026 ~ The Blind Wolf's Truth ~

"You can't leave me thirsty for more answers this way. Who's hunting me?" Selene asked.

"Names won't help you." His voice was flat, his tone suggesting every hint of finality.

"Then give me something that will."

He turned his face toward the sound of her voice, blind eyes searching for something they couldn't see. A long silence stretched before he spoke again. "The Blood Moon does not choose," he said, quieter now. "It reveals."

"That's not an answer." Frustration sharpened her tone, and she took a step closer, refusing to let him retreat behind riddles.

"It's the only one I can give you without signing both our deaths."

"Try me anyway."

His jaw tightened, the scarred side of his face pulling tight. "You think this began with a punishment. Wolves who broke pack law, judged and burned for it. That's the story they let survive."

"It's the only story anyone's ever told me... Alongside it's my fault," her face fell.

"Because it's easier to believe than the truth."

"So tell me the truth."

He exhaled slowly, the sound rattling with age. "Punishment doesn't require that much blood. It doesn't require silence this complete, lasting five years without a single crack." He shook his head, and something in his shoulders sagged, as the weight of the memory had physically settled onto him. "It was a silencing."

Selene's mouth went dry. "What silencing?"

"Uhh... Something that should never have surfaced because it would have unmade everyone standing at the top of that pack if it had lived one more day."

"Unmade how?" Her hands curled at her sides. "Prove what? Prove who did what?"

"I don't know all of it." He said it plainly, without apology, as though he'd rehearsed the limits of his own knowledge many times before tonight.

"Then tell me what you do know." Her voice cracked, frustration and fear bleeding together, so tangled, she couldn't tell them apart anymore.

"I told you. I was a guard, not a confidant."

"You've spent five years hiding in a tree with half the truth locked behind your teeth. I need the rest of it."

"And if I give it to you, they'll finish what they started that night." His hand found the bark of the oak beside him and gripped it, grounding himself against something only he could feel closing in.

"So you'd rather let me walk out of here with nothing?"

"I'd rather you walk out of here alive."

"I'm already a target." Her voice broke on the words. "You said it yourself. They're already hunting me. Whatever you're protecting me from, it's already found me."

"Not like this."

His hand shot out and closed around her wrist before she could react, his grip far stronger than his frail frame should have allowed. She flinched but didn't pull away, some instinct telling her this wasn't a threat, only a man losing hold of his own composure.

"What are you doing?"

"Listen to me." His fingers trembled against her skin, though the pressure didn't ease. "The moment you walked into this clearing, you made a choice you can't undo. I've spent five years being careful and untraceable, a ghost no one thought to hunt."

"I didn't tell anyone where I was going."

"It doesn't matter."

"Why not?" She searched his ruined face for something to hold onto, some sign this could still be undone.

"Because they've been watching every thread you've pulled since the tower. They know you found the journal. They know you're still asking questions no one wants answered." His unseeing eyes locked onto her, uncannily precise despite the clouded white that covered them. "They will come for me now that you've found me."

"Then come with me. Ashfang has walls and guards who will protect you by my word.

"Guards who answer to the same men I've spent five years hiding from?" Bitterness sharpened his voice, old and well-worn. "It's no use, Selene."

"Not all of them."

"Enough of them." His grip on her wrist eased slightly, but he didn't let go, as though the contact alone kept something inside him from breaking apart entirely. "You don't understand what you've done."

"I found a witness. That's what I've done." She said it firmly, though her voice wavered on the last word.

"You found the one loose thread they never accounted for, and now you've handed them the exact reason to pull it." His voice dropped lower, rough with something close to grief. "I was careful and was dead, as far as anyone in that pack was concerned, and dead men don't get hunted."

"I'm sorry." The apology came out smaller than she meant it to, guilt pressing down on her chest.

"Sorry doesn't undo it."

"Then let me fix it, please... Come with me." She reached toward him instinctively, though he was already retreating half a step, putting distance between them like distance might undo the last hour entirely.

"There is no fixing it." His fingers tightened around her wrist again, urgent, almost pleading beneath the roughness of his voice. "There's only what happens next. And what happens next is them finding out I'm still breathing."

"I won't let that happen."

"You can't promise that."

"Then let me try." Her chin lifted despite the tremor running through her, some stubborn refusal to accept the ending he seemed so certain of.

He shook his head slowly, sightless eyes fixed somewhere just past her shoulder, as though looking through her into the dark of the trees beyond. "You still don't understand. This was never about you finding me by accident. The Blood Moon reveals what it wants revealed, when it wants it revealed. You didn't stumble onto this clearing. Something led you here."

"That's not possible." Her voice thinned as doubt filtered through the conviction she'd walked in with.

"Isn't it?"

A sudden silence dropped between them, stretching long enough that she could hear her own pulse hammering in her ears, loud enough to drown out the rustle of leaves overhead.

"What happens to you if they come?" she finally asked, quieter now, some of the fight draining out of her voice.

"The same thing that was supposed to happen to me five years ago." He said it without moving a muscle.

"I won't let that be my fault."

"It already is." His grip tightened one final time, hard enough that she felt it in her bones, before he released her wrist and stepped back into the shadow of the hollow oak, as though the dark itself might swallow him whole and undo the last hour entirely. "Go, Selene. Before they realize you already have."

She didn't move, rooted to the spot, torn between the instinct to run and the guilt anchoring her feet to the clearing floor.

"Go." The single word cut through her hesitation, carrying more finality than anything else he'd said.

For the first time since she'd stepped into the clearing, Selene understood that she wasn't the only one who'd just run out of time.

She turned, forcing her legs to carry her back toward the tree line, and didn't look back once, even though the weight of his warning followed her through every step of the dark.