What the Lodge Remembers

KESSA

Blood doesn't wash out of old floorboards. I learned that watching my father's soak into wood grain that had probably absorbed a hundred years of hunting accidents before it absorbed him — dark, then darker, spreading into the grain like the wood itself was trying to drink him down and hide the evidence.

I didn't move. Some animal part of me had gone very still, the same stillness the cell had taught me, the stillness of a body that's learned stillness is sometimes the only thing it can control.

"We can't stay here." Ronan's voice, low, already moving, already scanning the shattered window for a second shot that hadn't come yet. "Whoever fired that dart knows exactly where we are. Every minute we stand in this room is a minute we're a target."

"He's my father." I heard how thin my own voice had gone, heard it crack on the word like the word itself was too heavy to carry. "I'm not just leaving him on the floor like—"

"You're not." Dorian knelt across from me, hands hovering the way they always did now, asking before touching. Close up, I could see the blood already drying dark on his knuckles from where he'd tried to stop a wound that had stopped needing stopping. "We're not leaving him for scavengers to find. But Ronan's right that we can't stay, and we can't carry him out the front the way we came in. Not if someone's still watching."

Cassian was at the shattered window, gold eyes tracking something in the dark I couldn't see yet. He held up a hand — wait — and for three full seconds none of us breathed.

"Clear," he said finally. "Whoever fired is gone. But they'll have heard the shot land, which means they know they missed the ones that mattered and got the one that didn't need killing to be silenced." His jaw tightened. "There's a service road behind the lodge. Old hunting trail, wide enough for a truck if we're careful. If we're fast, we can be off pack land before anyone circles back to confirm what they think they accomplished."

What they think they accomplished. Like my father was a job someone had checked off a list, and gotten half-credit for.

I made myself stand. My knees didn't want to hold me — the stone floor of that cell hadn’t prepared them for a night like this one — but I locked them anyway, the way I'd locked my spine in the cell doorway, the way I'd apparently decided to lock every part of myself that grief wanted to claim before I'd finished using it.

Grief could come later. Grief had waited long enough for me already. It could wait one more night.

"Then let's move," I said. "Dorian, help me wrap him — I won't leave him bleeding out in the open for whoever comes to find this place next. Ronan, watch the tree line. Cassian, is there anything in this lodge my father would have hidden — papers, a second copy of anything? If he knew this was coming, he might have left more than one trail."

They moved. That was the thing about the thing about the three of them I’d forgotten during all that time locked away — how fast they moved once I gave them something to move toward, instead of a door to stand guilty in front of.

We found nothing else in the lodge. But the search bought me the two minutes I needed to stop shaking long enough to be useful instead of just present.

"Someone needs to contact Elowen," I said, once we were carrying him between us toward the service road, the weight of him heavier than I remembered a person being, heavier than grief alone should have made him. "If pack security finds a body out here before we've explained anything, this looks like exactly what someone wants it to look like — the four of us, murdering the man who signed my imprisonment order. We need someone who'll vouch for us before anyone else forms an opinion."

Dorian's jaw tightened, but he didn't argue. "She's the only one who'll believe us without proof first."

CASSIAN

The walk to the east gate took the better part of an hour, mostly silent, mostly just the sound of four sets of footsteps and the particular quiet that follows people who are carrying something they can't put down and can't quite carry either.

I watched Kessa more than I watched the trail. Old habit. Even through all that time watching her from the wrong side of a betrayal, I'd never quite managed to stop.

She held together the entire walk. That worried me more than if she'd broken. I knew her well enough — had known her long enough, before everything — to understand that Kessa's stillness wasn't the absence of a storm. It was a storm choosing its moment.

"You're quiet," she said, without looking back at me.

"I'm thinking."

"About my father?"

"About what he said before he died." I kept my eyes on the tree line, partly for the watch Ronan had asked of me, partly because it was easier to say this without watching her face while I said it. "Someone inside your own pack. Someone you'd never. That's not a stranger he was warning you about, Kessa. That's someone standing close enough to you that the warning needed saying at all."

