Chapter 50

Elara's POV

We stayed in Ashwood territory for three more days, longer than I'd originally planned, though something about sitting with Alpha Cross through his slow decline felt important in a way I hadn't expected when Ryker's letter first arrived, less about him and more about giving myself the chance to close a door properly instead of leaving it hanging open the rest of my life.

"Do you think he'll recover," Kael asked quietly, the evening before we planned to return to Nightfall Hollow, both of us sitting on the small balcony outside the guest room the pack had prepared for us.

"I don't know," I admitted. "Nyra said guilt like that doesn't always resolve simply because someone finally speaks it aloud. Sometimes the body's already too worn down by the years of carrying it silently."

"How do you feel about that possibility?"

I considered the question honestly, turning it over before answering. "Strange. I thought I'd feel some kind of satisfaction, watching him face consequences after everything. Instead I mostly just feel tired, and a little sad, for Ryker mostly, having to watch his father fade after finally becoming someone worth respecting again."

Kael reached over, taking my hand, the mark between us warm and steady in the cool evening air. "You've grown considerably, since the forest. I don't think the girl who first walked into these woods months ago would have found compassion this easily for the man who let his son reject her in front of the whole pack."

"Maybe," I said. "Or maybe I always had it in me, and I just needed someone patient enough to help me trust myself before I could finally use it properly."

We found Ryker in the small sitting room near his father's chambers the next morning, exhaustion carved deep into his features, though something steadier had settled into his posture over the past three days, the weight of impending loss somehow making him seem more grounded rather than less.

"He's asking to see you both before you leave," Ryker said. "There's something he wants to tell you. He's been putting it off, I think, waiting until he felt strong enough to actually say it properly."

We found Alpha Cross propped up against his pillows, weaker than the day before but alert, his eyes tracking our entrance with careful attention.

"There's something about your mother I never told you," he said, once we'd settled near his bedside. "Something I only learned myself, years after she'd already passed. I think you deserve to know it, before I'm no longer able to tell you."

I felt my breath catch, old grief for a mother I barely remembered stirring unexpectedly at the mention of her. "What is it?"

"She wasn't running from the old cause alone," Alpha Cross said slowly, each word clearly costing him effort. "She was running from a marriage, arranged before her birth, to a prince from a kingdom far to the east, a match meant to secure an alliance the old cause desperately wanted to prevent, believing it would give her bloodline too much power if it combined with royal blood already carrying old magic of its own."

"A prince," I repeated, stunned. "I have family somewhere. Actual family, beyond just the two of you."

"Perhaps," Alpha Cross said. "Though whether that family would welcome you now, after twenty years of silence and an arranged match your mother refused to honor, I couldn't say. I only learned of this myself through old correspondence I found among the records the old cause once shared with me, proof of exactly how far they were willing to go to keep the various threads of power from ever weaving together."

Kael's hand tightened around mine, and I could feel him processing the implications alongside me, another kingdom, another connection to my mother's hidden past, one more thread in a story that seemed to keep unfolding no matter how much we thought we'd already uncovered.

"What kingdom," Kael asked carefully.

"Sunhaven," Alpha Cross said. "Far to the east, beyond even the territories Lady Vesna's family holds. I don't know if the prince she was meant to marry still lives, or whether the kingdom would even acknowledge the connection after all this time. But I thought you should know, Elara. Whatever else I failed to give you, you deserve the truth about where you actually came from."

I sat with the revelation for a long moment, my mind spinning through implications I hadn't prepared myself to consider, another kingdom, another piece of my mother's carefully hidden history, another door that had just creaked open into a part of my life I'd assumed was permanently closed.

"Thank you," I said finally. "For telling me. Even though I don't know yet what I'll do with it."

"You don't have to do anything with it," Alpha Cross said, his voice growing weaker as the effort of the conversation clearly wore on him. "I only wanted you to have the choice, rather than living the rest of your life without knowing it existed at all."

We left Ashwood territory later that morning, the revelation sitting heavy and complicated in my chest throughout the journey home, and it wasn't until we'd settled back into the familiar quiet of Nightfall Hollow's library, Nyra listening with growing fascination as I relayed everything Alpha Cross had told us, that the full weight of what it might mean began to settle properly.

"Sunhaven," Nyra said slowly, pulling a map from one of the shelves and spreading it across the table. "I know little about that kingdom directly, only that it's old, and powerful, and has kept itself largely isolated from the rest of the territories for generations. If your mother was meant to marry into their royal line, that suggests considerably more magic and history in your bloodline than we've even begun to understand."

"Do you think I should go," I asked. "Try to find out more, whether this prince still exists, whether there's any family there who might actually want to know me?"

Kael was quiet for a long moment before answering, clearly weighing his own instinct to shield me from further danger against the genuine curiosity he could likely see written plainly across my face. "I think that's entirely your choice to make," he said finally. "Whatever you decide, I'll stand beside you through it, the same way you've stood beside me through everything since the forest."

Nyra, still studying the map, looked up with a thoughtful expression that suggested her mind had already moved several steps ahead of the conversation. "If Sunhaven's royal line carries old magic connected to your mother's intended marriage, it's possible there are texts there, records that predate even what we've found in our own archive, information that might explain considerably more about your bloodline than anything we've uncovered so far."

The possibility settled into my chest alongside the lingering grief of learning something new and complicated about a mother I barely remembered, and I found myself staring at the map, at the distant borders of a kingdom I'd never heard of until that very morning, wondering what other secrets my mother had carried silently to her grave, and whether Sunhaven held answers, or simply more questions I wasn't yet prepared to face.

It was Soren, arriving breathless in the library doorway not ten minutes later, who interrupted the quiet contemplation entirely, a sealed letter clutched in his hand and an expression on his face that told me, before he even spoke, that whatever news he carried was about to make the question of Sunhaven considerably more urgent than any of us had expected.

"This just arrived," he said. "From Sunhaven itself. It seems word of the curse breaking has already reached them, Elara. And they're asking, quite directly, whether you're the daughter of a woman named Marielle who disappeared from their kingdom twenty-three years ago."