Chapter 14

Kieran's POV

Halric led me to his own quarters instead of the war room, which told me something before he even opened his mouth. He shut the door behind us and checked the hallway twice through the gap before he trusted it closed.

"You're making me nervous," I said.

"Good." He didn't sit. Paced instead, hands clasped behind his back, an old habit I have seen him do maybe three times in my life, all of them before delivering news he didn't want to deliver. "Because what I'm about to tell you should've come out a long time ago, and I've spent years telling myself it didn't matter. Last night proved me wrong."

"Then tell me."

He stopped pacing and looked at me straight on. "The treaty clause. The one demanding a Thistlewood daughter for the binding. I wrote that wording myself, forty years back, when I sat on the council that first drafted it."

That stopped me cold. "You never mentioned that."

"Because it wasn't something I was proud of admitting." His jaw worked. "The clause wasn't packed with consensus. I pushed for it. Argued the elders into it, convinced them it mattered more than they understood, and none of them asked me why it was hard enough for me to have to answer honestly."

"Why did it matter?"

He hesitated, which from a man who sat on this council longer than I have been alive, said more than most sentences could.

"There's history in that bloodline," he said finally. "Older than anyone still living remembers clearly. I knew pieces of it. Enough to believe the wording needed to stay open,not a name, not a specific daughter, just the line itself. In case what I suspected turned out true."

"Suspected what?"

"That the gift hadn't died out. That it was only sleeping, the way it's done before, generations at a time, and that when it woke up again, it wouldn't announce itself in advance. It will just show up in whichever daughter carried it, and nobody would know which one until it did."

I felt something cold settle in my chest. "You knew there was a chance Briony carried it. Before any of this happened."

"I suspected. I never knew." Halric's voice dropped, rough at the edges. "I've watched that family for decades, Kieran. Waiting, half-dreading, half-hoping I'd see some sign of its surface again before I died. I never once expected to still be standing here when it finally did."

"Why did you care so much? Forty years is a long time to carry a guess nobody asked you to carry."

Something crossed his face then, old and tired, the kind of look a man gets when a question lands somewhere he's spent decades keeping shut. "Because I had reason to believe the bloodline mattered more than the pack ever understood. Reasons that don't have anything to do with treaties or politics."

"What reasons?"

He didn't answer right away. Walked to the window instead, looked out at nothing for a long moment, and when he spoke again his voice had gone quieter, like he was pulling the words up from somewhere he hadn't dug into in a long time.

"There was a woman," he said. "Before your father's time, even. I knew her well. Knew things about her family nobody else in this pack ever learned, because I never told anyone. Not the elders, not your father, no one."

"What kind of things?"

"The kind that would've changed everything, had I told them at the time." His hand pressed flat against the window frame. "I've spent forty years telling myself it wasn't my secret to give away. Watching Briony use that power in the healing house two nights ago made me realize I might've been wrong about that."

"Halric." I stepped closer. "Whatever it is, tell me now. Not in riddles. The whole thing, start to finish."

He turned from the window, and for a second I thought he actually would, his mouth opened, jaw set like a man bracing to finally say something he swallowed for decades.

"The reason the treaty needed to stay open to any Thistlewood daughter," he started, "is because I already knew…"

The door slammed open behind us.

"Alpha." One of the border trackers, chest heaving, blood on his sleeve that wasn't fresh enough to be from tonight. "Sorry to interrupt, I know you said not to be disturbed, but this can't wait."

"What is it?" I turned fast, every instinct in me shifting from Halric's confession straight into pack business.

"We followed the trail from last night's intruder like you ordered. Found where he crossed back over the border." The tracker swallowed hard, still catching his breath. "It's not just his tracks out there, Alpha. There's more. Multiple sets, coming and going along that same stretch for days, maybe longer. Whoever sent him wasn't testing us with one man. They've had eyes on that section of wall for a while now."

My stomach dropped. "How many sets?"

"Hard to say for certain. At least four, maybe five different wolves, moving in patterns, not random." He glanced between me and Halric, sensing he walked into something but with no time to care what it was. "The senior tracker wants your eyes on it before the weather wipes what's left of the trail. Said it can't wait till morning."

I looked back at Halric. Whatever he'd been about to say sat frozen behind his eyes, the moment already slipping away, swallowed by something more urgent than either of us could put off.

"We're not done," I told him.

"I know." He nodded, some of the tension draining out of his shoulders, though whether from relief or disappointment I couldn't tell. "Go. This matters more right now."

I followed the tracker out into the cold, mind still half back in that room with Halric's unfinished sentence hanging in the air, already knowing what he was about to say was going to matter a great deal more than a handful of fresh boot prints in the dirt.