Chapter 6: Olivia's Warning

My sister stormed into that packhouse like she meant to bring the walls down with her, and for the first time in days, I felt something other than numb.

I heard her before I saw her. Olivia's voice carried clear down the hall, sharp and furious, demanding to know where the council was meeting and why nobody had bothered to send for her sooner. I was still standing outside Alex's door, hovering there like a ghost too stubborn to leave the house it used to live in, when she rounded the corner and her eyes landed on me.

"Clara." She crossed the distance between us in three strides and pulled me into a hug so tight it nearly knocked the breath out of me. "I came the second I heard. Why didn't anyone send word sooner?"

"Everything's been..." I didn't have a word for what everything had been. "Fast. Confusing. I haven't had time to think, let alone send letters."

She pulled back, holding me by the shoulders, studying my face with the same fierce, protective scrutiny she'd given me since we were girls scrubbing pots together in a kitchen neither of us had chosen. "Tell me everything. Don't soften it for me, Clara, I mean it."

So I told her. The attack, the three weeks, the moment his eyes opened and asked for a woman who'd abandoned him years ago. Serena's arrival within hours, dressed like she'd never left. The council's careful, cowardly hesitation. Olivia's expression darkened with every sentence until by the end, her jaw had gone tight enough to ache.

"This is insane." She said it loud enough that a passing servant flinched and hurried on. "He's your husband. You're his Luna. Memory or not, that doesn't just stop being true because some opportunistic ex-fiancée decided to waltz back in at the perfect moment."

"It's not that simple, Liv."

"It is that simple." She started walking, and I had to hurry to keep pace with her, already dreading whatever she intended to do with that much fury riding shotgun in her chest. "Where's the council right now?"

"Olivia—"

"Where, Clara?"

I told her, and she marched straight for the council chamber without slowing down even once, and I followed because stopping her had never once worked in the entire history of our lives together.

She didn't bother knocking. She pushed the doors open hard enough that they cracked against the walls, and every elder seated at that long table turned with varying degrees of alarm and irritation.

"I want to know," Olivia said, voice ringing clear across the room, "why this council is sitting around debating whether my sister is still Luna of this pack."

Elder Marcus straightened in his seat. "This is a closed session—"

"I don't care." Olivia planted both hands on the table and leaned forward, and I watched grown men who commanded warriors twice her size lean back slightly under the weight of her glare. "Clara has been Luna for two years. She's bled for this pack. She's earned every ounce of respect in this room, and the moment the Alpha gets injured and loses a few years of memory, suddenly you're all acting like she's some stranger who wandered in off the road."

"Olivia." I touched her arm, embarrassed, terrified, grateful all at once. "Please."

"No." She didn't look away from Marcus. "Someone explain to me how a mate bond works. Because last I checked, it wasn't something you could just misplace because of a head injury."

Elder Rowan, the oldest among them, the one whose silence usually meant he was choosing his words rather than avoiding the question, finally spoke. "You raise a fair point, child. A mate bond is not erased by memory loss. It is forged in something deeper than recollection. Blood, scent, instinct, soul. Alex's mind may not recognize Clara. But somewhere beneath that confusion, his bond to her almost certainly still exists."

The room went quiet at that. Even Marcus had nothing immediate to say.

"Then why," Olivia pressed, "is this council treating her like a question mark instead of the answer she already is?"

"Because instinct and law are not always the same conversation," Rowan said gently, though there was no comfort in the words, not really. "The Alpha himself must come to recognize his bond, in time, for the pack to follow his lead without division. Until then, we tread carefully. Not because we doubt the truth of the bond, but because we fear what happens if the pack splits over a truth the Alpha himself cannot yet see."

"So you're just going to wait." Olivia's voice cracked with disbelief. "While Serena moves into the packhouse like she already won?"

Nobody answered that. The silence said enough.

Olivia pulled me out of that chamber with her hand wrapped tight around my wrist, and we didn't speak again until we'd reached the small garden courtyard tucked behind the east wing, the one place in this entire estate that had always felt like mine alone.

"Liv." I sank onto the stone bench, suddenly exhausted in a way that went deeper than sleep could fix. "Yelling at the council isn't going to bring his memory back."

"No. But it might remind them you're not going anywhere without a fight." She sat beside me, some of the fury draining out of her now that we were alone, replaced by something softer, more worried. "Rowan's right, though. Did you hear what he said? The bond's still there. Buried, maybe. Confused, definitely. But it's there."

"That's supposed to comfort me?"

"It's supposed to give you hope." She took my hand, the same way she had a hundred times since we were children with nothing but each other. "Clara, I know this feels impossible right now. But you didn't fight your way out of that kitchen, out of nobody wanting an Omega orphan, out of every single person telling you that you'd never be more than someone's afterthought, just to lose everything the second life got hard again."

"I'm scared, Liv." The admission came out smaller than I meant it to, raw in a way I rarely let myself be, even with her. "What if the bond being there doesn't matter? What if he chooses her anyway because she's easy and I'm complicated?"

"Then he's an idiot, and we'll deal with that when it happens." She squeezed my hand hard. "But I don't think you get to give up on a man who built an entire home around you for two years just because his brain forgot the blueprints. The foundation's still there, Clara. Somebody just has to help him find it again."

I wanted to believe her. Some small, stubborn piece of me did, the same piece that had survived every other impossible thing life had thrown at me long before Alex ever existed in it.

But sitting there in that garden, the late afternoon light slipping gold and quiet across the stone path, I felt the weight of the secret still pressed flat against my stomach, unspoken, untouched, growing heavier with every hour Serena spent settling further into the home that used to be only mine.

A flicker of hope, Rowan had given me. Just a flicker.

I only hoped it would be enough to survive whatever Serena intended to build in the dark while the rest of us were still busy hoping.