Chapter 6

I didn't sleep. I lay there running the message over and over until the words stopped looking like words and started looking like a puzzle I didn't have all the pieces to yet.

By morning I'd made a decision. I wasn't going to sit around waiting for whoever sent that text to decide when I got to know more. I was going to start asking questions myself, quietly, before anyone realized I was asking them at all.

Colt was already gone on patrol by the time I got downstairs, so I went looking for the one place Bree had mentioned without meaning to: the old border line, where people still left flowers for my mother.

The walk took twenty minutes through parts of the territory I barely recognized anymore. New fences. A watchtower that hadn't existed a year ago. The forest thinned out near the border and gave way to a clearing scarred with old burn marks, the ground still uneven in places where something had clearly been fought over hard.

Someone had left fresh flowers at the base of a stone marker. Wildflowers, not the kind you buy. The kind you pick because you know exactly where they grow.

I crouched down to read the small carved plaque, my mother's name and nothing else, no dates, no titles, like whoever placed it hadn't wanted to say too much either.

"You shouldn't be out here alone."

I didn't need to turn around to know the voice. It found me anyway, low and even, the same voice that had cut through my skull the night before I met him.

"Funny. Nobody told me this spot was restricted." I stood, brushing dirt off my knees, refusing to let him see how hard my heart was working. "Do you patrol every inch of your territory yourself, or is this one special?"

Ash stepped up beside me, close enough that I caught the smell of pine and something colder underneath it, and looked down at the marker like he'd read it a hundred times before.

"This one's special." He said it plainly, no weight on it at all, which somehow made it land harder than if he'd tried to sound sad. "I come here sometimes."

"Why?"

He didn't answer right away. Long enough that I thought he wouldn't answer at all.

"Because I was here the night it happened." His eyes stayed fixed on the stone. "Closer than most people know."

The ground seemed to tilt under me, the same way it had in my father's living room three days ago.

"You were there." My voice came out thinner than I wanted it to. "You saw what happened to her."

"I saw part of it." Something in his jaw tightened, controlled, the way everything about him seemed controlled. "Not enough to tell you what you actually want to know. Not yet."

"Not yet." I stepped in front of him, forcing him to look at me instead of the marker. "What does that mean? What are you waiting for?"

"For the right time." His honey brown eyes finally met mine, and for one unguarded second I saw something underneath the control, something that looked almost like guilt. "You've been home for four days, Nora. Some truths don't survive being handed over too fast."

"That's not your decision to make."

"No." He agreed with me so easily it caught me off guard. "It isn't. But it's the one I'm making anyway, because the alternative gets people killed. Yours included."

I wanted to be angry. I was angry. But underneath the anger sat something colder and more useful, the same instinct Chris had spent a year training into my hands and feet: the sense that I had just been handed a real piece of the truth, even if it was wrapped in half a sentence.

"Someone texted me last night." I watched his face carefully when I said it. "Unknown number. Said there's more to my mother's story than my family's told me. More to theirs too."

Something flickered behind his eyes, fast, gone before I could hold onto it, but I'd gotten good at catching those flickers by now.

"Show me." He held out a hand, and for a second I almost gave him the phone without thinking twice.

I didn't.

"I'll think about it." I stepped back, putting air between us again. "Training's at ten. Don't be late."

I walked away before he could answer, and I felt his eyes on my back the whole way through the clearing, the same way I'd felt eyes on me the night Ren's wolf chose someone else. Different eyes. Same weight.

I was starting to understand that in this territory, everyone who claimed to be protecting me was also the one keeping something from me. I just hadn't figured out yet which one of those things mattered more.