Chapter Four: The Body in the Cellar

The scream had come from below the west stairs, and by the time Selene caught up to Kael, half the pack house was already awake, doors flying open, wolves spilling into the corridors in various states of undress and alarm.

"Where?" Kael barked at the first guard he passed.

"Cellar, Alpha. It's—" The guard's face had gone pale, his voice unsteady. "It's Miriam. The kitchen girl."

Selene's stomach dropped. The girl who'd brought her food. The one who'd whispered about the Ashford line before fleeing down the hall as she'd said too much.

She pushed past two startled pack members and followed Kael down the narrow stone steps into the cellar, where a small crowd had already gathered around something on the floor, lantern light throwing jagged shadows across the walls.

Miriam lay crumpled between two wine racks, throat torn open, blood pooling black across the stone. Her eyes were still open, fixed on nothing.

Selene's hand flew to her mouth. She'd spoken to this girl twenty minutes ago. She'd watched her chew her lip and whisper secrets and run off scared of her own honesty.

"Everybody out," Kael said, voice a low growl of command that sent the gathered wolves scattering instantly. "Except Marcus."

The scarred guard from the border camp — Marcus, apparently — stepped forward, jaw tight, eyes sweeping the scene with grim professionalism.

"Wolf or blade?" Kael asked.

"Neither," Marcus said, crouching beside the body without touching it. "Look at the wound pattern. Too clean for claws, too ragged for a blade." He tilted his head toward Selene without quite looking at her. "Might want to get her out of here, Alpha."

"I'm not leaving," Selene said before Kael could answer for her. "I talked to this girl less than half an hour ago. She told me something about my family before she got scared and ran off. Now she's dead. You don't think that's connected?"

Marcus's eyes flicked to Kael, silently asking permission to speak freely. Kael gave a short nod.

"There's an old story," Marcus said carefully, "about a weapon the Lycans used, back before the treaty. Something that mimics a wolf's kill without leaving the scent trail. If someone wanted this to look like an animal attack—"

"Lycans." Selene's mind spun back to the fragment of conversation she'd overheard. The Ashford name resurfaces in Lycan territory. "Why would Lycans care about a kitchen girl in your pack?"

"They wouldn't," Kael said grimly, straightening from where he'd crouched beside the body, gold-ringed eyes hard and calculating. "Unless she knew something somebody wanted buried."

The weight of it settled over Selene like ice water. Miriam hadn't died because of anything she'd done. She'd died because of what she'd almost said — about the fire, about the Ashfords, about a pack that had celebrated her family's death twenty years ago.

"This is my fault," she whispered.

"No." Kael's voice sharpened, immediate and absolute. He crossed the space between them in two strides, close enough that she had to tip her head back to meet his eyes, close enough that the pull of the bond hummed low and insistent beneath her ribs despite everything she'd just learned about his father. "This is the fault of whoever is watching this house closely enough to know a servant girl spoke two sentences to you in a hallway. That means someone inside these walls is reporting to someone outside them."

"A traitor," Marcus said grimly. "In the pack."

Kael's expression turned to granite. "Find out who was near the kitchens tonight. Every name. I want a full account by morning."

Marcus nodded and disappeared up the stairs, barking orders as he went, and for a moment it was just the two of them in the flickering lantern light, a dead girl between them and a war neither of them had asked for closing in around them both.

"You said the Ashford name resurfaced in Lycan territory," Selene said quietly. "I heard you and Lyra talking. What does that mean? Why would Lycans care about me?"

Kael's jaw worked, and for a moment she thought he might deflect again, might retreat back behind that wall of Alpha composure. Instead, something in his face broke open, exhaustion and grief bleeding through the cracks.

"Twenty years ago," he said, "my father made a deal with a Lycan enforcer named Dorian Vale. Vale wanted the Ashford bloodline erased — I don't know why, not fully, not yet. My father provided the location. Vale provided the fire." His voice roughened. "I found the ledgers three years ago, after he died. Payment records. A name I didn't understand at the time — Ashford, final. I spent three years trying to find out what it meant, whether there was anyone left to warn." His eyes lifted to hers, raw and stripped bare in a way she hadn't seen since the moment he'd first caught her scent. "I never imagined I'd find her standing over my own dead soldiers, smelling like the other half of my soul."

Selene's throat tightened, fury and grief and something achingly close to sympathy warring inside her chest. She wanted to hate him. She wanted it to be simple — his father's sins, his family's guilt, a clean line she could stand safely behind. But looking at him now, gutted and honest for the first time since they'd met, she understood with sick clarity that nothing about this was going to be simple.

"If Dorian Vale wanted my bloodline erased," she said slowly, "and he finds out I'm still alive—"

"He'll come himself," Kael said. "And he won't stop until you're dead. Or until I am."

A cold gust of wind swept down the cellar stairs, guttering the lanterns, and somewhere above them a wolf howled — not a warning, not a hunting call, but something mournful and mourning, echoed a second later by another, and another, the whole pack's voice rising together in grief for the girl bleeding out on the stone floor between them.

Kael's head lifted sharply toward the stairs, nostrils flaring, and Selene watched every trace of vulnerability vanish from his face in an instant, replaced by something cold and lethal.

"Someone's on the property," he said. "Someone who isn't pack."

And past the howling, faint but unmistakable, Selene heard it too — the low, deliberate crunch of footsteps on gravel, moving toward the house like they had all the time in the world.