Chapter Ten

The Name on the Screen

Lucas's POV

The name on Adam's phone was Lena Aaira.

It meant nothing to me. But it meant everything to Emily. I watched it happen, the colour leaving her face, her hand going out to the desk to steady herself, her lips moving around words that did not quite make it out.

"Emily." I stepped closer. "Do you know her?"

"She was my mother's closest friend," Emily said. Her voice was flat and distant the way voices get when the mind is running so fast that the mouth cannot keep up. "She left Ashveil the year of the fire. I was told she could not stand to be in a pack that had failed to protect the Alpha pair." She looked up at me. "Aden told me that. Aden told me she left because of the fire."

"Maybe she left because she knew something," Adam said carefully.

"Or because she was afraid of what would happen if she stayed," I said.

Emily pushed off the desk and straightened. Whatever had just moved through her — shock, grief, hope, all three at once, she was already putting it somewhere. I could watch her do it. It was a skill she had developed over sixteen years and she was very good at it, too good. I hoped that one day she would not need it anymore.

"I want to go and see her," Emily said.

"Not alone," I said immediately.

"I know." She looked at me steadily. "With you."

Caius settled inside me with a satisfaction I did not bother to argue with. I looked at Adam. He gave a small nod meaning he thought it was manageable, that he could hold Ironblood's operations while I was gone, that the border was locked down enough to risk a two hour absence.

"Tomorrow morning," I said. "First light. We go quietly. No pack escort… in order not to be too visible. Just us and two of my most discreet men."

Emily nodded. She looked at the maps on the table for a moment and then back at me. "Lucas." She said my name with a particular weight, the way she did when she was about to say something she had thought carefully about. "If my parents are alive and if Lena knows something, then the fire was not just Olivia acting alone. Someone planned it. Someone helped her get Blood of Wolfsbane into a locked sacred hall and made sure the blame landed on a six year old child." She tightened her jaw. "I want to know every name."

"So do I," I said. "And we will get them."

She went to bed. Adam and I worked through the night, cross-referencing the partial records against pack movement logs from sixteen years ago, identifying the rogue wolf group's known members, and mapping the possible locations where prisoners could be held in rogue territory. By three in the morning we had a short list of four sites. By four we had it down to two.

Neither of us talked about what it meant if Emily's parents were not at either location. We did not need to.

I stepped out onto the packhouse steps just before dawn and stood in the cold air. Caius was quiet for once. Not absent, just thinking. He was always more thoughtful than I gave him credit for when things were genuinely serious.

She was getting under my skin in ways I had not anticipated. Not just because she was my fated mate, that was Caius's certainty, bone-deep and absolute. But because of the specific way Emily existed, She had been told she was nothing for so long that she had no template for being something, and yet she was finding her way there anyway. Not because I was pulling her, but because she was pulling herself.

The drive to Lena Aaira's town the next morning was quiet. Emily sat beside me in the passenger seat and watched the trees pass and did not speak for the first hour. I let her think. When she finally did speak, it was not what I expected.

"What is your wolf's name?" she asked.

The question surprised me enough that I glanced over at her. "Caius."

She nodded slowly. "Does he talk to you?"

"Constantly," I said. "More than I would like, some days."

That almost got a smile. Almost.

"I have been feeling something," she said quietly. "Inside for days now. Like pressure. Or a voice that is almost a voice but not quite." She looked at her hands in her lap. "Is that what it is supposed to feel like when a bound wolf starts to wake up?"

I had not told her yet that Yoana believed the binding was dissolving on its own. I had been waiting for the right moment, not wanting to give her hope before we understood what it meant.

But she had already felt it herself. She already knew.

"Yes," I said. "That is exactly what it feels like."

She was quiet for a moment. Then, "She is angry."

"Your wolf?"

"Yes." Emily looked out the window. "She is so angry."

We pulled into a small, quiet town fifteen minutes later and found the address Adam had given us at the end of a narrow street lined with old trees.

The front door opened before we had even reached the path.

A woman stood in the doorway. Silver haired, older than her years in the way that people who have carried a secret too long always look. Her eyes went straight to Emily and stayed there, and whatever she saw made her kept both hands over her mouth.

"You look just like her," the woman breathed. "You look exactly like your mother."

Emily stopped walking.

"You were there," Emily said. "You pulled me out of the fire."

The town was small and old and had the specific settled quality of a place that has not changed much in decades and is not particularly interested in changing. Stone buildings, narrow streets, a market square with a covered section that smelled of bread and something warm and green.

Lena's house was at the end of a residential lane behind the market square. She had chosen well close to ordinary life, to movement and commerce and the unknown comfort of a busy small town, but set slightly apart. Visible enough not to seem like hiding, private enough to actually hide.

The door opened and the silver haired woman stood in it and looked at Emily and I watched Emily's face do something I had not seen it do before. Not grief exactly, not joy. Something that lived in the space between recognition and disbelief. The look of someone encountering something they had not known they were missing and finding that the missing was suddenly legible.

Lena had said: you look just like her. And Emily had said: you pulled me out of the fire.

Both true, no performance in either of them.

Inside, the house was warm, carrying the scent of old books and something herbal. Lena made tea with the movements of long habit and set three cups on a small wooden table and sat. She folded her hands the way people did when they were about to say something that had been composed and recomposed over many years.

I watched Emily on the other side of the table and watched Caius watch her through me. He had been quieter than usual on the drive. Processing. He understood before I had fully consciously admitted it that this woman was going to say things that would change the shape of what Emily understood about herself, and he was treating that with the specific reverence it deserved.

There were things I could not give Emily. The sixteen years, the parents she had not known, the wolf she had not had, the sense of her own worth that had been systematically removed before she was old enough to have fully developed it. I could not give those things back and I was not going to pretend otherwise, even to myself.

What I could give her was the truth, when it came. I could ensure she was never again in a room where the truth about herself was kept from her. I could make sure that anyone who had been part of keeping it — Lena included, who had kept it by distance rather than intention gave it up completely and finally.

Lena began to speak.

I listened. I watched Emily listen, and I held the table between us steady in the only way ava

ilable to me by staying completely, unwaveringly present for everything that was about to land.