Chapter 26

Wren

Wren's quarters for the summit were modest by Blackthorn standards, she suspected — a single room with a narrow bed, a writing desk, and a window that looked out over the stable yards — but they were hers, assigned by rank same as every other delegation, and she'd spent the hour before Kade's arrival arranging the space with the specific, deliberate control of a woman who needed something to do with her hands.

She'd changed out of her travel clothes into something plainer, told herself it was practical rather than deliberate, and mostly believed it. She'd moved the single chair twice, once closer to the desk and once further from it, before settling on a configuration that felt appropriately professional without feeling like she was hiding behind furniture. She'd lit exactly one lamp, enough to work by, not so much that the room would feel like anything other than what it needed to be tonight: a workspace, shared briefly, by two people with a task force to run and nothing more personal than that connecting them.

She almost believed that particular fiction too, right up until she heard footsteps stop outside her door.

She laid the intelligence reports out on the desk in careful order: incursion dates, territorial maps marked with red ink everywhere Nightshade had confirmed Ashenmoor's brand, Ezra's handwritten notes on what little the old records said about the pack's destruction forty years back. She read back through all of it twice, not because she needed to — she'd had the details memorized for months — but because reading kept her eyes on paper instead of on the door, and the door was the thing she found herself unable to stop watching regardless.

He knocked exactly on the hour. She'd have expected nothing less. Kade Voss had never once, in the entire time she'd known him, been late for anything that mattered, and it struck her, absurdly, as one more small detail she hadn't managed to forget along with everything else she'd spent five years trying to.

"Come in."

Kade stepped through the door with a leather folio under one arm, and for a moment neither of them said anything at all, the small room suddenly considerably smaller than it had been a moment ago. He'd changed out of the formal summit attire into something plainer, and it did something unfair to her concentration, seeing him dressed the way she remembered him dressing in quieter moments, back when quieter moments between them had still been a thing that existed. He looked, for just a second, less like Blackthorn's Alpha and more like the man who'd stood across from her in a clearing five years ago, and she hated how easily some old, traitorous part of her chest recognized the difference.

"Alpha." He said it carefully, testing the formality the way she had been.

"Alpha." She gestured to the chair across the desk from her own, grateful for the specific relief of having somewhere to direct him besides simply standing in her doorway looking like a memory she hadn't finished burying. "Sit. Let's get through this."

He sat, opened the folio, and for the next while — twenty minutes, thirty, Wren lost precise track of it somewhere in the middle — they did exactly what they'd told each other they would: worked. Blackthorn's three incursions had come from the northeast, all within six weeks of each other, all bearing the same brand Nightshade had documented. Kade's people had recovered a body from the third attack, a rogue who hadn't run fast enough, and the intelligence they'd pulled from it was more than Wren's own reports had managed in two years of chasing rumors.

"He wasn't a lone wolf gone feral," Kade said, sliding a report across the desk toward her. "Scarring patterns suggest pack discipline — old pack discipline, formal, the kind that gets beaten into a wolf young. And this." He tapped a small sketch at the bottom of the page: a second mark, smaller, half-healed, beneath the Ashenmoor brand. "We couldn't identify it. Wondered if you'd seen anything similar."

Wren studied it for a long moment, something cold settling low in her stomach. "I have. Ezra called it a binding mark, the one time I got him to talk about it in any detail. Something used to keep a wolf loyal past the point where loyalty should've broken down naturally. He wouldn't say more than that. I don't think he knows more than that."

"That's not rogue behavior. That's not even organized-pack behavior. That's something closer to—"

"Slavery," Wren finished, quiet, because neither of them seemed inclined to be the one who said it first, and somebody had to. "Or close enough to it that the distinction probably doesn't matter much to the wolves wearing that second mark."

"There's something else." Kade pulled a second document from the folio, sliding it across. "A pattern in the incursion timing. Every attack we've documented happened within three days of a new moon. I don't know if that's coincidence or design, but it's consistent enough across both our records that I don't think it's nothing."

Wren frowned, pulling her own timeline toward her, cross-referencing dates she'd looked at a hundred times without ever thinking to check them against the lunar calendar. "That would mean whoever's organizing this is timing incursions around exactly when packs are weakest — new moon's when most shifters run lowest on strength, lowest on healing speed."

"Which means whoever's behind this understands pack biology at a level that isn't casual." Kade's jaw tightened. "That's not a rogue leader who got lucky building a following. That's someone who was raised inside a pack structure, who knows exactly how to exploit one."

"Or someone who survived Ashenmoor's fall and spent forty years learning how to make sure it never happens to them again — on the receiving end, this time." Wren tapped the map, tracing the spread of incursions across three territories. "I want to propose something to the task force tomorrow. Coordinated patrols, timed specifically around the next new moon, three weeks out. If the pattern holds, we could actually catch whoever's running this instead of just cleaning up after them."

"That's aggressive."

"That's the point." She met his gaze, steady. "We've spent forty years letting whatever this is grow in the dark because nobody wanted to look at it directly. I'd rather stop being reactive."

