Chapter 4

Everything after that happened at once.

Alpha Cameron barked orders. Chairs scraped back. Someone ran for the guards. Luna Lea cursed Marian Lancaster so vividly that under any other circumstance, I might have laughed. But all I could hear was the pounding of my own heart and Neeka’s furious breathing inside my head.

“It’s her,” Neeka snarled. “I know her scent now. Smoke can’t hide it. Fear can’t hide it. That woman touched us that night.”

My stomach turned so violently I had to brace a hand against the desk. For two years I had lived beside my own ruin without a name to give it. Pain had a hundred shapes—cold, hunger, humiliation, darkness—but now it had one face. Marian Lancaster. Beth’s mother. The woman who had fed me scraps, who had spoken to me in honeyed lies, who had tucked blankets around my shoulders in front of witnesses and then taken them away when no one watched. The woman who had blinded me.

“Lock Beth down,” Ty said, already moving. His voice carried the kind of command that expected obedience and received it. “No one lets her out of their sight.”

“You can’t do this!” Beth cried as guards closed in. The sharp clatter of bracelets and the scrape of heels told me she was struggling. “I didn’t know she’d run. I didn’t know she’d burn the house. I didn’t know—” She broke off too late.

“Interesting choice of words,” Alpha Cameron said, his anger so controlled it sounded far worse than shouting. “You didn’t know she’d run. That suggests you knew she had something to run from.”

A hand closed around mine—warm, calloused, steady. Ty. The contact sent a jolt through me so sharp it nearly stopped me where I stood. “You’re coming with me,” he said, quieter now, for me alone. “If Neeka can track Marian, I need you there.”

I stared toward the sound of his voice even though staring had long ago become habit instead of sight. “You need me there?” I asked, my throat tight. “Or you just don’t want to let me out of your reach now that you’ve found your mate?”

His fingers tightened once around mine, not enough to hurt, just enough to tell me he had heard every jagged edge in the question. “Both,” he said. No hesitation. No apology. “And if that makes you angry, you can hate me after we catch her.”

I should have argued. I should have torn my hand free and demanded answers first, demanded years back, demanded some protection for the soft and furious part of me that still remembered loving him before loving him had teeth. But Neeka was already straining toward the door, every instinct fixed on the hunt. I swallowed hard. “Fine,” I said. “But if you order me around, I’ll bite you myself.”

For the first time since he entered the room, Ty made a sound dangerously close to a laugh. “There’s the Sila I remember.”

Then we were moving. Ty led me through the pack house at a pace just short of a run, one hand still gripping mine, the other no doubt free for whatever weapon Alpha trainees learned to keep hidden. The moment we burst outside, heat slammed into my face. Smoke choked the air. Wolves shouted over one another across the courtyard. Somewhere ahead, timber cracked and fell with a roar that made the ground shudder beneath my feet.

Blindness had taught me to read the world differently. Fire had its own language—the hiss of wet wood, the hungry collapse of beams, the frantic footsteps that told me who was useful and who was only watching. Beneath all of it, threading through smoke and fear and ash, Neeka followed a single scent trail with relentless certainty.

“She ran east,” Neeka said. “Toward the old boundary trail. Fast. Panicked. But not fast enough.”

Ty did not question me when I turned without hesitation. He simply matched my pace as we left the chaos of the courtyard behind and cut through the trees. Branches whipped at my sleeves. Damp earth shifted under my boots. Every few steps Ty tightened his hold or shifted his body just enough to steer me around a root, a fallen trunk, a drop in the land. The ease of it made my chest ache. Once, long before blood and betrayal, moving together had felt like this—natural as breathing.

“You still lean left when you’re angry,” he said suddenly.

Even now, in the middle of smoke and pursuit and pounding fear, the words hit me somewhere painfully soft. “And you still pick the worst possible moments to sound familiar,” I muttered.

He drew breath, maybe to answer, maybe to apologise, but Neeka cut across the moment with a violent surge of warning.

“Blood,” Neeka snapped. “Fresh. On the air. And silver.”

Ty halted so abruptly I nearly collided with him. Then he crouched, still keeping one hand anchored to my wrist. I heard leaves shift, metal strike lightly against his palm, and the sharp inhale he took a second later.

“A blade,” he said grimly. “Silver. Small enough to hide in a sleeve.”

The forest tilted under me. Rain. Mud. A hand at my throat. Another at my face. Burning—goddess, the burning. I heard myself make a sound I did not mean to let out. Not a scream. Worse. A broken, helpless breath torn from somewhere deep and buried.

Ty was in front of me instantly. His hands hovered at my arms for a fraction of a second before settling, careful and controlled, as if he feared I might break beneath too much force. “Sila,” he said, low and urgent, “talk to me.”

“Silver,” I whispered. My teeth wanted to chatter, though the air was hot with lingering smoke. “She used silver. I remember the smell now. And rain. And someone saying I should have died before I ever became a problem.”

The silence that followed was worse than any gasp. Ty’s hands tightened once, just once, and in that tiny betrayal of control I heard the violence of his guilt. “I should have been there,” he said, the words so raw they barely sounded like him.

“You weren’t,” I said. It came out sharper than I intended, because pain always sharpened truth. Then I swallowed. “But you’re here now. So, help me end this.”

For a heartbeat neither of us moved. Then Ty exhaled, rough and deliberate, and the moment closed. “Stay with me,” he said. We ran again.

The trail narrowed as it climbed. I recognised the old boundary path by the change in the ground beneath my boots—less leaf mould, more exposed stone, the wind moving differently through the higher trees. Marian knew where she was going. Beyond this ridge lay disputed land and, farther still, rogue territory. If she crossed the border, taking her back would get far more complicated.

“Closer,” Neeka said, every syllable a hunt. “She’s slowing. She’s hurt.”

A branch snapped somewhere ahead. Then came ragged breathing, the scrape of someone stumbling against bark, and at last a woman’s voice—breathless, vicious, and horribly familiar. “You should have stayed broken,” Marian hissed into the trees.

I stopped dead. Memory did the rest. The same voice, smeared with rain and cruelty, leaning over me in the dark. The same voice from my nightmares. The same voice that had whispered while I bled. Some girls are born to be broken.

Ty shifted instantly, placing himself half in front of me. “Marian,” he said, every letter edged like a blade. “Run again and I’ll drag you back by the throat.”

She laughed, and the sound was ragged with pain and smoke. “Still dramatic, little Alpha. Has no one told you? You’re already too late. She remembers enough now.”

My pulse thundered. “Why?” I called into the dark. “What did I ever do to you?”

Leaves rustled. I could almost feel her smile. “You were never the problem, child,” Marian said softly. “What you heard that night was.”

Every muscle in Ty’s body went taut beside me. Neeka lunged against the inside of my mind so hard it hurt. I opened my mouth to ask what Marian meant, but she spoke again first, her voice turning almost triumphant.

“The night I blinded you,” Marian said, “you weren’t alone.” She let the silence sharpen. “You heard Ty kill your father.”