Chapter 4

The Bread I Didn't Eat;

I didn't sleep again after that note, not properly. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw my father's face the way I remembered it from childhood, the way he used to swing me onto his shoulders after training, before any of this began.

I kept turning the note over and over in the privacy of my mind, where no guard could take it from me. Whoever had written it, whoever had risked everything to slip it beneath my bread, believed there was something about my father's death still worth protecting, even now, even after nineteen years.

"You look terrible," Kael said, and I startled so badly I nearly knocked over the basin beside me.

I hadn't heard the cell door open. He stood just inside it, dressed plainly, none of the formal robes from the ceremony two days earlier. The dark circles beneath his eyes matched the ones I felt forming beneath my own.

"What do you want?" I asked, and I heard how cold my voice sounded, how unlike the woman who had laughed with him through a closed door barely two days ago.

"I want to understand what's happening."

"Then ask the people who put me here, not me. I've told the truth from the beginning."

"The council has new evidence."

My stomach dropped. "What evidence?"

"A patrol warrior says he saw someone matching your description entering the northern forest several weeks ago. And a servant claims she heard you say Aurora should never have come back."

"I never said that. I didn't even know she was alive until she walked through those doors."

"Selene, I want to believe you."

"Then believe me."

"It's not that simple." He dragged a hand through his hair, the same gesture he made whenever a council decision weighed on him. "Every piece of evidence points in the same direction. If I ignore all of it because of how I feel about you, what kind of Alpha does that make me?"

"There's something else," he said slowly, as if the words cost him something to admit. "Her story keeps changing. The cell she describes gets smaller every time she tells it. The number of months she says she was held shifts depending on who's asking."

"And yet here I am, in an actual cell, with nothing about my story changing at all."

"I noticed that too."

"Then why am I still here, Kael?"

"Because noticing isn't the same as proving."

"And if you ignore everything you know about me because of evidence someone else handed you, what kind of mate does that make you?"

He flinched. I watched it land, and some small, exhausted part of me was almost glad it hurt him.

"I came because I needed to see you," he said quietly. "Not as the future Alpha investigating an accusation. Just as Kael."

"Then look at me, Kael, and tell me honestly. Do you believe I kidnapped her?"

The silence stretched long enough that I had my answer before he spoke.

"I don't know what I believe anymore," he admitted. "And that terrifies me more than anything Aurora has said."

"At least that's honest."

"Selene..."

"You should go," I said. "Before someone notices you're here, and decides I've corrupted you the way they think I corrupted my own father's name."

He left without another word, and I told myself the ache in my chest was anger, nothing more. I sat with that lie for a long time before Lyra found me an hour later, pale and moving faster than I had ever seen her move inside these corridors.

"Don't eat the bread on your tray tonight," she said the moment she reached the bars, no greeting, no preamble.

"What?"

"I caught the smell on my way down. Whatever it is, it isn't food. Someone tampered with it before it reached your cell."

My blood went cold. "Someone is trying to poison me."

"I think so. I haven't told the guards yet, I wanted to warn you first." She glanced behind her, the same nervous habit she had developed since this began. "Selene, if you're guilty the way everyone claims, why would anyone need you dead? 

Guilty people sit in cells until their trial. They don't get murdered before they can speak."

The question settled over me like ice water. "Unless I know something I'm not supposed to know yet."

"Or someone is afraid of what you might find out before your trial."

"Who has access to the kitchens?" I asked.

"More people than I would like to admit. Servants, guards, and two of the elders' personal attendants. I can't watch all of them, and I can't accuse anyone without proof or they'll simply move against me next."

"Then be careful. Whoever this is has already killed people who got too close."

"You don't need to tell me twice."

We stared at each other through the bars, both of us understanding, in that moment, that the danger surrounding me had never been about Aurora at all.

That night, after Lyra quietly disposed of the tainted bread and reported a vague suspicion to a healer she trusted rather than the council, I lay awake turning the note over in my mind until the words blurred together. Stay alive long enough to learn why.

I intended to. Whatever it took.

I thought of every face I had passed in Moonfang's corridors over the years, searching for one that might belong to a stranger with steady hands and careful silence. None of them fit. Whoever was protecting me wanted to remain invisible, and given how quickly people connected to Aurora's story kept disappearing, I understood exactly why.

I didn't expect that intention to be tested again before the next sunrise, when the sound of my cell door grinding open in the dead of night pulled me upright with my heart already racing, certain this time it wasn't herbs or water waiting on the other side.