Chapter 5

Chapter Five: 

My Father's Handwriting

The figure in the doorway wasn't wearing a hood this time.

"We don't have long," he said, his voice low and unfamiliar, an accent I couldn't place from anywhere in Moonfang's territory. "If you want answers about your father, you need to trust me for the next few minutes, and only the next few minutes."

"Who are you?"

"Someone who has waited a long time for the right moment to get you out of here." 

He held out a hand, his expression urgent rather than threatening. "The guards changed shift four minutes ago. We have maybe six before someone notices the corridor is too quiet."

"I'm not going anywhere with a stranger in the middle of the night."

"Then you'll die in this cell, either from the council's verdict or from whoever already tried to poison you. I would rather it not be either."

Something about the certainty in his voice, the lack of pleading, made me hesitate instead of refuse outright. I thought of the note hidden beneath my mattress. Stay alive long enough to learn why.

"If this is a trap," I said, "I will make sure you regret it."

"Fair enough."

I followed him through corridors I barely recognized in the dark, his pace quick and confident, as though he had walked this exact path before. We slipped past two sleeping guards and through a side passage I hadn't known existed, until cold night air hit my face for the first time in days.

"Run," he said, and I did, following him into the tree line.

"Where are we going?" I managed between breaths.

"Somewhere they won't think to look. Save your air for running, not talking."

He wasn't wrong. I clamped my mouth shut and ran until my lungs burned, until the lights of Moonfang shrank into nothing behind us, swallowed by trees and distance and the only home I had ever known.

I don't remember most of the journey that followed. Exhaustion and fear blurred the hours into a single stretch of trees and rivers and his steady voice telling me to keep moving whenever my legs threatened to give out. 

By the time we reached the settlement hidden deep in the mountains, I was barely conscious enough to register the wooden buildings rising out of the fog, or the dozens of unfamiliar wolves who watched me pass with quiet, careful curiosity.

I woke hours later in a bed that wasn't a cell, wrapped in blankets that smelled of pine and woodsmoke, with no memory of how I had gotten there.

For one disoriented moment, I thought I had dreamed the entire escape, that I would open my eyes and find myself back on the cold stone floor beneath the Alpha's residence. The softness beneath me argued otherwise.

"You're awake," said a voice from the doorway. "Good. I was beginning to worry."

The man standing there was tall, broad-shouldered, with a calm authority in his bearing that reminded me, uncomfortably, of every Alpha I had ever met in Moonfang.

"Where am I?"

"Shadow Ridge."

I sat up too quickly, my head spinning. 

"That pack was destroyed years ago. Everyone in the Northern Territories believes that."

"Everyone in the Northern Territories believes a great many things that aren't true." He stepped further into the room and offered a slight bow, an old-fashioned courtesy I hadn't seen since childhood.

"My name is Ronan Blackmoor. I'm the Alpha here."

"Shadow Ridge fell during the same season your father died," I said slowly, pieces shifting into place even as I said it. 

"I always assumed that was a coincidence."

"Very little about that season was a coincidence."

"Why did you help me?"

"Because I made a promise a long time ago, to someone who deserved better than what your pack gave him."

My chest tightened. "What do you mean?"

Ronan's expression shifted, something careful and sorrowful passing behind his eyes. "Selene, what do you remember about your father's execution?"

"That he betrayed Moonfang. That he sold information to rogue wolves and warriors died because of it."

"That's what they told you. It isn't what happened."

"Don't." My voice cracked, raw with nineteen years of carefully buried grief. "Don't say things like that to make me trust you faster. I've had enough lies for one lifetime."

"I'm not lying to you." He crossed the room and knelt beside the bed, meeting my eyes directly, the same way Kael used to when he wanted me to believe something completely. "The man your pack executed wasn't a traitor."

"Then what was he?"

"He died because he discovered a secret powerful enough to destroy every Alpha in the Northern Territories. A secret some of them are still protecting, even now. A secret that didn't stop costing lives the day they killed him."

The room felt suddenly too small, the air too thin to breathe properly.

"Prove it," I whispered.

"I intend to," he said. "But proof like this can get people killed if it falls into the wrong hands. I need to know you understand that before I hand it to you."

"I've already lost everything once tonight. I'm not afraid of losing more."

Ronan reached into his coat and withdrew a small, worn journal, its leather cover cracked with age, and placed it gently into my trembling hands.

"Read the first page," he said quietly. 

"Then decide if you still want me to stop."

I opened it, and the handwriting staring back at me was one I hadn't seen in nineteen years, one I would have recognized anywhere in the world.

It was my father's.