Chapter Eleven

What Lena Knew

Emily's POV

She did not deny it.

Lena Aaira stood in her doorway with her silver hair and her tired eyes and her hands still kept to her mouth, and she did not deny a single word of it. She stepped back to let us in without speaking. The house was small and warm and full of books. She had lived here for fifteen years and it showed the kind of home that has absorbed a person into its walls.

She made tea. It was such an ordinary thing to do that I almost laughed. She set three cups on the table and sat down across from me and looked at me the way people look at something they have been waiting a very long time to see.

"How much do you know already?" she asked.

"Some," I said. "Enough to know that what I was told growing up was a lie."

She nodded. She wrapped both hands around her cup. "Your mother was my closest friend. We grew up together in Ashveil. When she mated with your father and became Luna, I stayed close not because of his rank, but because she was my family." She paused. "When you were born, something happened that we kept quiet, very quiet."

"The Founding Line marker," I said.

Lena's eyebrows went up. She looked at Lucas briefly, then back to me. "You already know."

"We found it in a blood test."

She let out a long, slow breath. "Your mother knew from the moment you were born what it meant. She had read the old records, the ones that were later destroyed and she knew that a child carrying the Founding Line marker would be in danger if the wrong people found out. She kept it secret. Your father knew. I knew. No one else."

"Olivia found out," I said.

"Yes." Lena's jaw clenched. "I do not know how. But she found out, and she moved fast. The night of the fire I was not in the hall when it started, I was outside. I saw smoke and I went in." She stopped. Her hands hardened around the cup. "The fire was not natural. It burned in a pattern. Concentrated like something accelerant had been placed at specific points. I found you in the corner of the hall. You were unconscious, your parents were and they were still alive, but barely. I got you out and came back for them but by the time I reached them, Olivia's people were already there." Her voice thinned. "They took your parents away. They were not trying to save them, they were securing them."

The kitchen was completely silent.

I had known in the abstract way you know things that you have been told, that my parents died in the fire. And then I knew from the note under the door that they might be alive. But hearing it laid out this plainly that they were taken, deliberately, the same night the fire was set and made it real in a way that nothing else had.

"Why did you not come forward?" Lucas asked. His voice was even, not accusatory. Just a question.

"Because Olivia's people came to my house the next morning," Lena said. "Before I could reach anyone. They did not threaten me directly. They did not have to. I had a young daughter. I understood the message." She looked at me. "I am sorry. I have been sorry every day for sixteen years. I should have found a way and should have tried harder."

I did not know what to say to that. The grief was real and so was the failure, and both things were true at once. I looked at the teacup in front of me and said nothing for a moment.

"My parents," I said. "Do you know where they are now?"

Lena hesitated. "Not exactly. But I have been trying to find out." She got up and went to the bookshelf, pulling a worn folder from between two books. She set it on the table in front of me. "Everything I have gathered. Rumours, contacts, old pack geography. The rogue group, the ones connected to Olivia, have two main sites they have used over the years. One in the eastern lowlands, one much further north in the abandoned territory of the dismantled pack."

Lucas reached across and picked up the folder. He opened it and went still.

"What?" I asked.

"The northern site." He looked up at Adam's map image on his phone and then back at the folder. "Adam already had this location on our short list." He looked at me. "This is the stronger lead."

Lena leaned forward. "If you go there you need to be prepared. They will know you are coming. They always know." She looked between us. "Whatever you are planning, you cannot do it quietly. There are too many of them and they have had too long to prepare."

I stood up. The folder was in my hands and the wolf in my chest was pressing hard against whatever remained of the binding steady, rhythmic pressure, like water testing a crack in stone.

"I am not planning to be quiet," I said.

Lena looked at me with an expression I could not immediately read. Then she looked at my hands at the faint luminescence that was spreading up from my palms to my wrists, warm and white and completely involuntary.

"Oh," she breathed. She stood up slowly. "It is starting already." Her eyes were wide. "Emily. Your wolf is not just waking up." She pressed a hand to her chest. "She is breaking free."

The folder Lena had produced from between two books was worn at the corners from handling. She had been going through it recently and repeatedly. The wear was not from age but from use, the specific softening of paper that comes from many hands over a short period.

She had been preparing for this conversation for longer than six months. The six months was how long she had been actively asking about Emily. The preparation itself had been going on for years, maybe always. The way that people who carry significant information always exist in a state of low-level readiness for the moment when they can finally deliver it.

I set the folder open in front of me and looked at the first page. A hand-drawn map of the region — old, approximate, showing territorial boundaries in the way they had existed before the current governance framework formalised them. Several locations were marked with small careful notations. Dates beside some of them, names beside others.

Lena had been mapping the rogue group's movements. Not recently, over years. She had been tracking them from her small town two hours from Ironblood with the methodical patience of someone who understood that the information might one day be needed and was making sure it would be available when that day came.

"You have been building this for years," I said.

"Yes," she said simply.

"Waiting for Emily to surface," Lucas said.

"Waiting for someone to come and look," Lena said too. "I did not know it would be Emily herself who came. I hoped." She paused. "I hoped it would be someone who cared enough to come, which meant someone who knew what she was and valued what she was. I did not expect it to be her Alpha."

Lucas was quiet beside me. I looked at him briefly at the particular quality in his expression that he did not always allow to be visible. The depth of the thing he felt for me that he was still, even now careful about overwhelming me with.

I turned back to the folder. The northern site was marked with three separate notations spread across five years. The most recent was eight months old. Activity and Movement. Evidence of ongoing occupation.

My parents had been there for at least eight months. Possibly much longer. The earlier notations suggested the site had been in use for years. Which meant — slowly, it became real — they stayed in one place the whole time, not moved, just held.

Held somewhere that Lena had on a map.

"We can find them," I said.

"Yes," Lena said. "If you go quickly.”