Chapter 7: learning how to control my powers

I spun with the silver fire still crawling up my forearms, half of me expecting an assassin, while the other half thinking of the possibility that Vivienne herself could have somehow found a way to reach me even here. But my thoughts froze when a woman stepped out of the shadow of the courtyard wall, gray haired, dressed in the same dark colors as the Crimson Hollow warriors but wearing no pack insignia at all.

"Easy," she said, raising both hands, though her eyes never left the fire on my skin, tracking it with an interest that felt more clinical than afraid. "I'm not here to hurt you. I'm Mara. I served your mother before she fled, and your father ordered me to keep watch over you tonight without announcing myself, to see what would happen when you called the fire on purpose for the first time."

The flame guttered out along my arms as my concentration broke. "You could have just said that rather than clapping at me out of the dark."

The corner of her mouth twitched, almost a smile. "Old habit. I test what people do when they're startled. You didn't panic. You turned to fight instead of flee. That matters more than you probably realize."

"Why does it matter?"

"Because moonfire answers to fear as easily as it answers to courage," Mara said, "and a Vane who learns to call it out of panic instead of will. may burns out fast, sometimes literally. Your mother could never fully control hers. that was part of the reasons she ran instead of fighting when the raiders came for you both."

Something in that landed harder than I expected as I asked the next question "You knew her."

"she was like a sister to me." Mara's composure cracked for just a moment, grief surfacing plain and unguarded. "I've waited sixteen years to see that fire in someone again. I'd like to help you learn to control it, if your father allows it."

And He actually did allow it he was also joyful when I asked for his permission on it. So the very next morning, Mara's training was nothing like Rowe's. Less about strength and speed, more about stillness, about learning to sit inside my own anger without letting it swallow me whole. She made me meditate for hours before she let me so much as glance at a training blade, insisted that a Vane who couldn't sit still with her own rage had no business calling fire at all. Within two weeks I could call a small flame to my palm without it spreading, hold it, extinguish it on command. It wasn't mastery. It was only a start, but it was mine, earned instead of simply inherited.

Meanwhile, word continued trickling in from Cato's contact inside the Ashwood pack, and what came back painted a picture darker than any of us had expected. Vivienne had grown bolder since my banishment, no more careful. She'd moved two of the letter's likely couriers into positions of trust within the manor's own guard. She'd begun quietly redirecting supply shipments toward the northern border, the exact route a Bloodmoon alliance force would need if they intended to move against Crimson Hollow without Ashwood's council ever voting on it.

What none of us knew yet, because we had no way to see inside Ashwood's walls directly, was that Damon himself had started asking questions of his own, quietly, without telling his council, in the days right after my banishment.

It began, Cato's contact told us later, with a single detail that wouldn't stop bothering him. The scorched letter I'd tried to present at trial had vanished from the council's evidence table within a day of the verdict, and when Damon asked to see it again, no one could produce it. Not Elder Cole. Not the guards who'd logged it that night. It simply wasn't anywhere, as though it had never existed at all, and the absence apparently bothered him more than the letter itself ever had.

That single missing scrap of paper totally ate at him for days until he did something no Alpha in living Ashwood memory had reportedly ever done. He went, alone, to interview the servants directly, starting with the girl who cleaned Vivienne's chambers.

She broke almost immediately under his questioning, terrified but honest, and told him everything. The letter she'd pulled from the hearth. The words she'd read before handing it to me. The way she'd watched me get dragged from that hall while she stood frozen, too afraid to speak up in front of the whole council.

Damon reportedly said nothing for a long moment after hearing it, standing perfectly still in a hallway that had gone dead silent around him. Then he asked her one question that the guard who witnessed it couldn't stop repeating to Cato afterward, because it had chilled the whole corridor into a silence nobody there seemed willing to break.

If I had made a mistake that large in front of everyone I lead, how do I undo it without destroying what's left of this pack in the process?

I didn't know what to do with that when Cato relayed it to me, sitting across from him at the long table in my father's hall. Part of me wanted to feel nothing at all, to let the memory of that torn bond stay a clean, simple wound I never had to complicate again.

Another part of me, the part that still woke some nights with silver fire humming just under my skin also from dreaming about that hall, couldn't stop wondering what he'd do next now that he finally knew the truth I hadn't been able to prove myself.

I got my answer three days later, when a single Ashwood messenger rode alone up to Crimson Hollow's gates under a plain white banner, no escort behind him at all, carrying a sealed letter addressed, in Damon's own unmistakable hand, directly to me.