Chapter 7

I didn't show him the phone.

By the time I hit the training grounds at ten, sweat already prickling along my spine before a single drill had started, I'd decided that whatever Ash knew, he could earn it the same way I planned to earn my own answers. Slowly. On my terms.

He didn't ask again. That almost bothered me more than if he had.

"You're distracted." He caught my wrist mid-strike and held it there, not hard, just enough to stop me. "Where's your head?"

"Wherever it wants to be. You're not my therapist." I wrenched my arm back and reset my stance.

"No." The corner of his mouth did that almost thing again, gone before it fully arrived. "I'm worse. I actually expect results."

We ran drills for another hour, and somewhere in the middle of it, chasing his footwork instead of overthinking my own, I forgot to be angry with him for a few minutes at a time. I hated how easily that happened. I hated more that some small, traitorous part of me had started looking forward to ten o'clock.

Bree caught me on my way home, falling into step without asking permission the way she used to when we were kids.

"You look like you're carrying something." She bumped my shoulder with hers. "Spill."

I told her about the marker, about Ash showing up, about the confession that he'd been there the night my mother died and wasn't ready to say more. I left out the phone. Some things I still wasn't ready to hand to anyone, not even her.

Bree went quiet in a way that told me she was choosing her next words carefully. "My mom used to be close with yours. Before everything." She stared straight ahead as we walked. "I remember overhearing them once, years ago, arguing about something your mom found. A letter, maybe. When I was a kid, I didn't understand it. But I remember your mom saying somebody was going to get people killed if the truth didn't come out first."

My whole body went still. "Why didn't you tell me this before?"

"Because I wasn't sure it mattered." Bree finally looked at me, guilt sitting plain on her face. "And because bringing it up meant admitting I'd been keeping something from you too, and I already felt bad enough about the year we lost."

I understood that better than I wanted to. I'd spent a year learning how easy it was to let silence become its own kind of lie.

That evening, once the house had gone quiet, I climbed into the attic for the first time since coming home. My mother kept a cedar chest up there, the same one she'd had since before I was born, and I hadn't been able to make myself open it until tonight.

Inside were things I expected: old photographs, a folded wedding dress, a stack of birthday cards in Colt's careful childhood handwriting. Underneath all of it, wrapped in a scarf I remembered her wearing every autumn, sat a small leather notebook I'd never seen in my life.

The first few pages were nothing unusual, grocery lists, notes about hive maintenance she must have picked up from Grandma Ruth despite the years of silence between them. But near the middle, the handwriting changed, tighter, faster, like she'd been writing in a hurry and looking over her shoulder while she did it.

If something happens to me, look at the message that started this. It isn't what everyone thinks it is. Ask who benefits from a war nobody actually wanted.

No date. No name. Just that, circled twice, hard enough that the pen had nearly torn through the page.

I sat there on the attic floor for a long time, the notebook open in my lap, my mother's voice suddenly closer than it had been in a year, close enough that I could almost hear her saying it out loud.

Ask who benefits.

Ren's father hadn't benefited. He'd lost his son's inheritance and his own authority in a single night. Ren certainly hadn't, he'd run before the fighting even started. Ashwood had won the territory, but Ash himself had been out there fighting from the first hour, not orchestrating anything from a safe distance.

Which left the people standing close enough to whisper into an Alpha's ear without ever having to lift a hand themselves.

I thought of Priscilla's smile across the firelight the night Ren found his mate, the one that already knew how the story would end. I thought of Ethan's grin, wide and untroubled, like my humiliation had been the best part of somebody's plan finally coming together.

I closed the notebook and held it against my chest, and for the first time since I'd come home, the cold feeling in my stomach had a shape I could almost name.