Chapter 7
1054 Words
The room they'd given her smelled like cedar and old stone. Someone had placed a candle on the windowsill—pack custom, she remembered, for those under sanctuary protection. A small mercy. A small cruelty. She hadn't slept.
When the knock came before dawn, she already knew it was him.
Caelum filled the doorway without stepping through it. He'd changed since she last saw him in the document room—traded the council shirt for something plain, dark, unlaced at the throat. His hair was still damp. She didn't ask from what. Some men paced when they couldn't sleep. Some ran until their lungs burned out the thing that was eating them.
"Sit down," he said.
"I'm already sitting."
He looked at her on the edge of the bed, back straight, hands flat on her thighs. The bandaging on her shoulder pulled when she breathed too deep. She breathed shallow.
"Then stay sitting."
He came in. Didn't close the door all the way—left it cracked, like he needed the exit, or like he was making sure she understood she wasn't a prisoner in this specific room at this specific moment. She noted the difference. She noted everything about him, the way she always had, against her will, the way you can't stop noting a wound that won't close.
He stood at the window. The courtyard below was dark. The candle flame leaned toward him when he moved past it.
"The dossier," he said. "There's a name in the secondary ledger. Cross-referenced twice. Buried under supply chain notation."
She waited.
"Kael Voss."
Her father's name in his mouth. She felt it land somewhere below her sternum.
"He's listed as a contact point," Caelum continued. "Not the source. A relay. Someone who moved information between Greywood and a third party we haven't identified yet." He paused. "The last entry is dated six weeks ago."
"Six weeks," she said. Her voice came out level. She'd trained it to do that.
"Seraphine."
"Tell me."
He turned from the window. She'd seen Caelum Draveth face down a challenge from a rival alpha twice his age without flinching. She'd seen him stand over injured packmates in a field while his own blood ran into the grass and give orders like the pain was happening to someone else. She had never seen him look the way he looked right now.
"Our network flagged an incident two weeks ago. In the Morthfen lowlands, near the old crossing." He stopped. Started again. "It was ruled a hunting accident."
The candle flame went very still.
"Your father is dead."
The words fell into the room like stones into deep water. She counted the ripples. One. Two. She counted because if she stopped counting she would have to feel it, and if she felt it she would come apart in front of him, and that was the one thing—the last thing—
"Seraphine."
"Don't." The word came out sharp enough to cut. "Don't say my name like that."
He didn't. He was quiet.
She pressed her palms flat against her thighs until she could feel the tendons in her wrists pull. Her father's hands had been like hers—broad, scarred across the knuckles. He'd taught her to track by scent before she could read a map. He'd taught her that rogues weren't made by choice, they were made by circumstance, and the only shame was in pretending otherwise.
He'd been routing information. She'd known he was involved—peripherally, carefully, the way Kael Voss did everything. She hadn't known it had gotten this far.
She hadn't known he was gone.
"How." Not a question. A demand.
"The official report says a trap. Misfired, caught him wrong." Caelum's voice was flat and deliberate, the tone he used when he was keeping something controlled. "The Morthfen pack accepted the ruling. They had no reason not to."
"But your network didn't."
"No."
"What did your network find?"
"The trap was set. Not sprung by accident." He moved away from the window. Not toward her—just away from it, like he needed to put something between himself and the glass. "The placement was intentional. Someone knew his route."
Someone in Greywood. Someone in the chain the dossier documented. Someone who had decided Kael Voss was a thread worth cutting before she could follow it back to the source.
She'd been carrying his work in her jacket lining. She'd crossed three territories with it pressed flat against her ribs. She'd thought she was delivering evidence. She hadn't known she was carrying the last thing he'd managed to pass before they killed him for passing it.
She made a sound. She hadn't meant to. It was small and it was ugly and it came from somewhere she didn't have a name for, the place where grief lives before it becomes grief, when it's still just the body understanding what the mind refuses.
Caelum looked away.
That was the thing she would remember. Not the words, not the confirmation of what she'd already begun to suspect somewhere in the back of her mind since she'd noticed the dossier was six weeks old and her father hadn't made contact in five. She would remember Caelum Draveth turning his face away from hers.
Not from discomfort. Not from contempt.
To give her something.
The only privacy available in a room with no walls between them.
She pulled it back in. Whatever had escaped, she gathered it up, pressed it down, held it behind her back teeth. Her shoulder ached. The candle burned. Outside, somewhere past the courtyard wall, the dark forest breathed in and out like something enormous and patient.
When she was certain her voice would hold, she said: "I didn't know he was dead."
"I know," Caelum said.
"I've been carrying that dossier for three weeks."
"I know."
"He was already gone when the courier gave it to me." The shape of that was monstrous. She turned it over. Set it down. "Someone wanted it to reach you."
Caelum looked at her then. His jaw was tight. The mate bond—dormant, suppressed, present anyway like a scar that aches before rain—pulled once, low and sharp.
"Or someone wanted it to reach you first," he said. "And make sure you never made it out."
- Writer
