Five years of regret

 Luna POV 

"Sable." Kian's voice snaps through the courtyard, sharp with warning. "Not here."

The young woman Sable presses a hand over her mouth like she's trying to shove the words back inside. Her eyes stay locked on mine, wide, glassy, searching my face for something she's clearly terrified to find.

"My mother told me you disappeared," she whispers. "She said the elders made sure of it. She said your name wasn't allowed to be spoken anymore."

"Sable." Kian moves between us, voice low and urgent. "Whatever you think you know, you say nothing. Not to Cassia. Not to anyone. Do you understand?"

Sable's gaze flicks between us, and something in her expression shifts from shock into calculation, fast enough that I catch it even through my own rising panic. She's not just surprised. She knows something else, something bigger than my name.

"Your mother knew who I was?" I ask, before Kian can stop me. "Why would that matter to her?"

Sable's mouth opens, then closes. "I can't. Not here. Not where anyone could hear."

She's gone before either of us can press further, disappearing down the corridor at a near-run, leaving me standing in the wreckage of a secret I didn't even know I was carrying.

Kian turns back to me, and whatever careful control he was holding onto a moment ago has cracked completely.

"That's twice tonight someone's looked at you like you're a ghost," he says. "I need you to tell me the truth. All of it. Right now, before Cassia gets to that council chamber first."

I close my eyes. Five years of careful distance, and it's unraveling in a single night, faster than I can hold the pieces together.

"There isn't time," I say instead. "If Cassia already suspects who I am, walking into that chamber blind gets us both killed politically before we've even started. I need to know what I'm walking into."

"Then walk with me." He starts toward the pack house, and I fall into step beside him because I don't have a better option left. "Five years ago," he says, voice dropping into something rawer than I've heard from him yet, "I rejected my fated mate in front of the entire pack. I was seventeen. The elders told me a bond formed that young couldn't be trusted, that I needed to become Alpha before I tied myself to anyone. I believed them."

My chest goes tight and cold at once.

"I've hated myself every day since," he continues, not looking at me, like it's easier to say to the air between us than to my face. "I searched for her afterward. Petitioned three neighboring packs. chased rumors of a silver-eyed omega working border patrols for almost two years before every lead went cold."

"Maybe she didn't want to be found," I say, and my voice comes out rougher than I intended.

"Maybe not." He finally looks at me, and something in his eyes makes my breath catch. "But I want you to know that. Before whatever happens in that chamber tonight. I looked for her. I never stopped looking, even after I told myself it was hopeless."

We reach the pack house doors, and he stops just short of them, turning to face me fully.

"Cassia's about to accuse you of something," he says. "I don't know exactly what yet. But whatever she says, I need you to trust that I'm not going to let her use you as a scapegoat for whatever she's actually hiding."

"You don't even know me," I say quietly.

Something shifts in his expression, something that looks almost like pain.

"I think I might," he says. "I think some part of me has known since the second you walked through my door."

Before I can answer, the doors swing open ahead of us, and Elder Cassia stands in the entryway, flanked by two council elders, her expression carved from satisfaction so sharp it could cut.

"Alpha," she says, voice honeyed with false concern. "So glad you could join us. It seems our guest has been keeping quite a significant secret."

She turns to me, and for the first time since I arrived, she smiles fully.

"Sorensen," she says, letting the name sit heavy in the air between us. "That's an old Blackthorn bloodline. One I don't believe Ashwood has any legitimate claim to."

My stomach drops through the floor.

"Care to explain," she continues, "exactly how an Ashwood liaison came to carry a name that vanished from this pack's records the same year our yo

ung Alpha's rejected mate disappeared without a trace?"