The Truth Between the Lines

Jace’s POV

I couldn't sleep, I lay there running the priest’s warning over and over until the words stopped making sense, the way anything does if you say it enough times in the dark.

If that mark has truly returned, then perhaps Jenna’s homecoming isn’t the miracle this house believes it to be.

By morning I still had no answer, only more questions stacked on top of the old ones, so I did the only thing that made sense. I went to ask the source herself.

Jenna was sitting up when I entered, a shawl around her shoulders, color back in her face already. She smiled the second she saw me, soft and grateful, exactly the way she used to before any of this happened.

“Jace.” She patted the edge of the bed. “I didn’t expect you so early.”

“I need the rest of it.” I stayed standing. “Every detail you remember. If I’m going to find the ones who took you, I need more than what you gave the council last night.”

“Of course.” She folded her hands in her lap like a woman settling in to confess something painful. “Where do you want me to start?”

“The cabins. How many, and where.”

“Three, I think. Maybe four, some nights blurred together.” She looked down at her hands.

 “The first was somewhere in the eastern hills, thick pine everywhere, so cold I couldn’t feel my fingers by morning. Then they moved me south, near a riverbank. I remember the sound of water because it never stopped, not once, and I used to think if I could just reach it I could follow it home.”

“And the last one?”

“West.” Her voice caught. “Close to the Moberly ruins, actually. I didn’t know that until after I escaped and asked someone where I was.”

I kept my face still. “Moberly.”

“I know.” She wrapped the shawl tighter. “Nobody goes near those ruins. I think that’s exactly why they chose it. Nobody would look for me there.”

Her eyes filled, and for a moment I almost let it stop me, the way it stopped everyone else in that hallway last night. Almost.

“I keep dreaming about the cold,” she said. “I keep thinking I’m still there, and none of this is real, and I’ll wake up back in that cabin and none of you ever found me at all.”

“You’re home.” I said it because it was true, not because I meant it as comfort, though she took it as one, breathing out slow like the words themselves had weight.

“Thank you.” She reached for my hand. I let her take it. “Thank you for not giving up on me.”

I didn’t answer that directly. “The eastern hills,” I said instead. “Which stretch.”

“Past the old grain mill, I think. I couldn’t see much through the blindfold.” She frowned like she was working to remember. “Why does it matter which stretch?”

“Because we’ve had scouts through those hills every week since the border war. If rogues were holding a captive there, someone would have seen smoke, seen tracks, seen something.” I watched her face while I said it. “Nothing was reported.”

“Maybe they were careful.”

“Maybe.” I let it sit there instead of pushing further. 

There was no version of this conversation where accusing her outright ended well, not with her still bruised, not with the whole pack ready to defend her honor with their teeth bared. I needed proof before I needed a confrontation.

She squeezed my hand once before letting go, wiping her eyes with the corner of the shawl. 

“I know this can’t be easy for you either. Being married to her, and now me back, and everyone expecting you to just sort it out, like a debt owed.”

“Kenna fulfilled her duty,” I said. “That’s all it was.”

“Was it?” Jenna tilted her head, something unreadable moving behind her eyes. 

“I hope she never felt like she was replacing me. None of this was her fault. She didn’t ask for any of it.”

“No,” I said. “She didn’t.”

“I’ll speak to her myself once I’m stronger.” Jenna smiled, small and sad. “I don’t want her thinking I hold anything against her. She’s my sister.”

I left without another comfortable thing to say, because everything about the conversation had left me more unsettled than when I’d walked in, not less.

I found my Beta, Callum, in the corridor and pulled him into an alcove where no servant could overhear.

“I want the disappearance reinvestigated,” I said. 

“Quietly. No council, no announcement. Take three warriors you trust and verify every location Jenna described,  the eastern hills past the grain mill, the riverbank to the south, and the western stretch near Moberly.”

Callum’s brow lifted. “Moberly? Nobody’s held territory that close to the ruins in years.”

“I know. That’s exactly why I want it checked.” I gripped his shoulder. “If word gets out we’re questioning her story before she’s even healed, it’ll look like cruelty. So this stays between us until I know what we’re dealing with.”

“Understood.” He hesitated. “And if we find nothing?”

“Then we’ve lost nothing but time.” I didn’t believe that, not really, but it was easier to say than the alternative.

After he left I sat alone with the memory of the garden pulling at me again, the mark, the roses blooming wrong and fast, the fear on the priest’s face. 

I thought about walking down to Kenna’s chambers and asking her outright what she knew. I got as far as the door of my study before I talked myself out of it.

She’d looked as lost as I felt. Whatever that mark was, I doubted she understood it any better than I did.

Instead I sent for the archive records. Old ceremony logs, anything referencing unusual Luna bonds or ancestral marks. 

It took the archivist most of the afternoon to bring me a stack of ledgers thick with dust, and it took me less than an hour to realize most of them were useless.

Pages were missing. Not torn, removed, carefully, whole sections lifted clean from the binding decades ago. Where an entry referenced anything resembling a mark or a light during a ceremony, someone had gone through with ink and blotted it out so thoroughly the paper had worn thin from the scrubbing.

Someone hadn’t wanted this history read. That thought sat colder in my chest than anything the priest had said.

I was still turning the ledgers over when Callum returned that evening, faster than I expected, his expression already telling me the news before he opened his mouth.

“There’s nothing there,” he said. “No cabin in the eastern hills past the grain mill. No river settlement to the south, no tracks, no ash from a fire. And the western stretch near Moberly hasn’t seen a single confirmed rogue sighting in three years.”

“You’re certain.”

“I sent men to all three myself.” He shifted his weight. “I know how it sounds, Alpha. Like we searched wrong. But I’ve run these patrols for six years. I don’t get lost in my own territory.”

I didn’t get the chance to answer him, because the study door opened again, and one of the archive guards came in half out of breath, holding something wrapped in a strip of cloth like it might crumble if he breathed on it wrong.

“Alpha. We found this behind a collapsed shelf in the restricted archive. No title. No author.” He set it on my desk like it burned to hold. “I thought you’d want to see it before anyone else did.”

I unwrapped the leather cover myself. The journal’s pages were brittle, most of them blank, decades of dust settled into the spine. Only the first page held any writing at all, a single line, the ink faded to rust but still legible, still deliberate.

When the Substitute Luna awakens, the first lie will always return before the truth.

I read it twice. Then a third time, my grip closing around the cover until the old leather creaked in my hand, the words settling into me with a weight I didn’t yet have a name for only the certainty, cold and absolute, that whatever this meant, Jenna’s homecoming was only the first lie of many.