Cassia | Not Normal

The threat won't leave my head.

Sasha's words loop over and over, digging in like barbs buried too deep to pull clean:

You think you're the only one who knows what happened after you ran?

I've seen things.

I replay her face when she said it. The stillness behind her eyes. The absence of performance. That's what keeps snagging, Sasha without the performance is a different creature entirely, and that creature wasn't bluffing.

If she's seen something that has to do with my children, my blood, I need to know what. And I need to know before she decides to use it.

I'm crossing the courtyard toward the archive wing when it happens.

Nova stops walking, in the middle of the path, one hand still loosely in mine, head tilted back, eyes fixed on something above us. I follow her gaze and find a bird, brown and utterly ordinary suspended in mid-air above the oak tree at the courtyard's edge.

Frozen with wings spread, beak open, caught between one wingbeat and the next like something pressed pause on it.

Nova's eyes are very still. The particular blankness she gets when she isn't entirely here, when something in her has reached outward and taken hold of something she shouldn't be able to touch.

"Nova." I say it low and calm. The way I've learned to say it.

She blinks.

The bird drops six inches, catches itself, and arrows off into the trees with a panicked flurry of wings, gone before anyone else in the courtyard has fully registered what they saw.

I scan the space around us fast. Three pack members near the far gate, two young soldiers and an Omega woman with a basket of washing. All three are staring at the oak tree with expressions somewhere between confused and unsettled. The kind of look that means they saw something but aren't sure yet what story to put around it.

"I was just looking at it," Nova says quietly, peering up at me. "I wasn't going to hurt it."

"I know, baby." I squeeze her hand and start walking again, brisk, purposeful, like a woman with somewhere to be who has no idea what they're talking about if anyone asks. "We've talked about this."

"It looked tired."

"Nova."

"I only stopped it for a second."

"I know." I steer her left, toward the archive building, away from the watching eyes. "We keep it inside, remember? What we can do stays inside."

She nods, solemn and unbothered in the way only she can be, the weight of what she just did hasn't fully landed on her because it feels as natural as breathing. That's what keeps me awake at night. Not that she does these things. That she doesn't understand why she can't.

Leo is waiting by the archive door where I left him, back against the stone wall, arms crossed, watching a group of pack children play in the grass twenty feet away. Watching them the way he always watches other children, from a distance, assessing, never joining.

One of the boys, older than him by a few years, heavy-set and loud, has clearly said something. I can tell by the way the group has shifted, that subtle pack-child reorganisation around a centre of cruelty that children are so fluent in. They've arranged themselves behind the loud boy, and they're staring at Leo with the particular boldness of numbers.

I'm still ten feet away when I hear it.

"Your mum's a rogue." The loud boy again, chin jutting. "That means you're nothing. You don't have a rank. You don't even have a pack, you're just strays."

The other children laugh. It's the performance laugh, the one that means they aren't sure it's funny but they're afraid of what happens if they don't join in.

Leo doesn't move. Doesn't shift his weight, doesn't unclench his arms, doesn't do anything at all.

But something happens to the air around him.

It's subtle enough that I almost miss it, a drop in pressure, a particular quality of stillness that has no business being in a six-year-old boy. The grass at his feet stirs without wind. The loud boy takes one step forward and then stops, and I watch the colour drain from his face in real time, and I watch him not understand why he's suddenly afraid of a child smaller than him who hasn't moved or spoken or done anything at all.

The group edges back. Not running, their pride won't let them run. But back.

Leo tilts his head, Kade's gesture, exact, and says nothing.

The loud boy turns and walks away fast, and the others follow, and not one of them looks back.

Leo uncrosses his arms when he sees me coming. His expression is perfectly neutral. "Took you long enough."

"What happened?"

"Nothing."

"Leo."

He meets my eyes. "I didn't touch him."

"I know you didn't touch him."

A pause. "I didn't shift either."

"I know." I crouch to his level, one hand on his shoulder, speaking low and even. "What did you do?"

He considers this with the seriousness of someone twice his age. "I just looked at him," he says finally. "Like he was small."

I hold his gaze for a long moment before standing up.

"Inside," I say. "Both of you."

The archive wing is cool and still, dust motes drifting through the narrow window light. I settle Leo and Nova at one of the old study tables with a stack of illustrated pack history volumes, the kind with pictures, the kind that will hold them for an hour without complaint, and I move to the back stacks.

I shouldn't be in here. I don't care.

The catalog system on the wall is old enough to still be physical, index cards in slotted wood, handwritten labels, decades of pack record cross-referenced by name and bloodline and council decree. I used to shelve scrolls here once. Study pack law. Learn which bloodlines held favour, which ones were born cursed.

I know how this system works.

I scan fast, fingers moving through the cards, looking for anything filed under the council session that ended with my exile. The date. The council members present. The decree itself.

And underneath it, whatever came after.

"Cassia."

His voice behind me slides over my skin like a warning.

I don't turn. "You following me now?"

"You shouldn't be in here." Kade's footsteps stop a few feet behind me. His presence fills the narrow aisle the way it always fills spaces, completely, immediately, leaving no room for anything else.

"Sasha came to find me this morning." I keep scanning the cards.

Silence. Then his footsteps stop entirely.

"She said she knows something. That after I left, something happened that I don't know about." I pull a card, check the date, slide it back. "She said you know. That you don't want me to find out."

Nothing from him. I turn.

His jaw is tight. Arms crossed over that massive chest. The Alpha mask is up, every line of his face arranged into careful neutrality but just barely. Underneath it something is working hard, straining against the surface.

"She's trying to manipulate you," he says.

"She's succeeding." I take a step toward him. "She said it has to do with what happened after I ran. She said she saw something." Another step. "You're going to tell me what she saw."

"Cassia—"

"Or I'm going to find it in here." I gesture at the stacks around us. "Those are the options. Choose."

He exhales. Long and slow, the breath of a man managing something that wants very badly to get out.

"I did what I had to do," he says finally. "To keep you alive. If I hadn't rejected you the way I did, publicly, completely, on record…"

"The council would have killed me." My voice is flat. "I know. I figured that out somewhere around year two."

"No." His voice drops to something quieter. "They would have killed all three of you."

The archive goes very still.

I stare at him.

"What?" The word barely makes it out.

He closes his mouth. Looks away because he's already said more than he meant to.

"You knew," I say. "About the twins."

Something moves across his face. Not surprise or denial.

Recognition. The look of a man who has been carrying a word unsaid for a very long time and has just heard someone else say it first.