Chapter 7: The Traitor's Crime

ANAIYAH

The Crescent wolves bowed one by one, and I watched them do it.

People who had spat in my food. People who had looked through me in corridors. People who had told their children that I was what happened to traitors' daughters—all of them lowering their heads to the man who had just dismantled their Alpha in under ten minutes.

Thirteen years. That was how long they had bowed to Adrian.

Apparently, the calculation was simpler than I'd thought.

Nikolai stood in the center of the courtyard with the late afternoon light behind him, and even from twenty feet away his presence was something you felt before you saw. His wolf pressing against everything, restrained but unmistakable.

I forced myself not to look at him.

'He's looking at you,' Lunara offered.

"Thank you. That's very helpful."

Adrian was still on the ground when two Dravenmoor soldiers moved to take his arms. His expression was a study in controlled devastation—the particular horror of a man discovering his entire identity lived in a title that no longer existed.

"This isn't over," he told Nikolai.

"It is." Flat. Certain. "Your access to the household and records is restricted as of now. You'll remain in Crescent until I determine what comes next."

Adrian's jaw worked. "This pack belongs to my family—"

"It belongs to whoever is Alpha." Nikolai moved on. "Take him."

They took him.

I waited for the wave of fear that usually followed Adrian's presence. The low-grade dread that had been my constant companion for thirteen years, the one that never fully switched off regardless of what else was happening.

It didn't come.

I didn't know what to do with that.

Nikolai crossed toward me before I'd processed that the Adrian conversation was finished, and my first instinct was exactly what it always was—calculate the distance to the nearest exit, identify the fastest route, and prepare for whatever was coming.

He stopped four feet away.

Not touching distance. Deliberate space. I registered that before I registered anything else about the moment.

"What did Adrian do to you?"

I blinked.

Nobody had ever asked me that. Not once in thirteen years. Not a single person in this pack had looked at me and asked what was being done rather than what I'd done to deserve it. The question landed somewhere between my chest and my throat, and I spent a full second doing absolutely nothing useful with it.

"Nothing that matters," I finally managed.

His expression didn't change, but something behind it did.

"That's not what I asked."

I looked at the wall past his shoulder. Easier than looking directly at him, which was a problem I'd apparently developed overnight. 'Look at him,' Lunara pressed. I didn't look at him.

"Why did you leave this morning?" The question escaped before I could stop it—quieter than intended, with more inside it than I wanted to give away.

A beat of silence.

"To deal with Adrian."

I absorbed that.

"Not because of—"

"No." Quieter than his usual register. "Not because of last night."

The part of me that had spent all day constructing logical reasons for his departure made a noise I chose not to examine.

"Good," I returned. "I would hate for your regret to inconvenience me."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Almost.

Then his gaze dropped—to my wrists, my collarbones, and the way my shirt sat on my shoulders. It had never fit correctly, belonging to someone built on three regular meals a day, which I was not.

"When did you last eat properly?"

"I eat."

"When."

"This morning." I shifted. "There's only so much left after the kitchen closes to lower rank. It's always been—"

"How long has it been like that?"

"Since I was nine." I answered. "That's how it goes when the pack decides you're a punishment."

His jaw was very tight. I noticed that and catalogued it and reminded myself, consciously, that a powerful man's anger was not inherently pointed at me—which was something I still had to tell myself deliberately.

"Walk me through it," he said.

I did it in pieces. Not looking at him. Picking up the parts that felt survivable to give away. The kitchen roster with my name always first. The storage room with the cracked-bulb lamp. The cleaning assignments that started before sunrise and ended after dark. The guards who had decided consequences were optional when the target was me. The particular way Adrian used the word "traitor" until some piece of me had started answering to it.

Nikolai didn't interrupt. He listened the way people listened when they were building something from what you were handing them.

"Who told you your parents were traitors?" he cut in.

"Everyone."

"Who specifically?"

"Adrian. His father's guards. The pack." I shrugged. "They didn't hand me documentation. It was just the version of the world I woke up inside."

"What do you remember about their deaths?"

Careful. Deliberate.

"I was nine," I told him. "I remembered shouting. Being dragged somewhere. My mom's hand—the last time I felt it—and then adults smelling of fear telling me my parents had betrayed everything. I remembered blood on stone, though I'd always wondered if that was a real memory or just the story repeated often enough to wear grooves into something that felt like one."

These days, I barely remembered what my parents looked or smelled like. Or even what my mother's voice sounded like.

"I didn't remember a conspiracy or a revolution. I remembered a woman who braided my hair and a man who taught me to count cards. Then I remembered their absence and everything that filled it afterward.

Nikolai went still.

"You were nine," he said.

"Yes."

"And the conspiracy supposedly started years before the execution."

"That's what they told me."

Something moved across his expression. He turned toward one of his men. "Bring me the execution records. Original filings—not the summary copies."

The man moved immediately.

I watched this and tried to make sense of it. "Why does that matter? It's thirteen years old."

"Because I control Crescent now." He kept his eyes where his man had disappeared. "Its history is my concern."

The records arrived faster than I expected. A leather-bound ledger, which Nikolai opened without sitting down and scanned with the focused efficiency of someone who already knew what they were looking for.

His expression changed.

Small. Controlled. But I'd been reading powerful men's faces for thirteen years, and I saw it.

"What?" I moved closer before thinking better of it.

He closed the ledger. Looked at me with the full weight of those silver-gray eyes landing somewhere I hadn't braced for.

"Orion." The name carried without volume. A man appeared from somewhere behind us. "I want everyone interviewed. Adrian's Beta, his guards, the household staff, every person who handled these records, and everyone present at the execution thirteen years ago."

Orion's expression said he understood. "All of them?"

"Every single one."

"What are you looking for?" I pressed.

Nikolai looked at me for a long moment. Long enough that Lunara went still, and I forgot I wasn't supposed to trust him.

"The truth."

He said it so simply. Two words. As though it was the most ordinary thing.

And I stood there, while thirteen years of certainty began tilting toward something I had never once let myself consider—something I had always been too afraid to look at directly because looking would have made surviving the punishment impossible.

What if my parents weren't who they told me they were?

What if the story I had spent my entire life being punished for had been someone else's invention from the very beginning?