Chapter 4

ELIRA POV

"Elira Hart. I never thought I'd see your face again."

I froze on the pavement. The human town was grey and unfamiliar around me, rain starting to needle down, and the voice belonged to a face I hadn't seen since I was a child.

Greta. My father's old housekeeper. She'd left the pack when I was nine and I'd never known why.

"You look half starved," she said, and there was no judgement in it, only worry. "Come inside. Out of the rain."

Her flat above the bakery was small and warm and smelled like bread. She didn't ask me a single question about the bruises on my face or the way I flinched when she moved too quickly near me. She just seemed to already understand, in the way people do when they've watched a family for long enough to know exactly what it's capable of.

"I heard what happened," she said eventually, setting tea in front of me. "Word travels, even out here."

"Then you know they threw me out."

"I know Marisol slapped you in front of the whole house and Robert called you a bastard to your face." Her hands tightened around her own cup. "I've wanted to tell you something for a long time, Elira. I didn't have the courage before. I think I owe you the courage now."

Something in her voice made the hair rise on my arms.

"Your mother's name was Anya," Greta said. "She worked in that house before you were born. She was kind. Quiet. Robert forced himself on her, Elira. I don't know how else to say it gently, so I won't try."

The tea went cold in my hands.

"Marisol found out she was pregnant and wanted her gone before anyone knew whose child it was. But Anya never left. She stayed until she gave birth to you, and she was healthy the whole pregnancy, strong right up until the day you were born." Greta's eyes were wet now. "She bled out hours later. They called it a tragedy. Nobody questioned it, because nobody wanted to."

"But you did," I said quietly. "You questioned it."

Greta reached into her bag and pulled out a small cloth bundle, worn soft with age, and set it on the table between us.

"I found this in her room after she died. I never showed anyone. I was young and frightened and Marisol dismissed me a week later for asking too many questions." She unwrapped the cloth. Inside was a small dark glass bottle, empty, and a twist of dried herb I didn't recognise. "I always believed this was meant to end the pregnancy. Someone gave it to her, or put it somewhere she'd find it, hoping she'd lose you before you were even born. When that didn't work, I think someone made sure she didn't survive giving birth instead."

The room tilted.

"You think she was murdered."

"I think," Greta said carefully, "that a servant girl carrying a child nobody wanted was a very convenient person to lose."

I sat there with my dead mother's murder laid out on a kitchen table in a bottle and a twist of herb, and something inside me that had been breaking quietly for weeks suddenly stopped breaking and went very, very still instead.

I thought of Marisol's hand cracking across my face. I thought of Robert calling me a bastard like the word cost him nothing. I thought of Priya's smile that never reached her eyes, and Kian watching me get torn apart without saying a single word in my defence.

I had spent my whole life trying to earn a place in that house.

I was done earning anything from people who had likely killed my mother and then spent eighteen years treating her daughter like a mistake that should never have survived either.

"I need to keep this," I said, and my voice didn't shake at all anymore. "And I need you to tell me everything else you remember. Every name. Every detail."

Greta studied my face for a long moment, and whatever she saw there made her nod.

"Where will you start?" she asked.

I looked down at the small bottle in my palm, and then at my own flat stomach, where a child that was entirely mine was already growing.

"I'm going to build something they can't ignore," I said. "And then I'm going to come back for the truth, whether they're ready for it or not."

I didn't know yet how long that would take, or what it would cost me, or that the first person to try to stop me from finding my mother's killer would turn out to be someone standing far closer to Kian Voss than eith

er of us could have guessed.