Chapter 5—Secrets in the Shadows

Aiden's POV

Three weeks since the ceremony and Ashen Hollow Pack went back to normal.

Or that was what I told myself every morning when I woke up and the first thing my wolf did was reach for something that was no longer there.

I ignored him. I was good at that.

The bond did not disappear completely, which was the part nobody warned us about. It sat in the background, present enough to remind you it existed, too faint to do much else. Jayden felt it too. We did not talk about it, there was nothing to say.

Pack business filled the space well enough. Meetings, disputes, territory checks, the endless administrative weight of running Ashen Hollow at the level our bloodline demanded.

I threw myself into it and Jayden did the same and by the end of most days we were too tired to think about anything else.

That worked fine until Jace showed up.

He came into the study on a Tuesday afternoon without knocking, dropped into the chair across from my desk and looked at me with that expression he wore for three weeks. The one that said he was sitting on something and deciding how to say it.

"Go ahead," I said without looking up from the report in front of me.

"You know what I'm going to say."

"I know. Say it anyway so we can move past it."

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "She was good, Aiden. Whatever you've convinced yourself about the bloodline, Celeste Reed was good for this pack and you know it. Everyone knows it."

Jayden looked up from the sofa where he was going through his phone. "The Fourfold Bond would have required us to share authority with Ulfsang Pack. That is not something we were ever going to agree to."

"That's not what I asked."

"It's the answer," I said. "The bond was a trap dressed up as an honour. We were expected to split our mate, our pack's future Luna, between four men from two different bloodlines. Tell me how that preserves anything we have built here."

Jace was quiet for a moment. "I'm not talking about politics. I'm talking about her."

"They're the same thing." I set the report down and looked at him properly. "She carries a bond that divides her between us and the Wood twins. There is no version of that which doesn't compromise this pack's standing. We made the right call."

"Did you." It was not a question, he said it flat and let it sit there.

Jayden's jaw tightened slightly. "Watch yourself, Jace."

"I'm watching both of you." He stood, straightening his jacket. "I've been Beta of this pack for six years. I've never once questioned a decision you two made. I'm questioning this one." He moved toward the door and stopped with his hand on the frame. "She didn't deserve what happened to her in front of everyone. Whatever the politics are, that part was wrong."

He left without waiting for a response.

The study was quiet after that. Jayden set his phone down and I leaned back in my chair and we let the silence sit for a moment.

"He'll come around," Jayden said.

"He will," I agreed.

But Jace's words lingered in the room longer than either of us acknowledged.

***

Jayden poured the drinks an hour later, two glasses of something old and expensive from the cabinet by the window, and handed me one without a word. We stood at the glass looking out over the pack grounds, the way we always did when something needed settling between us.

"He's not wrong that she was good," Jayden said. He said it carefully, the way he did with things he turned over several times before speaking.

"No," I said. "She was."

"But good wasn't the point."

"No. It wasn't."

We drank. Outside the grounds were quiet, the pack going about its evening, everything exactly as it should be, as it always was under our authority.

"Vivian called it early," Jayden said, swirling his glass slowly. "Weeks before the ceremony she was telling us something felt wrong about the whole arrangement. The way it was structured, what it would cost us. She saw it before we did."

I nodded. Our stepsister came to us quietly, no dramatics, just a careful conversation about what she read in the old records.

The Fourfold Bond was not the sacred honour the elders presented it as. It was a mechanism that diluted alpha authority, split a Luna's loyalty between two packs, and left both bloodlines compromised. Vivian laid it out clearly and we listened.

"We owe her for that," I said.

"We do," Jayden agreed. "She saved us from walking into something we couldn't have undone."

I raised my glass slightly and Jayden touched his to it and that was the end of it. The decision was made and it was right and Jace's doubts were his to manage.

My wolf disagreed, quietly and persistently, the way he always did when I was not telling myself the full truth. I ignored him the way I always did.

We moved back to the desk an hour later, papers spread between us, the evening settling into the familiar rhythm of pack administration.

Jayden was mid-sentence about the eastern border arrangement when the study door opened.

Vivian stood in the doorway.

I noticed it immediately. The colour in her face, or the absence of it. She was pale, not from the light, her hands at her sides and not quite steady. She looked like she came straight from somewhere without planning to stop here and her eyes moved between us with an expression I could not name.

Jayden straightened. "Vivian."

She did not answer right away. She stepped fully into the room and the door swung shut behind her and she looked at both of us and something about the way she was standing made my wolf lift his head for the first time in weeks.

"What's wrong?" I said.

Her mouth opened. Closed. She pressed her lips together and when she looked at me again her eyes were steady in the forced way of someone holding themselves together by sheer effort.

"I need to tell you something," she said quietly. "Both of you."

The room went completely still.

"It's important." Her voice did not waver but her hands did. "I should have said it sooner. I don't know how to say it now but I have to."

Neither Jayden nor I spoke.

Vivian stood in the middle of our study looking like someone who carried something heavy for a very long time and finally ran out of the strength to keep it to herself.