Chapter 7: Bingo, Ophilia!

Chase's POV

"I won't mind using this on you, Ophilia."

I watched her flinch when I said the name. Not a flicker — a full-body recoil, quick and involuntary, the kind of reaction you can't train out of a person no matter how good the mask is. I'd seen fear before. I'd caused most of it. This was different. This was the fear of someone who thought the ground had just opened beneath her.

"Do you know anything about the Crimson wolf, Brenda?" I said it again, deliberately, watching her face the way I'd watch prey I hadn't decided whether to let live yet.

"No, please." Her voice cracked on cue, pitched just scared enough to sound believable. Almost convincing. Almost — but I'd spent a lifetime learning the difference between a stranger's fear and a familiar one, and this was familiar in a way that made my skin prickle.

Could she actually be Ophilia?

Knowing what Laura was capable of — the old witch had pulled off stranger magic than a borrowed face in her four hundred and fifty years — I wasn't ready to rule it out. The memory surfaced before I could stop it: Ophilia's small body limp in my jaws, blood matting her hair, the night I told Jace I'd watched her flee the territory and then doubled back through the dark to carry her into Laura's cottage myself. I'd lied to my own twin's face and hadn't lost a second of sleep over it. I would lie again if it meant keeping her breathing.

I'd looked after her since we were children, long before either of us understood what that meant. Pretended to despise her, sneered at her in front of the pack, because the one thing Mother Luna respected was cruelty, and the one thing she'd never forgive was softness toward a girl she'd already decided was worthless. Every insult I'd thrown at Ophilia over the years had cost me something I never let anyone see.

This Brenda carried the same unsettling presence Ophilia always had — that quiet, gravitational pull I'd spent years pretending not to notice, the one that used to make me find excuses to walk past the kitchens just to catch a glimpse of her hunched over the washbasins. But something about the picture in front of me was wrong. She was slim now, her hair a rich brunette instead of the shiny black I remembered from years of neglect. And her scent — that was the part that gnawed at me hardest. Gone. Scrubbed clean, like she'd been dipped in nothing at all. No wolf walked scentless. Not unless something unnatural was holding them together.

I used to like Ophilia's scent. Hated myself for it every time it drifted past me in a corridor, hated the way my wolf would go still and attentive at the edge of it. The day I learned she was fated to be Jace's Luna, something ugly and possessive had torn through my chest, and I'd hated him for it ever since — hated him for a gift he didn't even want, standing there rejecting the one thing I would have burned the pack down to keep.

He doesn't deserve her.

"Follow me," I said, voice dropping into the flat, cold register the pack expected from an Alpha. "Let's introduce you to the other royals."

She fell into step behind me, and I could hear her heartbeat from three feet away — too fast, stuttering, the rhythm of someone walking toward their own execution and smiling through it anyway. I wondered if she knew how loud it was. I wondered if she remembered that I, of everyone in this packhouse, had always been able to hear it.

"This is Brenda, Mother." I watched Jace's eyes catch on her the second we entered the hall, watched something shift behind his expression that he thought no one could see — recognition, maybe, or something closer to longing he didn't have a name for yet. My jaw tightened until it ached.

"She'll be my personal maidservant," I cut in before Sydney could finish drinking her in with those calculating eyes of hers.

"Oh, dear, she's beautiful." My mother circled her once, slow, assessing, the way she assessed everything — for use, for value, for weakness she could exploit later. "Which family is she from?"

I turned to watch the answer form on her face, already knowing it wouldn't come easily.

Sweat broke along her hairline, the same glisten I'd caught back in the corridor when the soldier first stopped her at the gate. Her jaw worked. Nothing came out. I let the silence stretch a beat longer than I needed to, just to watch her drown in it.

"She's an orphan," I said finally, filling the gap before it could last long enough to become suspicious in front of the wrong ears. "I pulled her from the den to replace that fool, Ophilia."

She flinched. I felt it more than saw it — a tremor that ran straight through her, there and gone in an instant, but I'd been watching for exactly that reaction and it didn't disappoint me. I saw her throat move as she swallowed the flinch back down, forcing her face into something neutral.

"Well. How old are you, then?" Sydney asked, arms folded, patience already thinning to nothing.

"I'm eighteen."

The same age as Ophilia was.

My suspicion sharpened into something closer to certainty, cold and precise. A Crimson wolf severed from their true form always found their way back eventually — the pull of what they really were didn't stay buried forever, not without something holding the disguise in place against nature itself.

For Ophilia, that would be the necklace.

"I need her for the moment, Mother." I was already moving toward the entrance, Brenda a half-step behind me, close enough that I could hear her breath catching high in her chest, ragged and shallow. "She has errands to run."

I led her down the hall to my chambers and shut the door behind us with more force than necessary, the sound cracking through the stone like a warning. "My room is a mess. Clean it. And lay yourself on the bed when you're done."

She flinched — again, that same telling stutter of movement — and swallowed hard enough that I saw her throat move from clear across the room. Every other maidservant who'd ever stood where she was standing had wanted exactly that invitation, had angled for it for weeks, begged for it with their eyes even when their mouths said something politer. This one looked like I'd asked her to walk straight into fire and thank me for it.

"I can't do that part, sir." Quiet. Firm underneath the fear, a thread of steel that didn't belong to a frightened orphan girl with nothing to lose. The exact cadence Ophilia used to use when she thought no one important was listening — that stubborn, quiet refusal she'd never once let go of, no matter how many times it earned her a punishment.

Something in my chest went very still.

"Oh, really?"

I crossed the room before she could react, caught both her wrists, and pinned them to the wall above her head. She gasped, and for one heartbeat I let myself study her — really study her, the way I should have done from the second she walked through the gate instead of circling the truth like a coward too afraid of the answer.

Her sleeve had slipped in the struggle. There, dark against pale skin, sat the crescent moon, faint but unmistakable, exactly where it should be.

I looked at her eyes next — really looked, past the unfamiliar color someone had painted over the real one, down to the shade underneath that no potion could fully erase if you knew precisely what you were searching for beneath it. I did. I'd spent nine years memorizing that exact shade in secret, cataloguing it the way a starving man catalogues food he isn't allowed to touch, storing away every detail of a girl I was never supposed to want.

My suspicions weren't suspicions anymore.

She was Ophilia.

And she was standing in my room, pinned beneath my hands, close enough that I could feel her pulse hammering against my palms — the same girl I had once carried half-dead through the woods and lied to my own brother's face to save, now trembling in front of me and praying, I could tell, that I hadn't just uncovered the one secret that could get her killed the moment I opened my mouth to the wrong person.

Her breath hitched. Her eyes darted to the door, then back to me, calculating an escape she and I both knew didn't exist.

The question wasn't whether I knew anymore.

The question was what I was going to do now that I knew — and whether the wolf in me, the one that had wanted her since we were children too young to understand what wanting meant, would let me hand her over to Jace and Sydney the way loyalty demanded I should.

But there one thing I knew for sure

She was mine, Brenda or Ophilia