Something that might have been the beginning of a real smile pulled at the corner of his mouth — brief, involuntary, gone almost as quickly as it appeared. "You always did prefer solving a problem to waiting for it to solve itself."

"You remember that about me."

"I remember considerably more than that about you, Wren." He said it quietly, not quite meeting her eyes now, something careful and exposed in his voice that hadn't been there a moment ago. "I've had five years of remembering. It's not really a skill I've had the option of losing."

Wren's pulse did something unsteady at that, old and familiar and entirely unwelcome. "We should stay focused on the reports."

"I know." He didn't look away. "I'm trying. I'm finding it harder than I expected, sitting across from you like this."

"I'd have believed you." He said it simply, without weight behind it, and somehow that made it land harder than if he'd tried to make it mean more. "For what it's worth. If you'd ever had reason to send word."

Wren looked up at that, and found him watching her with an expression that had nothing to do with rogue incursions or binding marks at all.

"I didn't have reason to send you anything, Kade." Her voice came out quieter than she intended, some of the careful control from the corridor thinning under five years of unspoken things finally getting a small, dangerous crack to slip through. "You made sure of that yourself, five years ago, in front of the entire pack."

Something flinched behind his eyes, quick and unguarded. "I know what I did."

"Do you." The words came out harder than she'd planned, old anger she'd thought she'd long since burned through resurfacing with an intensity that surprised her. "Because from where I was standing, Kade, you knew exactly what you were doing, and you did it anyway, in front of forty witnesses, in the loudest voice you could manage. I don't need you to tell me you know what you did. I watched you do it. I've had five years to memorize every single second of it."

"I was nineteen —" He stopped himself, visibly, and started again, quieter. "I was twenty-two. My father had a war half-started and a fiancée already chosen and I told myself, standing in that clearing, that I was protecting you by doing it. I've had five years to understand exactly how much of a lie that was, and I understand it completely now, and none of that changes what it cost you. I know that. I'm not asking you to forgive it. I'm not sure I'd know what to do with your forgiveness even if you offered it."

Wren sat with that a moment, breathing hard, aware of how far this had drifted from rogue incursions and binding marks, aware that she'd let it drift there herself, some old wound apparently needing this exact confrontation more than she'd let herself admit even to Ezra, even to Sable, even to the quiet hours she'd spent alone building an entire life specifically so she'd never need this conversation at all.

"We should finish the reports," she said finally, because it was the only safe thing left to say, and because some part of her recognized that if she let this conversation go any further tonight, she wasn't entirely certain what either of them might say next.

Kade held her gaze a moment longer, something unresolved and aching in it that mirrored, she suspected, whatever was showing on her own face despite every effort to keep it composed. Then he nodded, and reached for the reports, and they spent the next twenty minutes finishing the actual business of the task force with a careful, determined professionalism that neither of them entirely believed in anymore.

When he finally stood to leave, folio tucked back under his arm, he paused at the door a moment longer than the exit required.

"For what it's worth," he said, not quite looking back at her, "Nightshade's become something extraordinary. Whatever else is true between us — I hope you know I mean that without any complication attached to it. You built something real out of what I broke. That matters, whatever else does or doesn't."

He left before she could find an answer, which she suspected, uncomfortably, was becoming something of a pattern between them — one or the other of them saying the truest thing in the room and then leaving before it could be properly answered, as though neither of them entirely trusted what might happen if a conversation between them were ever actually allowed to finish.

Wren sat alone at the desk a long while after, reports forgotten, and pressed a hand to her sternum where the old ache sat exactly where it always had — quieter than it had been in years, and for the first time in longer than she could remember, not entirely unwelcome.

Sable knocked twenty minutes after Kade's departure, letting herself in without waiting for an answer, the same way she always had. She took one look at Wren — still sitting at the desk, reports forgotten, hand pressed flat against her own sternum — and didn't ask a single question about how the meeting had gone.

She just crossed the room, pulled the second chair around beside Wren's, and sat down close enough that their shoulders touched, and stayed there in silence until Wren's breathing evened back out on its own.

"That bad," Sable said eventually, gentle, not really a question.

"Worse." Wren let her head tip sideways, just slightly, until it rested against Sable's shoulder, an old habit from years ago that apparently hadn't gone anywhere either. "He said he'd have believed me, if I'd ever sent word. About Ashenmoor. About any of it."

"Do you believe him?"

Wren thought about that for a long moment — about the man who'd crossed a clearing for her once and then unmade the whole thing in the same breath, about the Alpha who'd sat across a desk from her tonight and built, without meaning to, an entire case for the exact opposite of everything she'd spent five years telling herself was true.

"I think I might," she said finally, quiet, surprised by her own honesty even as she offered it. "Which is its own kind of problem, isn't it."

Sable didn't have an answer for that, and for once, she didn't try to invent one. She just stayed where she was, steady and solid against Wren's shoulder, and let the silence hold both of them until it was time, eventually, to face the rest of the summit waiting outside that door.