Chapter Three: What the Blood Remembers

The voices below her window sharpened into words just as Selene pressed her ear to the glass.

"...cannot keep pretending this is a coincidence, Kael." Lyra's voice, tight with barely-restrained fury. "Twenty years we've searched, and now she just appears, covered in the blood of your own men, in the same week the Ashford name resurfaces in Lycan territory?"

Selene's stomach dropped. The Ashford name.

"I know what it looks like," Kael's voice answered, lower, harder to catch.

"Do you? Because it looks like someone wanted her found. It looks like a trap wearing a pretty face, and you walked right into it because your wolf finally decided to stop being alone."

"Careful, Lyra."

"I'm your Beta's sister, not your enemy. I'm the only one in this house who'll say it to your face instead of behind your back." A pause, heavy enough that Selene held her breath to hear it. "If she's who I think she is, this isn't a mate bond, Kael. This is a bomb somebody just handed you, and they're waiting to see who lights the fuse."

Footsteps retreated. A door slammed somewhere deep in the house, and then nothing — just the wind moving through the trees outside and the frantic thud of Selene's own pulse in her ears.

Who I think she is.

She backed away from the window, pulling her arms around herself, mind spinning through every fragment her mother had ever let slip before the fire took her — the warnings, the running, the way her mother's whole body used to lock with terror at the mention of packs, of Alphas, of anyone asking her name.

Never let anyone see this mark. Never say the name Ashford outside our door. Promise me.

She'd broken that promise the moment Kael Voss asked.

A soft knock made her flinch. "It's just food," a young voice called through the door — female, hesitant. Selene crossed the room and opened it to find a pack member barely out of her teens holding a tray, eyes darting nervously between the hallway and Selene's face like she expected to be caught doing something forbidden.

"Thank you," Selene said, taking the tray.

The girl didn't leave. She lingered, chewing her lip, and finally blurted, "Is it true? That you're the Alpha's mate?"

"Apparently."

"My grandmother said the Ashford line was wiped out." The girl's voice dropped to barely a whisper. "She said the last Ashford burned twenty years ago, up north. She said it like it was a good thing that happened. Like the pack was safer for it."

Selene's blood went cold. "Why would anyone say that?"

The girl's eyes widened, as if she'd only just realised what she'd revealed. "I — I have to go." She turned and fled down the corridor before Selene could ask another question, footsteps fading fast into the dark of the house.

Selene shut the door and slid down against it, tray forgotten on the floor beside her, mind racing. The last Ashford burned twenty years ago. That was the night her mother had grabbed her out of bed at three in the morning, the night the house had gone up in flames behind them as they ran through the trees, her mother's hand crushing hers so hard it left bruises, sobbing Don't look back, don't ever look back.

She'd always believed it was an accident. A fire, bad wiring, terrible luck.

She'd never once considered that someone had lit the match on purpose — and that whoever had wanted the Ashfords dead might still be walking free, might even be standing in this very house calling her mate.

The thought made her sick. She surged to her feet, crossed to the window, and tested the latch with shaking hands. It gave, easily, swinging open onto a two-story drop and a stretch of dark garden beyond. Not impossible. Not with a wolf's bones, even one she'd spent twenty years refusing to acknowledge.

She'd almost swung her leg over the sill when the door behind her opened without a knock.

"Going somewhere?"

Kael filled the doorway, arms crossed, gold-ringed eyes taking in the open window, her poised stance, the tray of untouched food on the floor, with the unhurried thoroughness of a man who'd hunted for a living.

"Working up an appetite," she said, stepping back from the sill with as much dignity as she could manage.

"You heard something." It wasn't a question. His gaze sharpened, moving over her face like he could read the fear she was trying to bury. "Lyra and I have arguments. It doesn't concern you."

"It concerns me when I hear my own name attached to the word bomb."

Something shifted behind his eyes — not quite guilt, but close enough that her chest tightened with the confirmation. He stepped further into the room, closing the door softly behind him, and for a moment the air between them thickened with everything neither of them was saying.

"Twenty years ago," she said, voice low, forcing the words out before she lost her nerve, "there was a fire up north. A family died. Except we didn't die — my mother got me out, and then she spent the rest of her life running from something she never explained, and now I'm standing in a stranger's house discovering the whole pack seems to know exactly what happened to the Ashford line."

Kael's jaw tightened. For the first time since she'd met him, the iron control in his face cracked wide enough that she saw something underneath it — something that looked disturbingly like guilt.

"Selene—"

"Tell me the truth," she said, voice shaking now despite her best efforts. "Did your pack burn my house down?"

He was silent for one second too long.

"It wasn't my pack," he finally said, quiet and careful, like each word cost him something. "It was my father."

The floor seemed to tilt beneath her feet. "Your father."

"He's dead now," Kael said quickly, stepping closer, hand lifting like he meant to reach for her before he thought better of it. "He died three years ago. I took the throne after, and I have spent every year since trying to undo what he—"

"You knew." Her voice cracked down the middle. "You knew who I was the second you smelled me. That's why you looked at my mark like it was a curse."

"Selene, let me explain—"

"Don't." She backed toward the window again, chest heaving, wolf and woman both screaming at her to run, to get as far from this house and this man and this impossible bond as her legs could carry her. "Your father murdered my family, and you brought me into his house and called me your mate?"

"I didn't know it was you," he said, desperation bleeding into his voice for the first time since she'd met him. "Not until I smelled the fire-scar in your blood. The Ashford bloodline was supposed to be extinct. I have spent three years trying to atone for a massacre I didn't order and couldn't stop, and the Goddess just handed me the one woman in this world who has every right to hate me for it."

Thunder cracked somewhere far off, and rain began hammering the window behind her, cold air rushing in through the open latch.

"Get away from me," she whispered.

"Selene—"

A scream tore through the house below them — sharp, female, cut off far too fast.

Kael's head snapped toward the door, every line of his body shifting instantly from raw and wounded to lethal and alert, gold flooding his eyes until the grey was gone entirely.

"Stay here," he snarled, already moving.

But Selene was done being told what to do — and she was two steps behind him out the door before it had even finished swinging shut.