Chapter 7

Something in me went still.

Not the stunned stillness of shock. Not the frozen silence of fear. This was worse. This was the moment after impact, when pain had not yet found its final shape and my body, perhaps mercifully, refused to feel all of it at once. My mother alive. My mother the one who bound my sight. My mother turned from memory into weapon in a single breath.

I turned toward Ty so sharply my shoulder flared from the fall. “You knew.” The words came out thin at first, then sharpened. “You knew something about her, and you said nothing.”

He did not insult me with denial. “Not all of it,” he said quietly. “But enough.”

A sound left me that was dangerously close to a sob and a laugh at once. “Enough?” I repeated. The word cracked in the middle. “That is what you call this? My father dead because of secrets. My sight gone because of secrets. My entire life built on secrets, and you stood beside me while another one bled out in front of me and decided I could survive it later?”

“I was trying to protect you.” Ty’s voice roughened on the last word, as if he hated it even while saying it. “There was never a right moment to tell you that your mother might be alive, that she might be tied to whatever was sealed in you, that she may have chosen to leave you in the hands of people like Marian. I needed proof before I put that kind of wound in your hands.”

“Stop deciding what wounds I’m allowed to carry,” I said, and this time the anger in me landed clean. “Do you understand what all of you keep doing? My father. Alpha Cameron. You. Everyone keeps choosing for me. Hiding things from me. Breaking me in careful little pieces and calling it protection.”

That hit him. I heard it in the silence that followed, in the way he inhaled and did not let the breath out for a beat too long. When he spoke again, the words were stripped of defense. “You’re right.”

The simple admission cut deeper than an argument would have. “I have loved you for too long to watch you hurt and do nothing,” he said. “But somewhere along the way, protecting you became another way of controlling the truth, and that is on me. I cannot undo what I kept from you. I cannot make any of this clean. I can only tell you now that every secret I held, I held because I was terrified of losing what little of you this pack had left untouched.”

My throat burned. There it was again—that unbearable tenderness arriving wrapped in ruin. I had wanted him to choose me, to fight for me, to come back for me. But I had not wanted to be loved like something fragile enough to hide. “I never needed you to save me,” I whispered. “I needed you to trust me with the truth.”

The answer came back immediate and wrecked. “Then I failed you in the worst way that matters.”

Marian laughed from ahead of us, low and ugly. “Finally. Some honesty. Do you see it now, Sila? Men like him do not love women like you. They worship, they protect, they cage. Your father did it. Your mate does it. Even now, he would rather carry your pain for you than let you choose what to do with it.”

For one brutal instant, Marian’s words found every bruise I had. That was the danger of a good lie: it wrapped itself around truth and borrowed its voice. I could have let that break me. I could have turned all the hurt in me toward Ty and let Marian disappear into the dark while I drowned in it. Instead, I drew one shaking breath and chose something harder.

“No,” I said, and this time the word belonged to me. “He failed me. He hurt me. But you do not get to use my pain as an escape route.” I stepped forward, toward Marian’s voice, toward the fear I could now smell on her beneath the smoke and blood. “Whatever Ty kept from me, you are still the one who carved your cruelty into my life.”

Ty made a sound behind me—small, disbelieving, almost broken. He did not try to stop me this time. That more than anything told me he had heard what I was really asking for. Not distance. Not surrender. Respect.

“Respect?” Marian hissed. “You still think this is about choice? Your mother made her choice the day she bound your sight and buried your power. She begged for the seal, child. Begged for it. She said if your gift awakened too soon, the packs would tear you apart before you learned how to survive them.”

The words struck differently. Not softer. Never softer. But sideways. My mother had not only abandoned me; she might have chosen to wound me in order to save me. The possibility was monstrous. Love as harm. Protection as mutilation. Was that all this world knew how to do to its daughters?

“There’s more,” Ty said quietly.

I laughed once, bitter and exhausted. “Of course there is. Say it.”

“The night before I left, I found one of your father’s hidden letters,” Ty said. “I could only read part of it before Alpha Cameron took it, but it mentioned a place beyond the northern falls. A sanctuary. Your mother was meant to stay hidden there until the seal weakened.” He paused, and dread entered every line of his voice. “The seal is weakening now, Sila. Which means if Marian knows your mother is alive, others will know soon too.”

Marian’s answering smile was audible. “Soon?” she said. “You’re both behind.”

Neeka exploded inside my mind. “Movement,” she snarled. “Not hers. More than one. Downwind.”

Ty shifted instantly from confession to command. “Get behind me.”

I should have obeyed. Every bruise in my heart would have made it easier to step back and let him become a wall again. Instead, I moved to his side. Not forgiving. Not healed. But choosing. “No,” I said, my voice steady for the first time in what felt like years. “You don’t stand in front of me anymore. You stand with me.”

The breath he took then sounded like hope and heartbreak colliding.

Then the ridge answered with howls that did not belong to our pack. Boots pounded over stone from three directions. Marian laughed once in savage triumph. And from somewhere beyond the northern falls, a female voice tore through my mind—ancient, urgent, and heartbreakingly familiar. “Run, little moon,” it said. “They’ve found us.”