Chapter 15

Briony's POV

Kieran came back near midnight, boots caked in mud from the border trail, jaw tight enough that I knew before he said a word that whatever he found out there hadn't settled anything.

"Well?" I stood up from the chair I'd been waiting in, too keyed up to have actually slept.

"Multiple sets of tracks. Days' worth, maybe longer." He dropped into the chair across from me, rubbing a hand over his face. "Whoever came through that window last night wasn't the first one scouting that stretch of wall. They've been watching us for a while."

"And Halric? What did he say before you got pulled away?"

Something shifted in his expression, careful now. "He wrote the treaty clause himself. Forty years back. Pushed the council to leave it open to any Thistlewood daughter instead of naming one specifically."

My stomach dropped. "He knew. About the bloodline."

"Suspected. That's the word he used." Kieran leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "Said he'd been watching your family for decades, waiting to see if it surfaced again. Then he started talking about a woman. Somebody from before my father's time. Said he knew things about her family nobody else in the pack ever learned, and that he kept it to himself for forty years because he didn't think it was his secret to give away."

"What kind of things?"

"I don't know. That's when the tracker interrupted, right as he was about to say it." Frustration bled into his voice. "He had the whole thing sitting right there. I watched him decide to say it. And then it was gone."

I sat back down slowly, mind racing through everything we knew, trying to find the shape underneath it the way I try to find the source of an infection under skin that looked fine on the surface. "So it's not just about the bloodline existing. It's personal for him somehow."

"Sounds that way."

"A woman he knew, from before your father's time." I turned it over out loud, thinking as I spoke. "That's old, Kieran. Older than the last time Blackfen and Ashvale had any real trouble, from what I understand the pack's history."

"You think it connects to Blackfen?"

"I think it's a strange coincidence if it doesn't. Halric wrote a clause forty years ago protecting a bloodline he suspects might carry something rare. Now Blackfen's sending armed men through my window to take me." I met his eyes. "That's not two separate stories. That's one story we're only getting half of."

Kieran was quiet for a moment, turning something over behind his eyes. "There's another piece that doesn't fit right either. Petra."

"What about her?"

"How would a pack warrior with no connections outside Ashvale end up passing notes to Blackfen soldiers in the first place? That's not something you stumble into. Somebody had to reach her first. Recruit her. Which means whoever's running this had eyes inside my pack long before last week."

The thought settled cold in my chest. "You think Halric's secret and Petra's betrayal are connected too."

"I don't know what I think anymore." He scrubbed a hand through his hair, frustration written plain across his face. "I've run this pack for six years and in the last two weeks I've learned there's a woman from Halric's past nobody ever mentioned, a bloodline the elders quietly tracked for decades, and a warrior selling secrets to the exact pack that bloodline apparently matters to. None of it's random. It's all one thread, and I can't see where it starts."

"Maybe it starts with whoever Halric was talking about."

"Maybe." He looked at me then, something steadier in his face despite everything. "You're good at this, you know. Pulling pieces together like a puzzle instead of panicking over each one separately."

"Comes from years of diagnosing wounds nobody else could figure out. Same instinct, different subject." I almost smiled. "Symptoms don't lie even when people do."

"I should bring you into more of this. Council matters, not just what directly touches you." He said it like it cost him something to admit, old habits of keeping things locked down clashing with whatever this was between us now. "You see angles I miss."

"I'd like that." I meant it more than the simple words let on.

For a moment the room felt almost easy, the two of us leaning toward whatever this next step was going to be, tired but working the same problem side by side instead of around each other.

A knock cut through it, quick and urgent.

"Alpha." A scout's voice, out of breath, through the door. "Sorry,you'll want to hear this straight away."

Kieran was up and across the room before I finished standing. He pulled the door open, and the scout nearly stumbled through it, chest heaving like he'd run the whole way from the border without stopping.

"What is it?" Kieran's voice had gone hard, braced for the worst.

"Marisol." The scout swallowed, forcing the words out between breaths. "She's alive, Alpha. One of the watch spotted her, clear as day, at the Blackfen border crossing. Walking. Unescorted. Nobody dragging her, nobody holding her."

The room went silent around me. I heard my own heartbeat before I heard anything else.

"She's alive," I repeated, the words not quite landing right in my chest. "And she's at the Blackfen border. On her own."

The scout nodded, still catching his breath, and none of us said the thing hanging heaviest in the room, that a woman who vanished the night before her own wedding, now walking free and unguarded straight into the territory of the pack hunting Briony. Marisol wasn't running from anything at all.

She ran straight to it.