What His Father Asked

Grayson had never once lied to his father's face and gotten away with it.

Tonight, kneeling in the frost with Callum Colt's guard forming a ring around him, torches throwing long shadows across the clearing, he understood he was about to find out if that record could survive one more test.

"Where is she?" his father asked, and his voice was calm in the way that had always frightened Grayson more than shouting ever could.

"Gone." Grayson kept his eyes level, kept his breathing even, every instinct trained since childhood screaming at him not to flinch under his father's gaze. "She ran the second the Hollow attacked. I don't know which direction."

"You had a blade at her throat, according to the guard we questioned before he stopped talking." Callum circled him slowly, boots crunching on frost. "And yet somehow she's alive, and somehow you're the one bleeding, and somehow you expect me to believe you simply lost her in the dark."

"I fought the Hollow. It threw me into a tree. By the time I got up, she was gone."

"And the Duskfall guard who ran with her?"

"Also gone."

Callum stopped directly in front of him, close enough that Grayson could see the exact moment his father's expression shifted from suspicion into something colder and more dangerous, a calculation rather than an emotion.

"You hesitated," Callum said quietly. "I saw it in your stance before the Hollow even arrived. Sixteen years of training, and you hesitated the one night it actually mattered."

"I was assessing the threat."

"Don't lie to me twice in one conversation, Grayson. It's beneath both of us."

The clearing went silent except for the wind moving through the trees, and Grayson felt every guard's eyes on him, waiting to see whether their Alpha's son would be disciplined in front of them or simply disappear from pack business quietly, the way problems in the Colt pack sometimes did.

"She's not what we were told," Grayson said finally, low enough that only his father would hear it. "Her blood isn't a weapon. It's a bloodline. A real one, older than the war, older than what happened to Grandmother."

Something flickered across Callum's face, there and gone so fast Grayson almost missed it.

"You think I don't know that," his father said.

Grayson's stomach dropped. "What?"

"I have known exactly what that girl is since the night she was born, Grayson. I have known for nineteen years, and I have said nothing, because the moment the packs learn a true queen is alive, everything we have built collapses." Callum's voice had dropped to something almost gentle, which was somehow worse than his anger. "Her father struck a deal with me before you were old enough to remember it. Her life, hidden, in exchange for peace between our packs. I have honored that deal for nineteen years."

"Then why send guards to kill her tonight?"

"Because her father broke the deal first." Callum's jaw tightened. "Someone leaked her existence. He panicked, and instead of coming to me, he decided ending her quietly was safer than explaining to either pack why he'd been lying to all of us for nineteen years."

Grayson stared at his father, the ground shifting beneath every certainty he'd built his whole life on. "You've known. This whole time. Every story you told me about her bloodline, everything you taught me to hate—"

"Was necessary," Callum said, "to keep you from ever looking for her. A secret is only safe if the people closest to it don't know enough to go searching."

"You lied to me my entire life."

"I protected you." Callum's eyes hardened. "And now you've ruined it by hesitating in front of witnesses, which means I no longer have the luxury of keeping this quiet. If she's still alive out there, others will find out what she is within days. And when they do, every pack in this territory is going to want her dead, or crowned, and neither outcome ends well for you if you're standing beside her when it happens."

Grayson said nothing, his mind racing through everything he'd believed an hour ago and everything he now knew to be false, and somewhere in the silence he realized his father hadn't actually answered the one question that mattered most.

"Are you going to help me find her," he asked, "or help them kill her?"

Callum studied his son for a long moment, torchlight flickering across a face Grayson had spent his whole life trying to earn approval from, and finally turned away without answering, walking back toward his guard.

"Bring him back to the pack house," Callum said to the nearest guard, not looking back. "And find that girl before someone else does. Alive, if it can be managed."

It wasn't the answer Grayson wanted. It also wasn't the answer he'd expected.

He was pulled to his feet by two guards who wouldn't meet his eyes, men he'd trained beside since he was old enough to hold a blade, and as they marched him back toward the pack house, he found himself searching the treeline out of habit, some part of him still hoping to catch a glimpse of silver blood in the moonlight, proof that Everly was farther away and safer than his father's men would ever manage to reach tonight.

He thought of Marcus, a guard from an enemy pack who'd chosen to run rather than obey an order, and felt something close to shame settle in his chest. A Duskfall guard had shown more courage in five minutes than Grayson had shown in an entire conversation with his own father.

Behind him, Callum's voice carried once more through the clearing, low, meant only for the guards closest to him, but Grayson's ears were sharp enough to catch it anyway.

"Send word to the other packs quietly," his father said. "Tell them nothing about the girl. But find out which of them has been talking to Damian Hawthorne behind closed doors these past few months. Someone helped him plan tonight, and I intend to know exactly who before this war finishes what it started.