Chapter 3: The Lie

I did not die.

I want to say that plainly because for a long time afterward I was not entirely sure it was true.

The fall was not straight down. The cliff face was more of a steep slope than a sheer drop, rocky and brutal, and I tumbled down it the way a broken thing tumbles, hitting outcroppings and ledges and loose earth that tore at my skin and spun me in directions my body was not designed to go. At some point, I stopped feeling individual pain and it all merged into one overwhelming signal that my brain eventually decided to shut down rather than keep processing.

I landed in something wet. A shallow stream at the base of the slope, barely deep enough to matter, but the cold of it hit me like a second impact and pulled me back into consciousness just enough to drag my face out of the water.

Then I lay there.

I do not know how long. Long enough for the sky to go from black to the deep grey that comes just before dawn starts thinking about arriving. Long enough for the cold to move past uncomfortable and settle into something more serious. My left shoulder was dislocated, I was almost certain of that. Two of my ribs on the right side sent white-hot signals through me every time I breathed in too deeply. My legs worked but not well. My wrists were still chained.

I was alive.

It did not feel like much of an achievement yet.

Far above me, on the road I had fallen from, I heard the truck stop. Doors opening. Voices. They had noticed. Of course, they had noticed.

I pressed myself against the base of the slope and stayed completely still, breathing in the shallow careful way my ribs would allow. My wolf was still muted from the drug but some instinct older than wolf and older than human told me not to move, not to make a sound, to become part of the ground if I had to.

The voices carried down to me but the words did not. I heard frustration in them. Then silence. Then after a long stretch, the doors closed again and the truck moved on.

They had looked down the cliff and seen nothing in the dark. Or they had decided that anyone who survived that fall was not worth recovering. Or perhaps delivering a body was not part of the deal and they had no interest in climbing down a mountain slope in the dark to check.

I did not care which reason it was. They were gone.

I let myself breathe properly for the first time since I had woken up in that truck. It hurt. I did it anyway.

Then I thought about Damon. About the festival grounds, the chaos, the pack alarm. About how long I had been gone and what was happening back home.

I needed to get back.

It was a simple thought. Clean and clear underneath all the pain. I needed to get back to my pack, to my mate, to my home. Everything else could come after that.

I got up. Slowly. Badly. With a sound I am not proud of.

And I started moving.

I did not make it far before my body overruled my intentions. The cold and the blood loss and whatever remained of the drug in my system were working together against me and I collapsed against a tree at the edge of the stream and could not immediately convince myself to get back up.

I did not know it yet, lying there in the dark at the bottom of that slope, but while I was fighting to survive the fall, everything at home was already being dismantled.

I did not know about Vanessa.

I did not know what she was saying.

I did not know that by the time the sun finished rising over Silver Moon Pack territory, my name would already mean something different to the people I loved.

Vanessa walked into the pack house at dawn.

Later, people would describe the way she looked when she arrived. Pale and shaking, hair loose, eyes red. She had clearly been crying, or had made herself look like she had, which with Vanessa amounted to the same thing. She asked for Damon specifically. She said it was urgent. She said she had information about what had happened to Aurora.

Damon had not slept. He had spent the entire night coordinating search parties across every border, sending warriors in all directions, standing over maps and trackers with the focused terrible energy of a man who was not going to stop until he had answers. The Beta had tried to get him to rest. Damon had ignored him the way he ignored everything that was not useful to finding me.

When someone told him Vanessa was asking for him he went immediately.

She was sitting in the main hall, still shaking and with red eyes. She had something in her closed hand. When Damon asked her what she knew she opened her hand and placed it on the table between them.

My necklace. The thin gold chain with the small wolf pendant that Damon had given me on our first anniversary. I never took it off. I had been wearing it at the festival.

It was lying on that table with blood on it. My blood.

“Where did you get that,” Damon said. It was not quite a question.

