Chapter 4

Chapter Four: Living Under One Roof

The council's departure didn't ease the tension in the estate. If anything, it multiplied it, spreading through every hallway like smoke that refused to clear.

Damon avoided her for the rest of the day. When Aurora finally cornered him near the training grounds that evening, arms crossed and refusing to move until he gave her answers, he simply said the matter was closed and walked away before she could argue further.

"He's hiding something," she told Noah later that night, pacing the length of the study while her brother sat with his head in his hands. "You heard her. Sealed records. About our parents. And he knows something about it."

"I'll talk to him," Noah said, though his voice lacked conviction. "But Aurora, right now we have a bigger problem. The council's given you thirty days, and until this is resolved, you're a target. For rival packs, for anyone who wants to exploit the situation, for anyone curious about what makes your bloodline different enough to warrant a sealed file."

"So what do we do?"

Noah exhaled slowly. "The Alphas move in. All five of them. For your protection."

Aurora stopped pacing. "You're joking."

"I'm not. It was Damon's suggestion, actually, before the council even left. Keep you surrounded, keep you safe, keep the situation controlled until we figure out what's really happening." He looked up at her, tired in a way she hadn't seen from him in years. "I know it's not what you want. But it's what keeps you alive."

By the end of the week, the east wing of the Hale estate had been converted into living quarters for four grown men who had spent years pretending they didn't feel anything toward her at all, and one who was just now returning after three years of near-total silence.

Elias arrived on a Tuesday evening, without warning, dropping a single travel bag by the door as if he'd never left in the first place. Aurora had barely processed the sight of him — taller than she remembered, harder around the eyes, carrying the kind of exhaustion that came from something more than travel — before Damon appeared in the hallway and the two men locked eyes with a tension so sharp it filled the entire corridor.

"You're back," Damon said flatly.

"Apparently my bond decided to ignite from three hundred miles away," Elias replied, equally flat. "Figured I should show up in person."

Aurora watched the exchange carefully, noting the history buried beneath their words, the years of unspoken conflict she clearly wasn't part of but somehow already tangled inside of.

"I don't suppose either of you wants to explain what that was about," she said.

Neither answered.

Living under one roof with five bonded Alphas turned out to be more complicated than Aurora had imagined, and she had imagined quite a lot.

Ryder made himself impossible to avoid, constantly finding reasons to be wherever she was, dragging her into conversations, teasing her out of bad moods, filling silences that would have otherwise felt unbearable. Kieran, by contrast, said almost nothing, yet she found him nearby more often than made sense, standing guard outside her door some nights, watching the tree line from her window like he expected an attack at any moment. Luca kept his distance during the day, buried in research about bloodlines and sealed records, but she caught him more than once staring at her across the dinner table with an expression he quickly hid whenever she noticed.

Damon remained the hardest to read. Cold in front of the others, controlled, giving orders and setting rules for her safety like it was simply another duty to manage. But late one night, unable to sleep, she found him alone in the study, staring at an old photograph she recognized instantly.

Her parents.

"Where did you get that?" she asked quietly, stepping into the room.

He startled, quickly setting the photograph face down on the desk, though not quickly enough. "It's nothing."

"It's my parents, Damon. Don't tell me it's nothing."

He was silent for a long moment, his shoulders tense beneath his shirt. When he finally spoke, his voice was lower than she'd ever heard it. "Your mother came to me, the week before she died. She told me something was coming for your family. She asked me to protect you, no matter what it cost."

Aurora's breath caught. "What was coming for us?"

Damon looked at her then, really looked at her, something raw and unguarded breaking through the careful control he always wore like armor.

"I don't know," he admitted. "I've spent nine years trying to find out, and every path I've followed has ended the same way. Erased. Sealed. Buried by people with more power than either of us."

"Then why didn't you tell me any of this?"

"Because the last time I got close to an answer," Damon said quietly, "the person helping me disappeared, and I was warned that if I kept looking, you would be next."

Aurora stared at him, her pulse suddenly loud in her ears. "So you stopped."

"I stopped looking," he said. "I never stopped protecting you."

Before she could respond, a sharp knock cut through the silence, followed by Kieran's voice on the other side of the door, tense in a way that made both of them go still.

"Damon. You need to see this. Now."

Damon crossed the room in three strides and pulled the door open. Kieran stood there, expression grim, holding his phone out.

"Perimeter cameras caught someone on the east ridge twenty minutes ago," Kieran said. "Whoever it was knew exactly where our blind spots are."

Aurora felt the cold return to her chest, the same cold that had settled there the moment the councilwoman mentioned sealed records and a bloodline that apparently mattered to more people than she understood.

"Did you get a look at them?" Damon asked.

Kieran turned the phone toward him, jaw tight. "Enough to know they weren't hiding their face on purpose."

He turned the screen toward Aurora next, and the moment she saw the grainy image captured on the ridge, her stomach dropped completely.

It was a face she recognized from an old photograph Noah kept hidden in his desk drawer, one she'd only seen once, years ago, before it disappeared entirely from the house without explanation.

A man who was supposed to have died the same night her parents did.