Cassia| Maybe Later

"Before the council session," he says quietly. "The bond changed. The way it felt heavier, doubled, like something new had been added to it that hadn't been there before." He stops. Starts again. "I knew what it meant. I'd felt it described in old records. The bond-weight of a bloodline beginning."

"So you knew."

"I knew there was a child." His jaw tightens. "I didn't let myself go further than that. Didn't let myself — " He stops again. A muscle works in his throat. "If I'd let myself think about it fully. About who they'd be. What they'd look like." He looks away. "I wouldn't have been able to do what needed to be done."

The silence between us has a different quality now. Not the silence of things unsaid, the silence of things finally, irrevocably said.

"And now?" My voice comes out quieter than I intend. "Five years later. They're standing in your archive. Leo has your jaw and your temper and your eyes." I watch his face. "And you still haven't said it."

He looks at me then. Really looks, stripped of the Alpha mask, stripped of the stone, down to the raw thing underneath that he has been managing since the gate.

"I'm waiting," he says, very low, "for you to say it first."

The air goes out of the room.

Because that, that right there, is the most honest thing he's said since I walked back through his gate. He knows. He has known since the moment he saw Leo standing at my side with those ice blue eyes, since the moment his wolf was certain in a way that had nothing to do with logic.

He's been waiting for me to confirm it because confirmation makes it real. Makes it something that has to be dealt with. Something that cracks every story he's told himself about why he did what he did, that he was protecting me, that the rejection was sacrifice, that he had reasons good enough to justify five years of my children growing up without a father and without a pack.

If they're his, when they're his, all of that gets so much heavier.

"And you didn't tell me," I say. Steadier now, back on solid ground.

"I couldn't. If you'd known what they were planning, you wouldn't have run. You would have fought." His eyes come back to mine. "You would have lost."

"What were they planning?" My voice stays level through sheer force. "Exactly. What did the council say they would do?"

A muscle works in his jaw.

"Kade."

"There were prophecies," he says. "Old ones. About a bloodline that carries both sides of the gift, the Alpha command and something older. Something the council calls the Unseen." He pauses. "When the elders started talking about your bloodline, about what a child of ours might carry, they didn't see it as a blessing."

The bird frozen in mid-air. Leo forcing the loud boy to lose his nerve.

My children, who don't act like pups.

"They saw it as a threat," I say.

"They saw it as something that needed to be controlled. Or ended." He says the last word carefully, like it has edges. "The rejection put you outside their jurisdiction. Outside pack law. They couldn't touch you once you were exile."

"But they could still touch the children." The realisation settles cold in my chest. "If anyone knew they existed."

"Yes."

"So Sasha—" I stop. Recalibrate. "Sasha knows about the prophecy."

Something crosses his face. Guilt, maybe. Or something older than guilt.

"She was the Elder's chosen candidate," he says slowly. "They told her things. Built her up as the future Luna, fed her information as a show of trust. And she was, she is, a lot of things. But she doesn't forget. And she doesn't forgive."

"What did she see, Kade." Not a question. "You said she saw something. What was it?"

He looks away.

"What did she see?"

The silence between us stretches to breaking point.

"The night of the rejection," he says finally, his voice stripped of everything but the bare facts of it. "After I sent you away. After the pack dispersed." A pause. "She followed me."

"And?"

"And she saw me go to the council chambers." His jaw tightens. "She saw what I did after."

"Which was?"

He looks at me then. Really looks, the kind of look that strips everything back to the thing underneath, the raw complicated thing that has been sitting between us since the gate.

"I destroyed the prophecy records," he says quietly. "Every copy I could find. Every scroll. Every elder's note. I burned them in the council chamber's grate and I told the three elders present that if they ever spoke the words again in my territory I would remove them from the council and their bloodlines from the pack rolls."

My chest rises and falls.

"You protected them," I say. "Even then."

"I tried to." Something in his expression breaks open slightly, just at the edges, just enough to see what's underneath. "But Sasha watched through the door crack. And Sasha remembers everything."

"So she has leverage." I say it flat. Clinical. The way I need to say it to keep the rest of me from reacting. "Over you. Over the children."

"If she chooses to use it."

"And what's stopping her?"

He holds my gaze. "Right now? I am. But if she decides I'm no longer worth the patience—"

He doesn't finish.

He doesn't need to.

I turn away from him and walk back to where Leo and Nova sit at the old study table. Leo has given up on the history book and is watching us with quiet, too-old eyes across the length of the room. Nova is absorbed in a page of illustrations, one finger tracing the outline of a wolf mid-shift, completely unbothered.

My children, who freeze birds and unnerve grown men without lifting a hand.

My children, who a council of elders decided needed to be ended before they drew their first breath.

I look at them for a long moment. At Leo's jaw, Kade's jaw, and Nova's golden eyes, Kade’s eyes, and the way they exist in the world with a power they don't yet understand and a patience that shouldn't belong to anyone so small.

Then I turn back to Kade, who is watching me from the shadows of the stacks with an expression I don't have a name for yet.

"She said you don't want me to find out," I say quietly. "That you know something you won't tell me." I hold his gaze. "Is there more?"

The pause before he answers lasts exactly one second too long.

"There are things," he says carefully, "that are better understood slowly."

"That's not an answer."

"No," he agrees. "It isn't."

I look at him for a long moment. At the man who destroyed evidence to protect children he wasn't even sure existed. At the man who rejected me in front of a full pack assembly and apparently spent three hours fighting the council before he did it.

At the man I have been so certain about for five years.

The foundation I built everything on shifts, barely, just slightly, just enough to feel.

"You should have told me," I say.

"I know."

"You should have trusted me to run if you'd asked me to."

"I know." His voice is low. "I was afraid you wouldn't."

"I had children to protect." The words come out raw despite me. "I would have done anything."

"So would I," he says. "That's the thing, Cassia. So would I."

The archive is very quiet.

Leo closes his book.

"Mama," he says, from across the room, with the particular precision of a child who has heard more than you wanted him to. "Are we in danger?"

I cross to him. Sit beside him. Put my arm around his shoulders and feel him lean into it, just slightly, just the smallest give, the closest he ever gets to asking for comfort.

"Not right now," I tell him.

He considers this. "But maybe later?"

I pull him in. Press my mouth to the top of his head. Feel Nova shuffle closer on his other side without being asked, the three of us making the small closed world we've always made when the larger one gets too close.

"Maybe later," I say. "But I'm going to make sure we're ready."

Across the room, Kade watches us.

And says nothing.

Because there is nothing to say, nothing that would reach across the distance between what he did and what I've had to be in the years since, nothing that would land cleanly in the space between his reasons and my scars.

But when I finally look up and meet his eyes, I see it.

The thing underneath the Alpha mask, underneath the jaw and the stone and the six years of whatever story he's been telling himself.

He would burn the world down for those children.

And somewhere behind the wolf that went certain at the gate, behind the man who burned prophecy records for children he hadn't yet met, he already knows exactly why.

He's waiting for me to say it.

And I'm not ready.

Not yet.

Not until I know everything he's still not telling me.