chapter 4

(Kaelan's POV)

The shot never came. That was almost worse, the half second where I was certain it would, where every instinct in my body screamed shield her louder than nine years of Alpha training had ever screamed anything, and then the scope dipped, and the shape in the trees was simply gone, retreating without firing, like whoever held that rifle had gotten exactly what they came for just by aiming it.

"They wanted to see something," I said, once I'd swept the treeline twice and come back empty. "Not kill anyone. See something."

Lyra hadn't moved from where I'd put her, back against a tree trunk, breathing hard, eyes wide and gold at the edges where her wolf sat close to the surface. "See what?"

"Whether you'd run," I said slowly, the pieces settling into a shape I didn't like. "Or whether I'd protect you." I looked at her. "I did the second one without thinking. In front of a witness with a rifle scope, who is now going to report exactly what he saw to whoever sent him."

"You think a hunter reports to someone."

"I think," I said, choosing the words carefully because some part of me had already leapt to a conclusion I wasn't ready to say out loud, "that hunters usually don't know which specific Omega to point a scope at unless someone told them where to look."

Lyra went very still. "Someone inside the pack."

"Maybe." I didn't want it to be true. I also couldn't make myself believe it wasn't.

We walked back to the perimeter marker in a silence that had changed texture completely from the one we'd started the night with, less charged, more frightened, both of us running the same math and arriving at the same uncomfortable answer. By the time we reached the others, my jaw ached from clenching it, and Lyra had folded her face back into the flat, careful blankness she wore like armor, like the last hour hadn't happened at all.

Marcus was waiting at the marker, and one look at his face told me the night wasn't done handing out bad news.

"Word already reached the house," he said. "Someone saw you put yourself between her and a threat out there. It's already being repeated as..." he glanced at Lyra, chose his words with visible care, "more than a patrol incident."

"It was a patrol incident," I said. "There was a rifle."

"I know there was a rifle, Kaelan, I sent the north loop back to sweep for it." Marcus's voice was low, urgent, the precision cracking under something that looked, for the first time since I'd known him, like genuine worry. "I'm telling you what's already circulating. Your father's going to hear a version of tonight that has nothing to do with hunters in it."

"Then I'll tell him the true version."

"He won't want the true version," Marcus said. "He'll want the version where you never went out there at all."

Lyra spoke up then, voice even, though I could hear the effort it cost her to keep it that way. "I can request a different patrol assignment. That solves the rumor."

"No," I said, before I'd fully decided to say it, and both of them looked at me. "Someone aimed a rifle at an Ashwood Omega tonight and didn't fire. That's not a rumor problem, that's a security problem, and I'm not going to solve it by pretending it happened to someone I don't care about."

The word hung there. Care. I watched it land on Lyra's face, watched her carefully composed blankness slip for exactly one unguarded second before she caught it and put it back.

Marcus exhaled through his nose, the sound of a man recalculating an entire strategy. "Then we do this quietly," he said. "Full incident report, my desk only, for now. I'll increase perimeter patrols. And Kaelan," he waited until I met his eyes, "you need to talk to your father before he hears the corridor version of tonight from someone else. Tonight. Not tomorrow."

He was right, and I hated that he was right, and I nodded because there wasn't another honest option.

I found my father in his study an hour later, and I told him everything: the rifle, the scope aimed at Lyra, my body moving to shield her before my mind had finished deciding to, the growing, ugly certainty that someone inside Ashwood territory had pointed a hunter at a specific Omega on purpose.

My father listened without moving, without a single change of expression, until I got to the part about the scope being aimed specifically at Lyra.

Then something in his face went the particular gray of a man hearing a fear he'd been carrying alone for a very long time finally start coming true.

"Father?"

"Increase her security," he said, too fast, too controlled. "Quietly. I don't want this discussed with the council."

"Why not? If someone's targeting her, the council should..."

"Because the council," my father said, in a voice I'd never heard him use, thin and old and frightened underneath the command in it, "will ask why anyone would bother targeting one Omega girl instead of simply waiting for the mate bond to end her the legal way. And I am not prepared to answer that question yet."

I stared at him. "Father. What are you not telling me?"

He looked at me for a long, terrible moment, old grief moving behind his eyes like something surfacing from very deep water.

"Nothing you're ready to hear," he said, and turned back to his desk, and I understood, with a cold certainty that settled into my chest and stayed there, that my father knew exactly why someone wanted Lyra Thorne dead, and had known it for a great deal longer than tonight.