She didn't answer for a long moment.

"I know," she said finally. "I've been trying not to think about what that means since the words left his mouth."

KESSA

Elowen met us at the pack's east gate before dawn, guard uniform still half-fastened like she'd dressed running, hair still loose from sleep she must have abandoned the second Dorian's message reached her. She'd been the one constant across three years that had cost me almost everyone else — the only visitor the cell ever saw who wasn't there to gloat, or forget, or make me perform gratitude for scraps of mercy.

She took one look at the four of us — at Malachi's body wrapped and carried between Ronan and Dorian, at the blood still marking Dorian's hands, at my own face, which I imagine told her everything the body didn't need to — and didn't ask a single question before pulling me into a hug fierce enough to hurt. She knew exactly where to find us before I'd told her the gate. I filed that away too, the way I'd been filing everything away, and let myself be held anyway.

"You're out." Her voice cracked against my shoulder. "Gods, Kessa. You're actually out, and I wasn't there for it, I should have been there—"

"You were there for three years when no one else was." I pulled back enough to look at her, this woman who'd sat outside iron bars in the cold more nights than I could count, who'd smuggled me warmer blankets and news of a world I'd been cut off from, who'd never once, not one single time, made me feel like the thing I'd been locked away as. "That's more than the four of us can say for each other. Don't apologize to me for tonight."

Her eyes went to the body between Ronan and Dorian, and something crossed her face — grief, I read it as, grief for a man she'd known her whole life the same way I had, before everything.

"What happened?"

"Someone shot him through a window before he could finish telling us who set this whole thing in motion." I said it flat, because saying it any other way might break something in me I needed intact for a few more hours. "He said it was someone inside the pack. Someone close."

Elowen's face did the careful arithmetic of someone used to holding pack secrets for a living. "Then we need to move fast and move quiet. If council hears a Thorne died before you've had a chance to explain your side, they'll paint you as the reason, not the survivor. You know how fast that story writes itself."

"Can you buy us time?"

"I can buy you the rest of tonight." Her hand found mine, steady in a way that had steadied me through worse nights than this one — the night they'd first locked me away, the anniversary of it every year since, the night I'd finally stopped believing anyone was coming for me at all. "I always have. That hasn't changed just because everything else did."

I believed her. I want that on record, even now, even knowing everything I know now. I believed every word of it completely.

DORIAN

I watched Kessa lean into Elowen's certainty the way a woman leans into the one solid wall left standing in a house that's otherwise come down around her, and something in me — something that should have felt only relief — instead felt a thin, unplaceable unease.

I told myself it was exhaustion. That much guilt didn’t exactly leave a man generous toward the people who’d gotten to be present when I hadn’t. Elowen had sat outside that cell more nights than I had the courage to walk past its door, and some ugly, small part of me apparently hadn't forgiven her for it, even though forgiveness was mine to earn, not hers.

Ronan caught my eye across the gate, and I knew without asking that he'd felt the same flicker and dismissed it the same way I was trying to. Cassian, though — Cassian was watching Elowen with the particular stillness he reserved for things he hadn't decided how to feel about yet, the same stillness he'd used on me for a week after we found out about the letters.

"We should get off the road before full light," Cassian said, instead of whatever he was actually thinking. "Malachi said someone inside the pack. Until we know who, everyone standing outside the four of us is a question mark. No offense meant by that, Elowen."

"Given what you're all carrying right now, I'd be more worried if you weren't suspicious of everyone." A beat, then: "Come on — I know somewhere safer than the house you've already used once. If someone's watching for patterns, that one's burned."

I told myself the unease was nothing. I made myself believe it, the same careful, deliberate way Kessa had made herself believe my hovering hand the night before.

Elowen's hand found the small of Kessa's back as we followed her into the dark — steady, certain, exactly the way it always had.

I watched it happen and said nothing. I would spend a long time wishing I'd said something instead.