Chapter Three: The Question Her Father wouldn't Answer

Elira didn't confront her father that morning. She'd learned long ago that questions asked in anger got answered with silence, and silence was the one weapon her family wielded better than any wolf's teeth. So she waited until dusk, until the house had gone quiet and her mother had retreated to the sitting room with her tea and her practiced indifference, and she found her father alone in his study, exactly where he always was — surrounded by pack ledgers, half a bottle of something amber already gone.

Marcus Voss did not look up when she entered. He rarely did.

"Ask your father about the night you were born," she said, setting her phone on the desk between them, the message still glowing on the screen. "Someone sent me that last night. Ask you why the healer never filed my birth records with the council." She kept her voice level, though her pulse hammered. "So I'm asking."

For the first time in years, her father actually looked at her — really looked, the way he used to before she turned sixteen and disappointed him in the one way that mattered. Something moved behind his eyes. Not confusion. Recognition. And beneath it, unmistakably, fear.

"Where did you get this," he said. It wasn't a question. It was closer to a demand, low and urgent, his hand already reaching for the phone like he could make the words disappear by touching them.

"A man outside the club. He said he knew you. He said he knew who I was better than I did." She watched her father's face drain of color and felt something cold settle low in her stomach — not vindication, not yet, just the sick certainty that she'd been right to be afraid. "Dad. What is he talking about?"

"Nothing." The word came too fast, too rehearsed. "It's nothing, Elira. Some pack rival trying to destabilize us before the succession vote. You shouldn't have gone to that club in the first place—"

"Don't." She'd used that word on Kaelen two nights ago, and it worked no better on her father now than it had then, except this time it was laced with something sharper than hurt. "I have spent eighteen years being told I'm a defect. A disappointment. The daughter who broke something in this family just by existing. And now, out of nowhere, a stranger tells me my own birth records were never filed, and you expect me to believe that's nothing?"

Her father's hands had gone white-knuckled around his glass. "Your mother—"

"This isn't about Mom. This is about you." Her voice shook, but she didn't stop. "Was I born wolfless? Or did something happen that night that you've spent my whole life hiding?"

The silence stretched long enough that she thought he wouldn't answer at all. When he finally spoke, his voice had lost all its authority, all its practiced pack-leader calm, and what remained sounded almost like grief.

"You need to let this go," he said quietly. "For your own safety. Some doors, once opened, cannot be closed again — and what's behind this one would destroy more than just your place in this family." He met her eyes, and for one unguarded second she saw something that looked almost like love, buried under eighteen years of distance. "I have protected you from this your entire life. Please don't make that protection meaningless now."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one you're getting tonight."

He stood, the conversation closed the way every conversation in this house had always closed — on his terms, at his convenience — and walked out, leaving her alone with the ledgers and the amber bottle and a hollow, furious ache that no bond, no mate, no destiny had ever been able to touch.

She found Kaelen at the training grounds an hour later, drawn there less by decision than by the pull that had lived under her ribs for two days straight, humming louder whenever the distance between them shrank. He was alone, running drills in the dark like exhaustion was something he could outpace, and when he saw her face he abandoned the exercise entirely.

"What happened?"

She told him everything — the stranger, the message, her father's fear, the door he'd refused to open. Kaelen listened with the particular stillness he reserved for pack matters that mattered, and by the time she finished, something dangerous had settled into his expression.

"Someone filed a birth record request under mysterious circumstances the week you were born," he said slowly, like he was assembling a puzzle he hadn't known he'd been holding pieces of. "My mother mentioned it once, years ago. A closed-door meeting between the healer and the council, sealed under Alpha authority." His eyes found hers, sharp with a realization that looked almost like dread. "I never thought to ask why. I didn't know it was about you."

"What if I'm not what everyone thinks I am?" The words came out smaller than she meant them to, cracked open by two days of fear she hadn't let herself feel. "What if the reason I never shifted isn't a defect at all?"

Kaelen crossed the space between them and did the thing he always did, the thing that had kept her tethered to something like hope for six years — he didn't flinch from her, didn't treat the question like it was dangerous to ask out loud.

"Then we find out the truth," he said. "Together. Whatever it is."

"Serilda warned me to bury this. She said if the council even suspects a wolfless girl bonded the future Alpha, they won't call it fate. They'll call it something they need to fix."

"Let them try." His voice hardened, the future Alpha surfacing beneath the boy who'd pulled her from the river. "I don't care what tradition says I'm owed. I care about what's true. And nothing about you has ever felt like a mistake to me, Elira — not once, in six years."

For a moment, standing in the dark with the pull thrumming steady between them, she almost believed she was allowed to want that.

Then a branch snapped at the treeline, and both of them turned toward the sound — toward the same shadowed figure who'd stood there two nights before, watching, waiting, unhurried as ever.

This time, he didn't leave. This time, he stepped fully into the moonlight, and Elira felt the ground shift beneath her, because the face looking back at her wasn't a stranger's at all.

It was her father's — twenty years younger, carved into a face that wasn't his.