chapter 5

(Lyra's POV)

Rhea's cabin smelled like crushed herbs and woodsmoke, tucked far enough from the pack house that most Ashwood wolves forgot it existed, which was exactly why Briar had dragged me there at midnight with a stolen lantern and a face full of nervous determination.

"She was pack healer when the Thorne massacre happened," Briar said, low, like the walls might report back to Marcus. "She's the only wolf left in this territory who was actually there and isn't Damon Ashwood."

Rhea turned out to be older than I expected, silver streaked and unhurried, with eyes that studied me for a long, assessing moment before she spoke. "Thorne," she said. "You have her mother's mouth. Set the same way when you're about to argue with someone."

My chest went tight. "You knew my mother."

"I set her arm once, the winter before it happened." Rhea's voice softened, briefly, before going careful again. "I've wondered for nine years whether the surviving Thorne child would ever come asking questions. Took you long enough."

"I didn't know there were questions to ask," I said. "I was told my pack sold Ashwood hunting routes to human hunters. That they burned for it. I don't remember enough of that night to argue with the story."

"Then let me tell you what doesn't add up about it," Rhea said, and reached under a floorboard for a small, fire scarred tin box. "I kept a few things I probably shouldn't have. Insurance, I told myself, though I never had the courage to use it."

Inside the tin was a half burned ledger page, edges black and curling, most of the writing lost to fire damage, except for a column of names near the bottom, and a single line that had survived almost intact.

"Payment received. D. Ashwood. Territory maps, Thorne perimeter, confirmed."

I read it three times before the words rearranged into something I could actually process. "This says..."

"It says someone with the initial D and the surname Ashwood sold territory maps of Thorne perimeter defenses," Rhea said quietly, "the same week the Thorne pack burned. I found it in the ash the morning after, half a mile from where your parents died. I never showed it to anyone, because the only wolf in this territory with the authority to investigate an Ashwood was the Ashwood in question."

The floor seemed to tilt under me. "Damon."

"I don't know that for certain," Rhea said, careful, precise. "The page is damaged. There could be another explanation. But I have spent nine years watching Damon Ashwood flinch every single time your name comes up in a room, Lyra Thorne, and I do not believe that is a coincidence, and neither, I think, do you."

Briar had gone very quiet beside me, her earlier bravado draining into something closer to fear. "If this is real," she said slowly, "it means the Thorne pack didn't betray Ashwood at all."

"It means," Rhea said, "that someone needed a story where they did. Badly enough to burn an entire pack to make it stick."

I sat with that for a long moment, feeling nine years of carefully buried grief reorganize itself around a shape I hadn't let myself imagine, not my family betrayed the pack that raised me since, but my family was murdered by the pack that raised me since, and blamed for their own deaths so the truth would die with them.

"Why show me now?" I asked. "You've had this for nine years."

Rhea's face did something complicated: guilt, relief, old fear finally finding somewhere to go. "Because three days ago, Kaelan Ashwood's eyes went gold in a corridor in front of half the pack house, and I have watched that boy grow up believing his father is a good man who made hard, necessary choices. I don't know what a forbidden mate bond does to a family built on a lie that old. But I know it's going to force the question eventually, and I would rather you go into that reckoning with the truth in your hands than blind."

I folded the ledger page with hands that weren't quite steady and tucked it inside my jacket, against my ribs, where it felt like it weighed considerably more than a scrap of burned paper had any right to.

"There's a rifle scope pointed at me in the woods two nights ago," I said slowly, thinking it through as I said it. "And an Alpha whose father goes gray at the mention of my name. And now a ledger page with his father's initial on a payment for my family's death."

"Yes," Rhea said.

"That's not a coincidence."

"No," Rhea agreed. "I don't believe it is."

Briar reached over and gripped my hand, hard, grounding. "What are you going to do?"

I thought about Kaelan's voice in the forest, I'm not going to solve it by pretending it happened to someone I don't care about, and about his father's face going the color of old ash when he'd heard about the rifle. I thought about a mate bond that pack law called forbidden, built on top of a secret that was starting to look less like ancient history and more like a live, ongoing threat.

"I'm going to find out exactly what Damon Ashwood did," I said, "before it finds out I already know."

Outside Rhea's cabin, an owl called once into the dark, and somewhere much farther off, carried faint on the wind, I heard the long, deliberate howl of a wolf that didn't belong to Ashwood territory at all.

Rhea's head came up sharply. "That's not one of ours."

"Then whose is it?" I asked.

Her face, in the lantern light, had gone the same particular gray I'd heard about in Damon's.

"Crimson Fang," she said. "Titus Crane's pack. They haven't howled this close to Ashwood land in nine years."

She didn't have to say the rest out loud. We both already understood exactly what anniversary that timing lined up with.