Chapter 19

Wren

Ezra finally told her about Ashenmoor on a night when the rest of the pack had gone to sleep and it was just the two of them by the dying fire, the question she'd been quietly circling for six months finally getting asked directly enough that he couldn't deflect it again.

"You knew that brand," she said. "The night Rurik found it. You said you'd seen it before, and then you wouldn't say anything else, and it's been six months, Ezra."

He was quiet long enough that she thought he might deflect again. Then he sighed, the particular sound of a man setting down something heavy he'd been carrying a long time. "Ashenmoor was Nightshade's sister pack, once. Same bloodline, split off three generations back over some dispute nobody living remembers the details of anymore. They kept more of the old blood than we did — more of the power you're carrying now. Forty years ago, something wiped them out. Wiped them out thoroughly, in a way that doesn't happen to packs by accident, and left this territory's records with more gaps than answers about what actually did it."

"And now somebody's using their old brand to mark rogues."

"Now somebody's using their old brand to mark rogues," he agreed, grim. "Which means either somebody's revived something that should have stayed dead forty years ago, or somebody who survived whatever happened to Ashenmoor is still out there, still organized, and has decided a pack carrying Nightshade blood again is worth paying attention to." He looked at her steadily across the dying fire. "I don't know which. I've spent six months hoping I was wrong about the connection at all. I'm less and less convinced I am."

Wren sat with that a long moment, turning it over, the old ache in her chest joined now by a newer, colder kind of dread. "You could have told me sooner."

"I could have. I was trying to give you six months of just being Alpha, before I handed you something that might mean you have to be more than that." Something apologetic crossed his weathered face, rare enough on him that it landed heavier for the rarity. "I'm sorry for that. I think I was wrong to wait. But I wanted you to have this — the pack, the ceremony, the ordinary work of building something — without it immediately turning into one more thing you had to survive instead of something you got to actually have."

"I'm never going to get to ask my mother," Wren said quietly, the thought arriving from somewhere she hadn't planned on visiting tonight. "You told me, the night of the fight, that I should ask her where the blood came from. I've thought about it since. I don't think I ever will. I don't think she'd tell me the truth even if I did, and I'm not sure I've got it in me to go back and find out."

Ezra didn't try to talk her out of the grief in that, which she was grateful for. "Then you'll have to build the rest of the answer without her. Same way you built everything else since you got here." He nudged the dying fire back to life with a stick, sparks rising into the dark. "You're not the girl who left Blackthorn anymore, Wren. Whatever's coming — Ashenmoor, or whoever's wearing its brand now — you're not facing it alone, and you're not facing it as somebody's overlooked afterthought. You're facing it as Nightshade's Alpha, with an alliance at your back and a bloodline that's finally decided to wake up and be useful. That's not nothing. That might, eventually, turn out to be exactly enough."

Wren looked into the fire a long while after that, watching the sparks climb and disappear into the dark above the clearing, and thought about the girl who'd stood at the Blackthorn border eight months ago, one hand pressed to her chest, making herself a promise instead of a wish.

Whatever I become out there, I'm never again going to be the kind of person a room could look straight through.

She'd kept that promise, as far as she could tell. Whatever waited beyond it — Ashenmoor's ghost, or Kade Voss's silence, or a future she couldn't see the shape of yet — she intended to keep it a while longer.