CHAPTER FIVE

Sage’s POV

I pressed myself closer to the closet door, my heart hammering so loud I was sure they would hear it through the wood.

“Who?” Aunt Ruth’s voice had dropped even lower now, barely more than a whisper. “Ruth, if you know something, you have to tell me. This has gone on long enough.”

“I only know pieces,” Mrs. Whitfield said, and for the first time she sounded less sure of herself, less like a woman spreading gossip and more like someone who had been carrying something heavy for far too long. “My sister said the name once and then she never said it again. Made me swear I would forget I ever heard it.”

“Then why are you telling me now?”

“Because I saw Sage at the gathering two nights ago.” A pause. “Because I watched the Alpha look at that girl like she was something to be ashamed of and I thought about how she’s spent five years paying for a mistake that was never hers to pay for. It isn’t right, Ruth. It was never right.”

My throat had gone tight. I wanted to shove the door open, grab both of them by the shoulders, and demand they finish the sentence they kept dancing around. But some frozen part of me couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything but stand there and listen, terrified of what name might come next. Whatever this secret was, some deep instinct in me already knew it was going to rearrange everything I understood about my own life.

“So say it,” Aunt Ruth pressed. “Who else was involved?”

There was a long silence. Long enough that I thought maybe Mrs. Whitfield had lost her nerve completely, that whatever truth she had been about to hand over was going to get swallowed back down and buried again, the way everything else about that night had been buried for five long years while I paid the price for a story that wasn’t even real.

Then, finally, she said it.

“Daniel Voss.”

The name meant nothing to me. I frowned into the darkness of the back room, turning it over in my head, searching for a face to match it, but coming up empty. I didn’t know Daniel Voss. I had never heard the name in my life, not once in twenty-two years of living in Redhollow Pack. My mind scrambled through every pack member I could think of, every family name I had grown up around and found nothing that fit.

“The Beta’s son?” Aunt Ruth breathed. “He’s been dead for years, Whitfield. Killed in a border skirmish, wasn’t he? What does he have to do with anything?”

“He’s the one who brought the rogues onto our land that night,” Mrs. Whitfield said. “Vanessa was seeing him behind everyone’s back, against her parents’ wishes, against pack law. Daniel had ties to a rogue group nobody trusted and he thought he could use them to strengthen his own standing, prove himself worthy of being the next Beta. It went wrong. Terribly wrong. And Vanessa got caught in the middle trying to warn people, trying to fix what he had started before it destroyed them both.”

I felt like the floor had tilted beneath me. My hand found the doorframe and gripped it hard, needing something solid to hold onto while my whole world rearranged itself around a name I had never even heard before today. Everything about that night, the version I had grown up hearing, the version carved onto Vanessa’s memorial stone, the version that had shaped every single day of my life since I was seventeen years old, none of it had ever been the full truth. Five years of silver ribbons and white roses, built on a lie.

“And the family knows this?” Aunt Ruth asked, disbelief thick in her voice. “Sage’s parents know?”

“Her mother does. I’m almost certain of it.”

That was the moment something inside me finally cracked wide open. My mother knew. My mother had known this entire time, had watched me carry the weight of a story that wasn’t even real, had let an entire pack blame me for something I never had any part in and she had said nothing. Not one word. Not in five years. Not on a single one of those mornings she looked at me like I was a math problem she couldn’t solve.

I don’t remember deciding to move but suddenly I was pushing the closet door open and both women turned toward me with matching looks of horror, their faces going pale as they realized exactly how much I had heard.

“Sage…” Aunt Ruth started, reaching a hand toward me like she could somehow take the words back.

“How long,” I said, my voice shaking in a way I couldn’t control anymore. “How long has everyone known this except me?”

Neither of them answered right away. Mrs. Whitfield’s mouth opened and closed, no sound coming out and Aunt Ruth just stared at me like she didn’t know whether to comfort me or run.

“I need to talk to my mother,” I said and I turned and walked out of the clinic without waiting for a response, without even grabbing my jacket from the hook by the door.

Dr. Jasmine called after me, asking if I was alright, but I didn’t stop. I couldn’t. My whole body felt like it belonged to someone else, moving on instinct while my mind was still back in that storage closet, replaying Mrs. Whitfield’s words over and over until they didn’t sound real anymore.

Daniel Voss. Rogues. A secret my mother had buried alongside her own daughter.

I walked the entire way home in a blur, barely registering the pack members I passed, barely hearing the whispers that followed me the way they always did. For once, I didn’t care what any of them thought. Let them stare. Let them whisper. None of it mattered next to the storm building inside my chest, five years of grief and blame rewriting itself with every step I took.

My mother’s car was in the driveway when I got there. I marched straight through the front door, not bothering to knock or announce myself and found her in the kitchen, exactly where I expected, standing at the counter with her back to me, humming quietly to herself like it was any other ordinary afternoon.

“Sage?” she said, turning, surprise flashing across her face at the state I must have been in. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

“Daniel Voss,” I said.

I watched the color drain from her face in an instant, watched her whole body go rigid the same way mine had in that storage closet twenty minutes earlier and I knew before she said a single word, that every terrible thing I had just heard was true.

Her coffee mug slipped from her hand and shattered against the kitchen floor.