chapter 6

POV: Kieran

"Say that again," Rhen said, "because I think I misheard you, or I need you to have misspoken, one of the two."

I had not misspoken. I wished, standing in that clearing with a hundred year old carving watching us both like a held breath, that I had.

"Isolde Thornwolf didn't just curse my bloodline," I said, slower this time, giving the words room to land properly instead of all at once. "She was carrying a child when she died. My father told me that part once, years ago, like a footnote, like it didn't matter. The line was supposed to have ended there. Nobody ever traced where the child went, or if the child even survived."

Rhen's hand had not left the locket. Her knuckles had gone white around it. "You think I'm descended from her."

"I think the crest carved into this wall and the crest hanging around your neck are not a coincidence I know how to explain any other way."

Sable, who had gone very still beside her, finally spoke, voice careful. "If that's true, if Rhen carries Isolde's bloodline, then the curse isn't punishing an Ashveil heir for bonding an Omega. It's watching for the exact thing that's happening right now."

"Watching for what," Rhen asked, though something in her face said she already suspected the shape of the answer and was hoping to be wrong.

"For an Ashveil and an Isolde-blood Thornwolf to bond again," I said. "Only this time, with both of them choosing it freely instead of hiding it in secret the way Isolde and Corin had to." I had turned the story over in my head a hundred times as a boy, always as a warning, never once as anything else, and only now, looking at the carving in this wall, did another reading of it open up in front of me like a door I had never noticed was there. "What if the curse was never a punishment. What if it was a promise nobody managed to keep the first time, spoken in the only language a dying woman had left to speak it in."

Rhen let out a breath that shook on the way out. "That's a very convenient theory for a man who just publicly refused his own arranged bond in front of two packs."

"It would be," I agreed, "if I'd had any reason to believe it before tonight. I didn't build a theory to justify what already happened. I found a carving in a wall an hour after it happened and I am telling you what it looks like to me, which is terrifying, not convenient."

That got the ghost of something almost like a smile out of her, gone as fast as it arrived.

"Someone's coming," Sable hissed, torchlight already swinging toward the tree line, and this time it was not a false alarm. Dorian stepped into the clearing a moment later, and behind him, two Enforcers I did not recognize by name but recognized by the crest on their collars as my father's personal guard.

"Kieran." Dorian's voice was tight, apologetic in a way that told me this was not entirely his idea. "Your father wants you back at the hall. Now. And he wants the Thornwolf girl brought in with you."

"On what grounds," I said, stepping half in front of Rhen before I had consciously decided to.

"On the grounds that half the valley watched you break an engagement in front of two packs tonight, and your father needs to control what story gets told about why before the Duskmoor delegation decides to control it for him." Dorian's eyes moved to Rhen, then down to the locket visible at her collar, and something in his expression made it clear he already knew far more than he was saying out loud in front of the other Enforcers. "This isn't a punishment, Rhen. Not yet. It's questions. I'd take the questions if I were you, rather than make him send more men to find you a second time."

Rhen looked at me, and I watched her weigh it, the old Omega instinct to make herself small and disappear warring visibly against something newer, harder won over just the last few hours, that refused to shrink from a room simply because the room had been built to make her feel like she should.

"Fine," she said finally, chin lifting. "I'll come. But I'm not walking in there with my eyes down like I did something wrong, because as far as I can tell, the only thing I did tonight was exist in the wrong place at the wrong time, same as I've been doing my whole life."

Something in me, some old, tired, dutiful piece of myself that had spent twenty two years believing want and duty could never occupy the same space, cracked quietly down the middle at the sight of her walking toward my father's hall with her spine straight and her locket in plain view instead of hidden.

We crossed the training yard together, Dorian a pace behind, the guards flanking without quite touching either of us, and the pack hall doors loomed ahead lit gold from within, every window full of shapes waiting to see what we would bring back with us.

Rhen's hand found mine in the dark between the last two trees, quick and sure, gone again before anyone could have seen it happen.

"Whatever's in there," she said quietly, just for me, "we walk in together, or we don't walk in at all."

I closed the distance to the hall doors beside her, and for the first time since I was old enough to understand what my name would cost me, walking toward my father's judgment did not feel like walking alone.