Chapter 41

Odalys knew where to start.

"The Sorrell family kept a cabin," she said, spreading an old, hand-drawn map across Kade's study table. "Deep in the hills, two days' travel from here. I visited once, as a girl, before the scattering. If any of them survived that night, that cabin's the most likely place they'd have gone."

"Two days is a long time to leave Rowan again," Ivy said, though she was already reaching for her coat.

"I'll go with Odalys," Kade said. "You should stay, this time. Rowan needs one of us close, and Rhys still has concerns about lingering Thorne loyalists testing our security while attention's split."

Ivy hesitated, torn, then nodded slowly. "Bring back whatever you find. All of it, even the parts that are hard to hear."

"Especially those," Kade agreed.

Ivy stayed home for three days that felt longer than any of the three-day countdowns she'd survived over the past year, pacing between the nursery and Rhys's security updates, waiting for word.

It came on the evening of the third day — not a phone call, but Kade and Odalys walking through the front door themselves, travel-worn, and not alone.

An older woman stood between them, silver hair in a long braid, sharp eyes that reminded Ivy instantly of Odalys despite no obvious family resemblance at all. She looked at Ivy with open, unguarded curiosity, the kind of look that came from someone who hadn't seen many new faces in a very long time.

"This is Wren Sorrell," Kade said quietly. "She's been living at that cabin for forty-one years. Alone, since the raid."

Ivy's chest tightened. "You survived. All this time."

"I ran," Wren said, voice rough from disuse. "Into the deep woods, the night they came. I heard the screaming. I didn't look back to see who made it and who didn't. I've spent forty-one years assuming I was the last one, too afraid to come out and find out for certain."

"You're not the last," Odalys said gently. "There are more of us now than there have been in sixty years. Ashgrove is being rebuilt, Wren. Openly, with recognition, with a seat on the Voss council itself."

Wren's composure cracked for the first time since she'd walked through the door, something raw and disbelieving moving across her weathered face. "Rebuilt. After everything."

"After everything," Kade confirmed. "I'm sorry it took my family forty-one years to even start trying to make that true."

Wren studied him a long moment, something complicated behind her sharp eyes — not forgiveness, not yet, but something Ivy recognized as the beginning of a willingness to consider it.

"Your grandfather wasn't working alone," Wren said finally, and the room went very still. "I heard them talking, the night of the raid, before I ran. Your grandfather gave the order. But it wasn't his idea. There was another voice directing things — cold, precise, telling your grandfather exactly which households to target and in what order. I never saw a face. I only remember the voice."

"Do you remember anything else about it," Kade asked, careful, urgent. "Anything at all."

"Only one thing." Wren's eyes met Ivy's directly. "Your grandfather called him 'the Warden.' Like it was a title, not a name. I always assumed it meant nothing, some old-fashioned pack rank that died out with that generation."

Odalys went very still, something sharp and alarmed crossing her ancient face.

"Warden isn't an old pack rank," she said slowly. "It's older than pack law itself. It's a title from before the packs as we know them existed — someone tasked with enforcing bloodline purity across territories, answerable to no single alpha, no single council." She looked at Kade, something grim settling behind her eyes. "If that title still exists, still has someone attached to it after all these years, then your grandfather wasn't the architect of what happened to Ashgrove, Kade. He was a tool. Someone else has been shaping pack history from the shadows for a great deal longer than forty-one years."

The room went utterly silent, Ivy's blood running cold at the thought of an unseen hand steering all of this from somewhere far beyond one grandfather's single, terrible order.

"Then we find out who the Warden is," Kade said finally, voice hard with a resolve Ivy had heard from him only twice before — once before the challenge fight, and once in a garden the night Thorne's people had come for her. "Whoever they are, whatever they've been doing all these years, this ends with us. I won't hand Rowan a legacy with a shadow still hiding inside it."