Chapter Ten: A Name Carried on the Wind

Adrian Black had not thought about the girl from Silver Moon Pack in months. Or that is what he told himself, most days, when her face rose unbidden in his mind during some quiet hour he could not account for.

He had told himself many things since that night in the great hall. That he had done what an Alpha must do, protecting his pack from an uncertain bond. That the strange, hollow feeling that had settled into his chest afterward was simply the ordinary weight of leadership, nothing more. That the way his wolf had gone restless and sharp-tempered in the weeks since, snapping at pack members who had done nothing to deserve it, had nothing to do with a rejection he had chosen freely and would choose again.

He believed none of it, not fully, but a man can carry an unconvincing lie a very long way if he is stubborn enough, and Adrian Black had always been stubborn.

The rumor reached him through Corwin, his beta, a broad, steady man who had served the Black River Pack since before Adrian was born and had a talent for hearing things long before they became common knowledge.

"There is talk in the southern towns," Corwin said, standing in the doorway of Adrian's study one evening in late summer. "About a shop that will not sell."

Adrian did not look up from the papers on his desk, half his attention on pack finances that had grown steadily worse since a rival territory began undercutting Black River's trade routes. "I do not see how that concerns me."

"The buyer is Hale Holdings."

That got his attention. Adrian set down his pen slowly. "The same Hale Holdings that has been buying land along our southern border for the better part of a year?"

"The very same." Corwin stepped further into the room. "A shop in a town called Millbrook. Small place, run by a young woman alone. Hale's people made her an offer, she refused it, and shortly after, the shop beside hers burned to the ground under circumstances nobody in that town believes were accidental."

Adrian frowned. Hale Holdings had been a quiet, persistent thorn in Black River's side for months, buying up land at their borders in a pattern nobody had yet managed to explain, always through shell companies, always just far enough from pack business to make direct confrontation difficult.

"Why does a single shop matter to them?"

"That is the question, is it not?" Corwin folded his arms. "There is something else. The girl's name is Elena. Elena Rose."

The name landed in the quiet room like a stone dropped into still water.

Adrian went very still.

"That is a common enough name," he said, though something in his chest had already begun to twist tight in a way he recognized and did not want to.

"Perhaps," Corwin said carefully. "But the description matches. Brown hair. Quiet. Came to Millbrook alone about a year ago with almost nothing, and built a shop from an abandoned building on Pine Street. The dates line up, Adrian. It has been almost exactly a year since the ceremony at Silver Moon."

Adrian said nothing for a long moment. He was aware, distantly, of his own heartbeat, faster than it should have been for a man simply sitting at his desk.

"You think it is her," he said finally.

"I think it might be. I think you should know, either way, before Hale Holdings decides to try again."

Adrian did not sleep that night.

He told himself it was concern for pack business, for the growing puzzle of Hale Holdings and whatever quiet game they were playing at his borders. He told himself, lying awake and staring at the ceiling of a room that had felt too large and too empty for a year now, that it had nothing to do with a girl he had rejected in front of his entire pack and had not allowed himself to think about since.

He was not a man who lied to himself easily, as a rule. He found, that night, that he was not very good at it.

He remembered the ceremony more clearly than he wanted to. The moment he had stood in front of her and felt nothing where every instinct told him he should have felt everything. The flicker of surprise on her face when he asked her name. The steady, quiet way she had said I am here, as though she understood already that he was failing to sense something that was standing directly in front of him.

He remembered, too, the way she had looked at him after he rejected her. Not broken, the way he had half expected, half feared. Straight-backed. Steady-eyed. You will regret this, she had said, and then she had walked out of that hall without once looking back, and he had stood there in front of his entire pack feeling something crack open inside his chest that he had not been able to name since.

He had told himself it was guilt. Only guilt.

Lying awake now, with Corwin's information turning over and over in his mind, he was no longer certain that was the whole truth.

He rode south three days later, alone, telling Corwin only that he intended to look into Hale Holdings' interest in the southern towns himself. It was not entirely a lie. Black River's borders were genuinely at risk from whatever Hale was building, quietly, one small property at a time.

But as he rode, and Millbrook grew closer with every mile, Adrian found himself thinking less about shell companies and land deals, and more about a pair of steady brown eyes that had looked at him across a burning bond and had not once begged him to change his mind.

He told himself he was going to protect pack interests.

He was not entirely sure, by the time the rooftops of Millbrook came into view against the evening sky, that he believed that either.