Chapter 3: What the Records Don't Say

Elena didn't get an answer to what she was. Not that night.

The moment the torches guttered out along the tree line, Kael went still in a way that had nothing to do with calm — his head turned, slightly, toward the sound of voices carrying through the woods, and whatever softness had crept into his expression in the clearing folded itself away like it had never been there.

"Someone's coming," he said.

"That's Ashcombe territory. Someone's always coming."

"Not like this." He was already moving, putting himself half a step between her and the sound, and Elena felt a flicker of irritation under the nerves — she didn't need protecting, not from her own pack, not on the worst night of her life on top of everything else. Then she heard it too. Not the scattered chatter of wolves heading home from the ceremony. Footsteps, several sets, moving with purpose.

"They'll have noticed you're gone," Kael said. "Rejected omegas don't usually wander off into the trees. Someone will have gone looking, and someone else will have gone looking for whoever pulled you into the dark, because that's a story your Alpha won't want circulating unsupervised."

"You make it sound like a conspiracy."

"I make it sound like exactly what it is." He glanced at her, and for a second the urgency dropped away entirely, replaced by something almost rueful. "You have more enemies than you think, Elena Voss. You've had them since before you were born. Tonight just introduced you to the first one."

"Marcus isn't my enemy. He's an idiot, maybe. That's not the same thing."

"I wasn't talking about Marcus."

Before she could ask what that meant, the footsteps resolved into shapes at the tree line — her cousin Dess in front, worry written plainly across her face, and behind her two of the younger enforcers Marcus kept close, the kind of wolves who did what they were told without asking why.

"Elena!" Dess's relief lasted about as long as it took her to register Kael standing beside her. Her expression shifted, fast, into something wary. "Who is that?"

"A friend," Elena said, before she'd decided that was true.

One of the enforcers — Tobias, she thought, though she'd never spoken two words to him in her life — took a step forward, chin lifted in the particular way pack wolves used when they wanted to seem larger than they were. "You're not pack," he said to Kael. "State your business in Ashcombe territory."

Kael didn't move, didn't so much as straighten, and somehow the stillness of it carried more weight than if he'd squared up to the boy directly. "My business is my own, and I'd remind you that Ashcombe's borders end considerably closer to the hall than this clearing."

Tobias's jaw tightened. Dess put a hand on his arm, quiet and quick, the universal gesture for don't.

"Elena," Dess said again, softer now, eyes flicking between her and Kael like she was trying to solve a puzzle with half the pieces missing. "Your mom's asking for you. She's — it's been a hard night. Come back with us."

Elena looked at Kael. He gave her nothing — no argument, no plea to stay, none of the possessive urgency she might have expected from whatever he was building toward in that clearing. Just a small, unreadable nod, like he'd already known this was how tonight would end.

"I'll find you again," he said, quiet enough that only she caught it. "Sooner than you think. When you're ready to ask the right questions, I'll have real answers instead of half of them."

"How do I find you?"

"You don't. I find you. That's rather the point of what I am." A ghost of that same almost-smile. "Go home, Elena Voss. Let them think tonight broke you. It'll be more interesting when they find out it didn't."

He was gone before she could respond — not dramatically, no smoke or flash of light, just a shift into the trees and then nothing, the kind of vanishing that only someone genuinely dangerous could make look effortless. Tobias took an aborted step after him and then clearly thought better of it.

"What was that," Dess said, once they were walking back toward the hall, Elena wedged safely between her and the enforcers like she might make another break for the tree line if left unsupervised.

"I don't know."

"Elena."

"I'm not being difficult. I genuinely don't know." She wrapped her arms around herself, aware suddenly of how cold the night had gotten, or maybe how cold she'd gotten, the strange warmth from the clearing already fading like it had never been there at all. "He said he'd find me again."

"That's not comforting, in case you were wondering."

"I wasn't going for comforting."

They didn't talk much after that. The pack had mostly cleared out by the time they reached the hall again, the fire pit banked down to embers, the ceremonial table where she'd caught herself still bearing a faint scuff mark from her wrist. Someone — her mother, probably — had already gathered her cloak from where she'd left it, and pressed it into her hands the moment she walked through the door, along with a look that contained about six different kinds of grief Elena didn't have the energy to sort through tonight.

"We'll talk in the morning," her mother said, which was the kind of thing parents said when they meant I don't know what to say and I'm hoping the sun makes it easier.

It didn't get easier. Elena lay awake long after the house went quiet, staring at the ceiling of the room she'd slept in her whole life, replaying the night in pieces that refused to fit together in any order that made sense. The bond snapping. The torches. Kael's pale, unnervingly patient eyes. You're about to become a problem for a great many people who assumed your line died out a hundred years ago.

Around three in the morning, unable to sleep, she got up and lit the small oil lamp on her desk — an old habit, something to do with her hands when her mind wouldn't slow down — and it was only when the wick caught that she noticed her fingers weren't quite steady, and hadn't been all night.

She held her hand flat over the lamp's small flame, not touching it, just testing something she didn't have a name for. The flame didn't so much as flicker.

She was almost relieved. Almost ready to write the whole night off as grief doing strange things to an exhausted mind, the torches nothing but coincidence and imagination —

And then, without her willing it, without any warning at all, the flame bent sideways toward her palm like it was reaching for something. Not blown by wind. Not flickering with draft. Reaching.

Elena snatched her hand back so fast she knocked the lamp half off the desk, catching it before it hit the floor, heart slamming against her ribs.

Outside her window, faint and distant across the sleeping pack grounds, she could have sworn she heard someone laugh.

She didn't sleep again that night.