Chapter 6: The Family

“Save the King!”

“Seal every gate!”

“Find the assassin!”

A healer wrenched me back from the blood soaking through my father’s armor, and I fought her grip without thinking, my hands already reaching for him again.

“Don’t let him die…”

⸻

The hall had become chaos. Guards tore down the corridors after fleeing shapes. Cassian didn’t bother with the door … he shifted mid-stride, silver fur rippling out of skin, and tore through the shattered window after them. Michael was already gone, vaulted straight off the balcony, chasing a second shadow across the rooftops in the rain.

I stayed.

Healers surrounded my father, hands moving fast and grim, and I gripped his slack fingers anyway, refusing to be pulled away twice in one night.

“The poison should have stopped his heart,” one healer breathed, disbelieving.

Another stared at the wound like it had betrayed her. “…but something is protecting him.”

I didn’t understand what she meant until I looked down and saw the faint silver light bleeding from my own fingertips into the wound, the bleeding slowing beneath my hands without my willing it to. No one else noticed.

Except the High Priestess, standing very still in the doorway, watching me with an expression I couldn’t read.

⸻

He woke hours later. Weak, gray around the mouth, but alive, and the first thing he did was ask everyone to leave.

For the first time since the hall exploded into arrows, it was only the two of us.

He didn’t reach for an apology. He reached for the truth instead, like he’d been holding it ready for twenty years and only now had somewhere to set it down.

I was born beneath a Blood Moon, he told me. The court had celebrated for a week. One prophet alone had refused to smile, warning that I would unite kingdoms and that someone would try to end me before I ever understood why.

He’d dismissed her. Three nights later, soldiers dressed as rogues tore through the palace gates. My mother died shielding me. I vanished into the storm and never came back … not until a rider found a bleeding girl on a forest road twenty years too late.

His voice didn’t break once telling it. It broke after, in the silence that followed.

⸻

He led me to a cabinet built into the wall and opened it with hands that still shook. Maps spilled out, hundreds of them, marked and re-marked in fading ink. Letters. Sketches of a child who might have been me. An entire wall of portraits, girl after girl, each one crossed through in red.

Each one a disappointment he’d had to survive.

“Every birthday,” he said quietly, opening a second chest, “…I bought you a gift.”

Twenty presents. Wrapped, ribboned, untouched, stacked with a care that made my throat close.

I didn’t cry over the search, or the maps, or even the attack. I cried over the gifts … over a man who kept buying presents for a daughter he had no proof was still alive, year after year, because stopping would have meant giving up.

⸻

He reached toward me, slow, and stopped an inch away, the same way the rider in the storm had stopped, the same way everyone in this kingdom seemed to have learned to.

“May I?”

No one had ever asked before touching me. Not Lucien, not the elders, not a single healer in twenty years of hands on my skin.

I nodded, because I couldn’t manage a word.

He brushed a strand of hair back from my face and pressed a kiss to my forehead … the exact spot, some buried part of me insisted, where she used to kiss me. A woman singing. Moonlight through a window. Laughter, bright and close.

Then blood, and darkness, and nothing.

I gasped and grabbed the edge of the bed, the memory gone as fast as it came, but it had come. My past was starting to surface.

⸻

A knock. Before Orion could answer, the doors burst open and Cassian filled the frame, armor slick with blood that wasn’t his, chest still heaving from the chase.

He stopped dead.

Whatever mask an Alpha wears cracked clean off his face, and for several long seconds he only stared at me like I might vanish if he blinked.

“…Little Star?”

The name again. My chest ached with it.

He crossed the room in three strides and pulled me into an embrace hard enough to lift me half off my feet. I went rigid, arms pinned at my sides, no memory in my body of ever being held like this. Then, slowly, so slowly, my arms found their way around him too.

He was crying into my shoulder before either of us said anything else.

⸻

He’d been twelve, he told me later, voice raw, when I disappeared. He’d promised to guard me that night and chosen instead to chase the men who took me, certain he could bring me back himself.

He never had.

Every year since, he’d trained harder, fought harder, waited for a lead that never came, carrying the failure like armor he refused to take off.

“It wasn’t your fault,” I whispered.

He shook his head, jaw tight. “It has been my punishment.”

⸻

A guard burst in before either of us could say more. “One of them’s alive.”

Cassian hauled the wounded assassin into the chamber by the collar and dropped him at the foot of the bed. The man was bleeding, broken, and smiling anyway, eyes finding me across the room like he’d been waiting his whole life for this exact moment.

“You should have stayed dead.”

Before anyone could move, he bit down. His body convulsed once and went still, foam at his lips, whatever he knew gone with him.

⸻

Michael searched the body while the rest of us stood frozen, and pulled a silver ring from beneath the man’s collar … small, plain, stamped with the Silvercrest seal.

Orion went the color of old parchment.

Only the royal household carried that seal.

Which meant whoever had hired these men hadn’t hired them from outside the palace walls. They’d hired them from inside it.

⸻

Dinner that night was quiet, careful, four people learning how to sit at the same table without knowing the rules yet. Roger slid the largest slice of cake across the table toward me without a word, then softened it with a small smile.

“Mother always said birthdays deserved extra cake.”

I smiled … small, real, the first one I could remember meaning in longer than I wanted to admit. Across the table, three brothers traded a look I wasn’t supposed to catch, something like relief passing between them.

⸻

I couldn’t sleep after. The palace felt too loud in its silence, my skin still humming with everything the day had cracked open in me, so I wandered out into the gardens instead, moonlight silvering every flower bed.

Footsteps behind me. I turned, already forming Cassian’s name.

Instead, a hooded woman stood beneath the twisted branches of the Moon Tree, watching me with an expression too sad for a stranger.

“You’ve grown so much.”

“Who are you?”

She lifted a pendant from beneath her cloak, silver, six-pointed … the exact twin of the one sketched in my mother’s journal.

“Your mother asked me to protect you,” she said, and let the silence stretch long enough to hurt before finishing.

“…because she knew one of your brothers would betray you.”