MARKED BY THE ENEMY

CHAPTER 3: TOMORROW

Elira's POV

Tomorrow, it turned out, meant nothing. I woke up to sunlight cutting through unfamiliar curtains and a tray of food someone had left outside my door sometime in the night eggs gone cold, toast gone stiff, a note in handwriting I didn't recognize that just said, eat. No signature. I ate anyway, because being furious on an empty stomach felt like a worse plan than being furious on a full one.

Then I waited, nobody came. By noon I'd counted the floorboards in my room twice, tried the door four times still unlocked, still useless, since the hallway just led to a wall of silence and a house that felt bigger and emptier than it should and rehearsed at least a dozen versions of the conversation I was owed. “You said today. You said we'd talk about my sister.”

By the time the door finally opened, I'd worked myself into something closer to rage than fear, which I decided was an improvement. It wasn't Kane. It was Naya, holding a stack of folded clothes that were clearly not mine, her expression unreadable in a way that felt practiced.

"He's dealing with something," she said, before I could ask. "He said today," I replied like I didn't hear what she said. "I know what he said," she replied. "That's not an answer."

Naya set the clothes down on the end of the bed with more care than the moment seemed to need, like she was buying herself a second to decide how much to tell me. "There was another incident last night. Near the border. Kane has been in council since dawn." "Another incident like the one I watched happen in the clearing?"

Something flickered across her face not quite surprise, more like she was recalibrating how much I already understood. "No, Different kind" she said carefully. "That's not an answer either,"I said. "It's the only one you're getting from me," she replied but she didn't leave.

She stood there a moment longer, studying me the way you'd study a lock you weren't sure you wanted to pick. "You really don't know anything about us, do you. About what we are, how this works." "I know you executed a man in the woods and then a different man knocked me unconscious and brought me to his house like I was luggage." I crossed my arms. "I'm learning fast."

To my surprise, something that might have been the ghost of a laugh crossed her face before she caught it. "You've got a mouth on you." "So I've been told. Recently. By a man with claws." "He doesn't usually miss things," Naya said, and there was something underneath it I couldn't quite place not quite warning, not quite something else.

"The fact that he hasn't decided what to do with you yet, three days after finding a human witness to an execution standing in his territory that should tell you something," she said to me. "Tell me what?"I asked scared. "That you're not what he expected to find out there." She picked up the empty breakfast tray. "For what it's worth, the execution wasn't about cruelty.”

Ren broke pack law in a way that gets people killed, human people, the kind of people your sister might have been standing next to when it happened. Kane doesn't do what he did last night for fun. He does it because if he doesn't, worse things happen to people who can't protect themselves."

That stopped me cold. "What does that have to do with Mara?" Naya's face closed like a door. "That's not mine to tell you." She turned to go, then paused in the doorway, not quite looking back. "He'll come tonight. He always keeps his word eventually, just not always on the timeline you want."

She left before I could push further, and I spent the rest of the afternoon turning her words over like stones, looking for what was underneath them. " The kind of people your sister might have been standing next to.” Not vague. Specific enough to mean something. Specific enough that my hands were shaking again by the time the light outside started turning gold.

Kane came just after dark, and I knew before he said a word that whatever conversation I'd been rehearsing all day wasn't the one I was about to have. He looked older than he had that morning not in years, but in something behind the eyes, like a man who'd spent the day making decisions he didn't like the taste of. He didn't sit.

He stood near the door like he might need the exit, which struck me as strange, considering he was the most dangerous thing in this house by a significant margin."I owe you a conversation," he said. "You owe me a lot of things. Start with that one," I answered.

The corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile, gone before it fully arrived. Then it vanished entirely, and what replaced it was harder to look at. "The man I killed last night," he said. "Ren, He wasn't executed for breaking a border rule. He was executed for trafficking humans across pack lines using our territory to move people nobody would ever look for, because who checks werewolf land for missing persons?"

The room tilted, the same way it had the morning I woke up in this house. "We've been hunting the operation for months," Kane went on, watching my face the way you'd watch someone standing too close to a ledge. "Ren was one piece of it. Not the top of it.

I killed him because he was about to disappear before he could tell us who he answered to." He paused, and whatever came next, I could see he'd been dreading saying it out loud all day. "Three weeks ago is roughly when we think the operation moved its last group through this stretch of border." I couldn't breathe right. "Are you telling me my sister"

"I'm telling you I don't know," he said, and it was the first time since the clearing that his voice wasn't perfectly controlled there was something rougher underneath it. "I'm telling you it's possible. And I'm telling you that if she went through what I think she went through, you finding her alive depends entirely on how fast we find out who Ren was working for."

I sat down hard on the edge of the bed because my legs had stopped being reliable, "Then let me help." "No,” he replied sharply. "You just told me my sister might be" "I told you because you deserved to know what you're standing in the middle of." His eyes didn't leave mine. "Not because I'm putting you anywhere near the people responsible for it."

"She's my sister." "And you're a human with no training standing in a war you don't understand, in a house full of wolves who are not all as patient as I am." He said it flatly, but something underneath the words sounded almost like it cost him something to say. "You want to find her. So do I. That doesn't mean you get to walk into the fire to do it."

I looked up at him, furious and terrified and, underneath both, something dangerously close to grateful that he'd told me the truth at all when he clearly could have chosen not to. "Then what am I supposed to do," I said, "just sit here?"

Kane held my gaze for a long moment, and when he finally answered, his voice had dropped low enough that I had to lean in to catch it. "For now," he said, "you stay where I can protect you. Whether either of us likes that or not."