Vanessa looked at him with those carefully arranged eyes of hers and said she had found it near the eastern border. She said she had followed something that had been bothering her all night, a suspicion she had not wanted to believe. She said she had seen things in recent weeks, things she had not known how to bring to him, things she had told herself were not her business.

Then she told him her story.

The story was this.

Aurora had been unhappy. Had been hiding it for months. Had been seen near the eastern border on multiple occasions, meeting someone. A rogue. A man from outside any pack structure who had been spotted in Silver Moon territory three times in the past season and who Vanessa had foolishly said nothing about because she had not wanted to cause trouble.

Last night had not been a kidnapping.

Last night Aurora had run away. With him. Willingly. The blood was from a struggle with a warrior who had tried to stop her at the border and whom she had fought off herself before crossing.

Damon said nothing for a very long time.

Then he said, “That is not true.”

“Damon-”

“That is not true,” he said again, and his voice was the quiet kind of dangerous that people who knew him understood to take seriously.

Vanessa did not push immediately. She was smarter than that. She let the silence sit. She looked down at the table. She said she understood why he could not hear it. She said she had not wanted it to be true either. She said she was only telling him because she cared about the pack and she cared about him.

Damon stood up and walked out.

He went back to his maps. He sent more warriors to the eastern border. He doubled the search parties heading north toward the mountain roads. He told the Beta privately that Vanessa was either lying or badly mistaken and that no one was to adjust the search based on her account.

He did not believe her.

Not yet.

The rogue body was found near the border crossing at midmorning.

A young warrior on patrol came across it in the tree line, half hidden under brush. Male. Mid-thirties. No pack markings. Dead from wounds consistent with a wolf fight, though there were no other bodies nearby.

He was carrying a bag.

Inside the bag were things that had no business being there. A shawl I had worn to a pack dinner three weeks earlier. A small journal that looked like mine, the brown leather cover, the gold clasp. A set of clothes folded neatly that the warrior who found them recognised as belonging to the Luna.

The elders were informed before Damon was.

By the time Damon heard about the body the elders had already gathered and were already talking in the careful measured tones they used when they were worried about something but had not decided yet how worried to be.

One of them said it gently. They were not accusing. They were simply noting. That combined with what Vanessa had reported, that the belongings, the blood, the location at the eastern border, created a picture that needed to be addressed.

Damon stood in the centre of that room and something happened to his face that the Beta later said was difficult to describe. Not anger exactly. Something that was trying very hard to hold its shape against a force pushing it from the inside.

“My mate did not betray this pack,” he said.

No one argued with him directly. They simply looked at the bag of belongings on the table. They simply waited.

The letter arrived that evening.

A warrior found it tucked into a hollow at the base of the stone marker at the eastern border crossing, the one that traditionally marked the boundary of Silver Moon territory. As if it had been left there deliberately. As if someone had wanted it to be found.

It was brought to Damon unopened.

He sat alone at his desk and looked at it for a long time before he picked it up. The handwriting on the outside was mine. He would have known it anywhere. He had seen it on hundreds of notes left on his pillow, on the margins of the books I borrowed from his shelf, on the planning documents we worked through together late at night.

His hands, which had never shaken in any fight he had ever been in, were not entirely steady when he broke the seal.

Inside was a single page. The handwriting throughout was mine. The words were not. They described dissatisfaction and resentment and a love that had quietly died over months. They described a choice made freely. They said not to look. They said to let her go. They said she was sorry for what she was taking with her but that she had no choice because she could not stay somewhere she no longer belonged.

He read it twice.

The second time he read it he was looking for something wrong, some inconsistency, some word or phrase that was not how I would say a thing. I know this because I know him. That is exactly what he would have done.

I do not know what he found or did not find.

I only know what the Beta told me, years later, when the truth had already destroyed everything it was going to destroy.

He said Damon sat at that desk for a very long time after he finished reading.

He said when Damon finally looked up his eyes were not right.

He said that was the night something in Damon broke, or was broken, and that the man who stood up from that desk was not quite the same as the man who had sat down.

At the bottom of the page was my signature.

And a confession of betrayal.