Chapter 37

Ryker's POV

"How long," I said, when the silence had stretched too long to bear. "How long have you known them? Since before Elara was born?"

My father moved to the window of his study, looking out over the pack lands he'd spent his whole life protecting, or so I'd always believed, and when he finally spoke, his voice carried none of the cold authority I'd grown up measuring myself against, only something tired, worn down by decades of secrets finally cracking under the weight of my questions.

"My father knew them before me," he said. "It's an old arrangement, Ryker, older than either of us, older than this pack's founding, if the stories the old cause tells about themselves are even half true. They call it protecting the natural order.

Ensuring certain bloodlines stay dormant, certain balances of power stay undisturbed, because the alternative, in their view, risks chaos none of us are prepared to survive."

"And you believed that."

"I believed it was safer to cooperate than to refuse," my father said. "They approached my father when Marielle first arrived in our territory, pregnant, alone, clearly hiding from something.

They told him her bloodline was dangerous, that watching her, reporting on her, was a small price to pay for the security of the entire pack. He agreed. When I inherited his position, I inherited the arrangement along with it, and by then, refusing felt considerably riskier than continuing."

"You could have told her the truth," I said. "Could have warned her, protected her properly, instead of watching her for twenty years and then pushing me to reject her the moment it became clear what she actually was."

"Warning her would have meant admitting my own complicity in watching her mother for two decades," my father said, something almost like shame flickering across his face for the first time in this entire conversation.

"It would have meant risking the old cause's anger, and believe me, Ryker, that is not a risk any sane man takes lightly. What they did to packs that defied them, generations ago, is not something recorded kindly in our oldest histories."

The admission settled heavy in the room, and I found myself studying my father with something closer to pity than anger now, understanding finally that whatever cruelty he'd shown toward Elara hadn't come from simple ambition alone.

But from a fear he'd carried his entire life, inherited the same way he'd inherited the arrangement itself, passed down like a poison neither of us had ever been given the choice to refuse.

"They're the ones who attacked in Nightfall Hollow's courtyard," I said. "Aren't they. The ring, the timing, all of it."

"I don't know for certain," my father admitted. "But it would fit everything I understand about how they operate. Patient, until patience no longer serves their purpose. Then swift, and difficult to trace back to any single source."

"I need to tell Elara everything," I said. "Not just what I've already sent her. All of it. What you just told me."

"If you do that," my father said, turning to face me fully, something urgent entering his voice, "you paint a target on this entire pack, Ryker.

On every wolf here, whether they know anything about this arrangement or not. The old cause does not distinguish between the guilty and the innocent when they decide a pack has become a liability."

"And staying silent protects us how, exactly," I said, my voice rising despite myself. "You've already been feeding information to Mathis.

Elara's people already know about the ring, about your correspondence. Whatever protection silence might have offered, it's gone now, father.

The only question left is whether we help her stop whatever's coming, or whether we let cowardice cost her the same way it already cost her mother."

My father didn't answer immediately, and I watched something war behind his eyes, decades of caution and fear pulling against whatever remained of the man who'd once, long before ambition hardened him, genuinely believed himself to be protecting this pack rather than simply protecting his own position within it.

"There's a meeting place," he said finally, quiet enough that I had to lean in to hear him properly. "An old chapel ruin, two days' ride north of here, near the border of Frostpine territory.

It's where the old cause has always gathered when decisions require more than a single representative's judgment. If they're planning something significant, something worth the risk of an open attack in Nightfall Hollow's own courtyard, that's where it will be decided."

"You know this because you've been there," I said. It wasn't a question.

"Once," my father admitted. "Years ago, when Marielle first arrived, before I fully understood what continuing the arrangement would eventually cost either of us."

He met my eyes, and for a moment, I saw something almost like an apology in his expression, though he never said the word outright. "I'm telling you this because you're right, Ryker. Silence has already cost too much.

I won't pretend I've been a good man in all of this. But I can still choose what kind of man I am from this point forward."

I wrote to Elara again that same night, including everything, my father's confession, the location of the chapel ruin, the decades-long arrangement between Ashwood pack and the old cause that had shaped my entire life without my ever understanding it.

And as I sealed the letter and prepared to send it north toward Nightfall Hollow, I found myself hoping, more fiercely than I'd hoped for anything in months, that whatever came next would be enough to finally end the fear my father had lived under for so long that he'd nearly let it cost an innocent woman everything.