Chapter Four – Damien

Isabel Sterling arrived a week later, exactly on schedule, exactly as composed as her reputation promised, and I spent the better part of an hour trying to determine whether she wanted this alliance any more than I did.

“Your mother's very thorough,” she said, taking in my study with the polite, cataloguing look of someone raised the same way I had been. “She's already spoken to my father twice this week.”

“She does that.”

“I'll say this plainly, Alpha Cross, since I doubt either of us has patience for pretending otherwise. I don't particularly want to marry a man who's still recovering from rejecting his fated mate in front of three packs. No offense intended.”

“None taken. I don't particularly want to marry anyone recovering from anything, myself included.”

Something in her expression eased, fractionally; not warmth exactly, but the relief of finding out the person across from you isn't going to make you perform a feeling neither of you had. “Then we agree on something. My father wants the alliance regardless of what either of us wants personally.”

“She'd frame it as Blackthorn's security. She's not wrong that the border's gotten worse.”

Isabel's composure didn't crack, but something behind her eyes sharpened. “Worse how?”

I told her about the east ridge patrol, the missing hours, the claw marks eight feet up a trunk that no wolf I'd ever heard of could leave. I hadn't planned on telling her that much, but something about the flat, competent way she listened made it easier to keep talking than to stop.

“We've had something similar,” she admitted. “Two incidents on our western border, dismissed as wildlife by the time anyone senior looked at the reports. I didn't think much of it until now.”

“Someone's dismissing them on purpose.”

“Or someone's scared of what it means if they don't,” Isabel said, and for a moment neither of us said anything else, both doing the same uncomfortable math.

She left an hour later with nothing formally decided, which seemed to suit us both better than a decision would have. I watched her car disappear down the drive and found myself, unhelpfully, thinking about a girl with moonlight-pale eyes I'd spoken not more than nine words to in my entire life, four hundred witnesses deep in the worst decision I'd made as Alpha.

The ache under my ribs hadn't faded. If anything, it had settled into something worse than pain. It was a persistent wrongness, like a limb gone kind of numb, the kind that made you forget it was there right up until you tried to use it and it simply didn't answer.

Marcus found me still at the window an hour after Isabel's car had gone. “Second patrol's back. Confirmed two more incidents past the treaty line, both matching the east ridge pattern. Whatever's doing this isn't wildlife, and it isn't Draven either because their scouts found the same tracks on their own side.”

“Which means it's not territorial at all.”

“Which means I don't know what it is,” Marcus said, “and neither does anyone else old enough to remember the last time something like this happened, because apparently nobody's alive who remembers.”

I called an emergency session with my mother that night and laid out the reports from all three packs side by side. Her face did something I hadn't seen it do since my father's funeral; it was a flicker, gone before I could name it, the way Kira's face had gone unreadable across four hundred feet of ceremonial ground.

“It's nothing,” Selene said, too quickly for a woman who never said anything without weighing it first. “Old wildlife stories resurfacing because people are anxious after the ceremony.”

“Three packs are reporting identical incidents the same week you're telling me it's nothing.”

“I'm telling you what it is,” she said, and there was something underneath her voice I hadn't heard directed at me before, not quite fear, but close enough to its neighborhood that I filed it away without knowing what to do with it yet. “Leave it alone, Damien. Some things are better left buried.”

I didn't leave it alone. I didn't tell her that either.

Later that night I went looking for answers in Blackthorn's old archive room, shelves of treaty records nobody under eighty had any real reason to read. Tucked behind a shelf of ratifications, I found a slim, water-damaged volume describing bloodlines the moon kept for itself; wolves who didn't shift into wolves at all, but into something the old text called the First Shape, kept dormant for generations until the world needed them again. The passage ended abruptly, like whatever came next hadn't been a peaceful ending.

Marcus found me there past midnight. “You look like a man who hasn't slept in a week. What are you looking for?”

“I don't know yet.” It was mostly true. “Have we had word on where the Voss girl ended up?”

Something in his face went careful. “Rumor is a rogue pack past the western treaty line took her in. Wilders. No Alpha, no formal territory, mostly left alone because they've never caused enough trouble to be worth the fight.”

“Why would rogues take in an Ashwood reject?”

“I'd say it's worth asking yourself why you're still asking about her a week after you rejected her in front of everyone who matters,” Marcus said, and I didn't have an answer for that either.

That night, lying awake with the ache under my ribs keeping time with something that felt less like memory and more like a pull, I found myself wondering, for the first time since the ceremony, whether my mother's certainty about the rejection had ever really been about Blackthorn's security at all, or about something she'd recognized in that girl that she'd never once explained to me.

I didn't have proof of anything yet. Just an old book, a Beta's careful caution, and a feeling under my ribs that refused to fade no matter how many hours of work I buried it under. It wasn't enough to act on. It was enough to make me start looking harder than I had any business looking, for a girl I'd told myself, less than a week ago, was someone else's problem entirely.