Chapter 5

The world inside me split cleanly in two.

For one terrible heartbeat, I heard nothing but the roar of blood in my ears. The forest disappeared. The smoke disappeared. Even Ty’s hand on mine disappeared beneath the violent rush of memory and grief and disbelief. My father. Ty. Kill. The words did not fit together. They struck against each other in my mind like flint, throwing sparks into places already drenched in old pain.

My knees nearly gave way. Ty’s grip tightened, catching me before the ground could. That should have steadied me. Instead, it broke something open. The same hands that had once tucked flowers into my braid, that had guided me across creek stones, that had fastened my necklace with trembling fingers, were now wrapped around the possibility of the one wound I had never survived. I tore my hand from his as the contact burned.

Marian heard it—the tiny sound of separation, the fracture she had wanted—and laughed softly through the trees. “There it is,” she crooned. “Truth always sounds like that when love finally breaks.”

“Don’t listen to her,” Ty said, and the rawness in his voice hit me harder than a shout. He was no longer the controlled, lethal Alpha trainee from moments before. This was the Ty I had once known, buried under all that power—ragged, desperate, and one breath away from shattering. “Sila, look at me.”

A laugh clawed its way out of me, jagged and wrong. “Look at you?” I whispered. “That’s cruel even for you.” The silence that followed was brutal. Then, lower, with all the damage I could no longer hold back: “Did you kill him?”

He did not answer fast enough.

That single, broken pause hollowed me out more efficiently than any blade. If he had denied it at once, maybe I could have clung to that. If he had shouted, lied, cursed Marian and the moon above us, maybe I could have pretended certainty still existed. But Ty’s silence cracked through me with the force of confession. My father’s laugh flashed through my head—deep, rare, more felt than heard. So did his hands, rough from training, lifting me to sit on the fence rails when I was little. Then came the ugly truth beneath it all: I could barely remember his face anymore, but I had never stopped mourning him.

“Something is wrong,” Neeka snarled, torn between fury and instinct. “He smells like grief, not guilt. But if he hurts you, I will still remove his throat.”

“Your father died because of me,” Ty said at last, each word dragged up from somewhere brutal. “But not the way she wants you to believe.”

Marian clucked her tongue. “Such careful phrasing. He always was quick.” Leaves rustled as she shifted farther back, keeping just enough distance to stay hidden. “Go on, Ty. Tell her how noble it all was. Tell her how much blood was on your hands when she was screaming for her father.”

“No more fragments.” My voice shook, and I hated that it did. “No more half-truths. No one speaks around me anymore. Ty, if you ever meant a single thing you promised, tell me what happened that night.”

For a moment, the only sounds were Marian’s ragged breathing, the hiss of faraway fire, and the wind moving hard through the pines. Then Ty spoke.

“I came back to see you the night before I left for training,” he said. “Not at the cedar tree. After. I had this feeling I couldn’t shake, like something in the pack had shifted wrong. I saw your father heading into the forest with Marian and two rogues. He was arguing with them. Loudly. I followed.”

My breath snagged. Rogues. My father had always hated rogues with a ferocity that bordered on obsession. He called them disease in wolfskin. The idea of him meeting them in secret twisted everything I thought I knew.

“You were there too,” Ty said, and now there was pain threaded through every syllable. “You’d followed your father. I don’t think he knew. I didn’t either, not until I heard you step on a branch. Everything happened at once after that.”

The memory hit in jagged flashes, sharper now that someone was forcing shape into it. Rain is soaking through my dress. Voices raised in fury. Marian spitting words like poison. My father snarled that no one could know. Ty is crashing through the brush. Someone is grabbing me. Silver at my throat. The world is tilting toward panic.

“One of the rogues came for you,” Ty said, his voice turning flat in that way people’s voices do when the memory is too ugly to survive unguarded. “Your father moved first. Not to save you. To stop you from hearing. He grabbed you, and when you fought him, Marian used the silver blade. I went for her. Your father came at me from the side.”

No. The word did not leave my mouth, but it ripped through me anyway. My father, who had taught me how to whistle through my fingers and carve my name into soft bark. My father, who had mourned my mother so fiercely he barely spoke of her. My father, who had let Beth’s family keep me after he died because I had thought he trusted them. My father, stepping toward me not to protect, but to silence. Grief twisted into something uglier, more humiliating. Betrayal with my father’s voice.

“He had a blade,” Ty said. “Iron and silver mixed. He went for my throat. I shifted halfway on instinct, blocked the first strike, and he slipped in the mud when he came again. My claws—” He broke off, the sound he made torn raw at the edges. “I never meant to kill him. But I did.”

The forest went silent around that confession. Not because sound truly vanished, but because my body could not hold anything else. Ty had killed my father. By accident. In violence. In chaos. While trying to stop something worse. None of that mattered, and all of it did. My chest ached so badly I thought for one absurd second that the mate-bond itself had reached in and hooked its claws around my ribs.

“I tried to get to you,” Ty said, closer now, though he did not touch me. “Marian’s rogues dragged me off while she went back for you. By the time I broke free, you were gone, and your father was dead. Alpha Cameron found me before dawn. He knew if the truth came out wrong, the pack would tear itself apart before I could prove what really happened. He sent me to training early, and I let him, because I thought if I became strong enough, I could come back and finish what I failed to stop.”

“You let me bury him thinking I was alone,” I said. I had not meant to cry. I had promised myself years ago that tears were a luxury other girls could afford. But my voice broke anyway, and once that first crack formed, there was no hiding the rest. “You let me grieve you both. Do you understand that? I lost my father, my sight, my life, and then I lost you, too. And all this time, you knew.”

When Ty answered, his voice sounded wrecked. “There was not a single day I didn’t know exactly what it cost you. I carried it through every training ground, every fight, every breath. I knew I had no right to ask anything from you when I came back—not forgiveness, not trust, not even your anger. But don’t ever think I stayed away because I stopped loving you.”

The words should have been a relief. They should have landed soft and healing. Instead, they hurt in a new place. Because some stubborn, traitorous part of me had wanted to hear them for so long that hearing them now—here, in blood and smoke and betrayal—felt almost unbearable. Love did not fix this. The mate-bond did not erase a grave.

“Beautiful,” Marian murmured from the dark. “Two broken children trying to make tragedy sound romantic.” Her voice sharpened. “Ask him the part he still hasn’t said, Sila. Ask him what your father was protecting.”

I hated that Marian could still pull the strings of the moment. I hated even more that she was right. “Protecting what?” I asked, my voice thin from crying and fury and too much truth at once.

This time Marian answered first. “You,” she said. “Or rather, what you were born to become.”

Neeka surged so hard against my mind that pain flashed white behind my ruined eyes. Ty swore. Somewhere ahead, Marian shifted again, and this time I could hear the wetness in her breathing, the strain in her body. She was hurt, cornered, and still smiling. Nothing in the world was more dangerous than a cruel person with nothing left to lose.

“Your father wasn’t hiding a crime,” Marian said. “He was hiding a prophecy.” A beat of silence passed, sharp as a blade. “And the blind girl he tried to silence is the next true Luna.”