Chapter Eight

They Already Know

Emily's POV

Something woke me before the knock came.

I was already sitting up in bed, heart beating fast, when Yoana rapped three sharp times on my door and pushed it open without waiting. She was fully dressed. Her hair was up and her jaw was set and looking at her face told me that whatever she had come to say was not good.

"Get dressed, Quickly."

"What is happening?"

"Border breach. Lucas wants you moved to the inner rooms until it is handled." She dragged open the wardrobe and tossed clothes onto the bed in front of me. "Do not argue with me, just move."

I dressed fast, my fingers not quite steady. Yoana was already at the window when I finished, looking out at the tree line below with an expression I had not seen on her face before. She was the most unshakeable person I had met since arriving at Ironblood, warm, direct and impossible to rattle. Seeing her rattle now made my stomach drop.

"Who is it?" I asked.

"Ashveil wolves and some others." She turned from the window. "It is not a patrol, They crossed deliberately." She held my gaze for a beat. "Emily, They came for you."

I had known it was coming. The note under my door two nights ago had told me so, plain and cold and signed with nothing. And yet hearing Yoana say it out loud felt different and heavier.

She led me through a side corridor I had not been shown before, down two flights of stairs and through a door that opened into a large room below the main floor. Stone walls, one small high window, a table with chairs. Two Ironblood warriors stood inside, both armed and watching the door.

"Stay here," Yoana said. "Lucas will come when it is safe."

She left before I could ask anything else.

I sat at the table and tried to breathe. The two warriors did not speak to me. They watched the door and communicated in looks I could not read. I folded my hands in my lap and tried to think clearly.

Ashveil wolves had come here, Ironblood territory. That was not a casual crossing, wolves do not enter another pack's territory without permission unless they were willing to start something. Aden had signed a contract giving up all claims over me. He knew what that meant. Coming here anyway, with rogue wolves alongside meant he had decided the contract did not matter anymore, or someone had decided that for him.

Olivia.

The name settled in my gut like a stone. I had been careful not to think about her too much since arriving at Ironblood because thinking about her made something in me go very dark and very hot in a way I did not trust. She had spent years finding new ways to make my life worse. Quiet, creative cruelties, extra work assigned late at night, food taken before I could reach it, doors locked and unlocked in patterns designed to disorient me. Small things individually devastating in sum.

I heard raised voices somewhere above me, then running. Then silence that stretched long enough to make the warriors at the door exchange a look.

Then the low, distant sound of something I felt more than heard, a vibration through the stone floor that I recognised with my body before my brain caught up to it. Fighting, close to the border but close enough to feel.

The thing in my chest, the wolf I had been feeling stirred for days, faint and tentative, pushed forward suddenly. Hard like a hand shoving against a locked gate.

I gripped the table edge and breathed heavily. My vision pulsed once at the edges. The warrior on the left took a step toward me.

"Are you alright?"

"Yes," I said. The word came out steadier than I felt. The pressure in my chest eased slightly but did not disappear. It sat there, heavy and restless, like something that had just realised it was caged.

The door opened. Lucas stood in the frame, breathing harder than usual, a cut along his jaw already closing as I watched. He looked at the warriors first, they gave him a nod that meant something had been resolved and then he looked at me.

"It is handled," he said. "For now."

"For now," I repeated. "What does that mean?"

He crossed the room and huddled in front of my chair so we were eye level. His silver eyes were still sharp with the edge of a fight, but underneath that edge was something else. Something careful and urgent at the same time.

"It means the wolves at the border were a distraction," he said. "While we were managing them, someone else entered the territory from the west side." He paused. "They left something behind before we could catch them."

He held up a folded piece of paper.

I took it from him with a hand that had stopped shaking and opened it.

Three words. That was all.

We have them.

My mind went blank for one terrible second. And then something deep in my memory cracked open — my mother's voice, half-remembered, singing in the kitchen of a house I had not thought about in years.

The paper dropped from my hands.

"My parents," I whispered. "They are talking about my parents."

The two warriors in the stone room had been joined by a third, by the time twenty minutes had passed. She was younger than the other two mid twenties, sharp eyed, with the specific alertness of someone who has been briefed on a situation and is taking it seriously. She introduced herself as Shannon and did not make conversation beyond that, which I appreciated.

I sat at the table and watched the door and tried to keep my breathing even.

The note was still in my head. Three words ‘We have them.’ The theme that I had understood immediately, with the specific knowledge of someone who had spent sixteen years being told their parents were dead and had always, underneath that telling, felt a hollow where grief should have been but never quite settled.

You grieve what you have lost, what you’ve never had doesn’t ache the same way, it aches differently. It asks a different set of questions in the dark. Questions like: what were they like?, would they have loved me?, did they know about me?, did they think about me?, did the last thing they felt include me?.

I had been asking those questions since I was six years old without knowing I was asking them. I had buried them under the weight of surviving each day because that was what you did when there was no point to grief that had nowhere to land.

And now there was somewhere for it to land.

The hollow feeling in my chest was not grief, I was realising. It was anticipation. It was the specific held-breath quality of something you have wanted for so long that wanting it has become structural, built into you so completely that the possibility of having it is more frightening than continuing to not have it because at least the absence is familiar.

I bore down on the table with both hands, and made myself stay in the room rather than run through all the ways, this could go wrong. Lucas and Adam was working on it. The people who had sent that note wanted something from me and they would not destroy what they had if they thought they could use it as leverage.

My parents were alive because I was useful. That was a horrible thing to understand and I understood it anyway and used it as a handhold. They would not be harmed while I was still in play.

The door opened. Lucas crossed to me and squatted in front of my chair and looked at my face the way he did when he was checking that I was still in one piece. I met his eyes.

"Tell me," I said.

"Your parents are at the northern site," he said. "Both alive. Our contact confirmed it within the last hour."

I held that for a moment. Let it be real.

"Then we go and get them," I said.

Lucas looked at me steadily. He was already

thinking about how. I could see it in the particular quality of his focus.

"Yes," he said. "We do.”