold that went through me had nothing to do with the night air.

"Sable." My voice came out smaller than I meant it to. "Come look at this."

She crossed the clearing and went very quiet beside me, torchlight flickering over the same carving, the same two wolves, the same moon.

"That's the crest from your locket," she said slowly.

"I know."

"Rhen, that's not a Thornwolf mark. I've seen every Thornwolf crest, every branch, every house sigil, my whole life. That's not one of ours."

"Then whose is it."

Neither of us had an answer, and the not knowing sat in my chest heavier than anything that had happened in the hall an hour earlier. I traced the carved stone with two fingers, half expecting it to feel warm, half expecting nothing at all, and got the second.

"We should ask someone," Sable said, though her voice had lost its earlier certainty. "An elder. Someone who remembers before the treaty."

"And say what. That I found my baby locket carved into a hundred year old wall on the wrong pack's land, the same night the Alpha heir decided the mate pull mattered more than his own engagement." I laughed, short and not remotely amused. "That'll go over well."

"Better than saying nothing and letting Dorian be the one who explains it to Alaric first." Sable's voice had gone flat and serious in a way that made me look at her properly. "He saw the locket tonight, Rhen. Before the ceremony. He asked you where you got it and you didn't tell him everything."

"I told him what I know, which is nothing."

"He didn't look like he believed that. He looked like a man who already suspected the answer and was giving you a chance to say it first."

A twig snapped somewhere behind us in the dark, and both of us went still at the same instant, every Omega instinct I'd ever been trained into screaming at me to drop my eyes and my shoulders and make myself small. I fought it, torchlight raised, and found not a hunter, not a guard, but Kieran, standing at the edge of the clearing like he had followed the same pull I had without either of us planning it.

"They told you to stay away from me," I said, before he could speak first.

"They did." He did not come closer, though everything about the way he stood said it cost him something not to. "I came anyway, because I needed you to hear it from me before anyone else decides what version of tonight you get told."

"Then talk fast," I said, throat tight, "because Sable and I just found something on that wall behind me that I don't think either of us is ready for, and I would very much like an answer before the whole valley finds out I might not be who either pack thinks I am."

Kieran's eyes moved past me to the carving in the stone, and whatever color had been left in his face drained out of it entirely.

"Where did you find that," he said, voice gone rough and low.

"It matches my locket," I said. "The one my mother's never explained. Kieran, what is it. What am I looking at."

He crossed the clearing in three long strides, close enough now that the pull between us pulsed hot and undeniable, and looked down at the carving like it was a wound reopening under his hands.

"That crest," he said, "belonged to Isolde Thornwolf. The woman who cursed my bloodline a hundred years ago." His eyes came up to meet mine, dark with something between fear and a terrible kind of hope. "Rhen, I don't think you're just an Omega who happened to catch my attention. I think you're the reason this curse exists at all."