Chapter Sixteen: What Selena Wanted

Back at Black River, Selena had not stopped thinking about the girl in Millbrook since the day Adrian rode south.

She told herself, at first, that it did not matter. Adrian had rejected the girl in front of an entire pack. A rejection could not simply be undone because an Alpha felt a flicker of guilt a year later. She had spent that year making herself useful to him, learning the names of his warriors, sitting beside him during council meetings, slowly building the shape of a Luna in everyone's mind until it became easier for the pack to imagine her standing beside him than to imagine anyone else.

Then he had ridden south, alone, and come back different. Quieter. His eyes drifting toward the window more often than they used to. A man distracted by something he would not name.

Selena did not need him to name it. She already knew.

---

She found Corwin in the training yard one grey morning, overseeing a group of young wolves sparring in the mud, and waited until he had sent them off before she approached him.

"You went with him to Millbrook," she said, without any greeting. "Tell me what you saw."

Corwin studied her a moment before answering, the way he studied most things, carefully and without hurry. "I did not go with him. He rode alone."

"Then tell me what he told you, when he returned."

"That is between the Alpha and myself."

Selena's smile did not waver, though something colder moved behind her eyes. "Corwin. We have known each other a long time. You know as well as I do that a pack cannot afford an Alpha distracted by old mistakes while Hale Holdings grows bolder along our borders every month. If something in Millbrook threatens that focus, I would think you, of all people, would want it handled quietly, before it becomes a larger problem."

"Handled how?"

"I have not decided yet." She turned to leave, then paused, glancing back at him over her shoulder. "But I would start by learning everything there is to know about the girl who owns that shop. Where she truly came from. What she is hiding."

Corwin did not answer, but he did not argue either, and Selena took his silence as the small victory it was.

---

She sent a man south within the week, a quiet, capable wolf named Ollie who had worked for her discreetly before, asking questions that never seemed to trace back to her directly. She told him only to watch, to listen, and to bring back anything useful about the shop owner called Elena Rose.

Ollie returned eleven days later with more than Selena had expected.

"She is building something real down there," he reported, standing in the private study Selena kept away from the main pack house, where conversations like this one could happen without curious ears nearby. "A shop. Successful, from what the townsfolk say. She has protection now too. Two of Black River's own warriors, stationed nearby."

"Sent by Adrian."

"That is the word in town, yes."

Selena's jaw tightened, though she kept her expression carefully smooth. "What else?"

"There is a man. A property dealer named Daniel Reyes. He has been close to her since she arrived, closer still in recent months. The whole town assumes they will marry eventually, though nothing has been made official."

That, at least, was useful information, something Selena filed away carefully for later. A rival for Adrian's attention was a complication, but it was also, potentially, a tool.

"And the fire?" she asked. "The one that burned the shop beside hers?"

"Hale Holdings. Everyone in Millbrook believes it, though nobody can prove it outright." Ollie hesitated, choosing his next words with visible care. "There is also talk, quiet talk, about old bloodlines. About why Hale Holdings wants that particular stretch of land so badly. Something about the sealed passes to the north."

Selena went very still.

She had heard those old stories too, growing up, whispered half-jokingly among pack elders who claimed to remember a time before the wars sealed those passes shut. Stories about a bloodline hidden so completely that even their own packmates could not sense them, protected by old magic that predated anything modern packs understood.

She had never once connected those old stories to a curse closer to home, until now.

"Thank you, Ollie," she said quietly, her mind already moving ahead of the conversation. "You have done well. Say nothing of this to anyone else."

Alone that evening, Selena poured herself a glass of wine she did not drink and sat by her window, looking out over the pack lands that she had spent a year convincing herself would eventually be hers to rule beside Adrian.

She thought of Adrian's curse, the one only a handful of people in the pack knew the full truth of, the one that made his wolf grow more unstable with each passing season, a weight he carried quietly and refused to discuss, even with her. She had always assumed it was simply an old family affliction, inherited and inevitable, something a strong enough Luna might help him manage through sheer force of will and loyalty.

But if the old bloodline stories were true. If Elena Rose truly carried something ancient and powerful enough to explain why no wolf had ever been able to sense her. Then perhaps Adrian's curse and Elena's strange silence were not two separate mysteries at all.

Perhaps they were the same thread, pulled from two different ends.

She did not yet know what that meant, or how she might use it. But Selena had not spent a year building herself into the pack's expected Luna only to watch a shopkeeper from nowhere undo all of it with a bond nobody but Adrian's own wolf seemed able to feel.

She set down her untouched wine and reached for a sheet of paper, beginning a letter of her own, one she had no intention of sending through the usual pack riders, addressed to a contact she had cultivated carefully over the past year for exactly this kind of quiet, careful work.

I believe we share an interest in a shop in Millbrook, she wrote. I would like to discuss what you know about its owner, and what you intend to do about her.

She did not sign it with her own name. She signed it only with the small crescent mark she used for matters she preferred to keep entirely her own, sealed the letter, and called for a rider who did not ask questions about where he was sent, or why.

Somewhere south, in a shop full of dried flowers and hard-won independence, Elena Rose had no idea that a new and far more dangerous thread had just begun weaving itself quietly into the story of her life.