FATASS FATED VENGEANCE

Chapter 15: Where Selene Went

The search lasted three days.

Three days of empty rooms and cold trails, of Ironwood’s guards and Thorneheart’s trackers working side by side in a silence that felt less like cooperation and more like shared dread.

I didn’t sleep much. Kian didn’t either.

We took turns pacing the same stretch of hallway outside the room Selene had vanished from, staring at warded walls that should have made her disappearance impossible, until the staring stopped making sense and just became something to do with our hands.

“There’s no scent trail,” Cassian said, joining us on the second night, exhaustion carved deep into his face. “Not one. My trackers have covered every exit from this wing twice.”

“That’s not possible,” Kian said. “Nobody moves a person without leaving something behind.”

“Someone did.”

I sat with that for a long moment, turning it over the way I’d turned over every impossible thing since the night of the ceremony.

“What if nobody moved her,” I said slowly. “What if she left the way someone who knew every ward in this hall would leave. Quietly. On purpose. Without triggering a single alarm because she wasn’t trying to escape a threat , she was following instructions.”

Cassian went very still. “You think she was in contact with someone. Before this.”

“I think my sister has surprised me before,” I said, thinking of a coded letter, a captivity that had cost her more than any of us understood at the time, a woman who’d learned, the hard way, how to survive by making choices nobody else could see coming.

The proof came on the fourth morning, carried in by one of Maren’s scouts, breathless from a hard ride.

A cloak. Selene’s, unmistakably , the pale blue she’d never worn anything but, found snagged on a low branch three miles past Ironwood’s eastern boundary, in a stretch of forest that bordered old, unclaimed territory nobody patrolled anymore.

“There’s more,” the scout said, hesitant, holding out a second item wrapped in cloth. “We found tracks near the cloak. Boot prints. Several sets. Moving with purpose, not with panic.”

Kian unwrapped the cloth.

A single glove. Not Selene’s , too large, too worn, the leather cracked in a pattern that spoke of years spent gripping a blade rather than a quill.

“Ashen King colors,” Dorian said, quiet, examining the stitching along the cuff. “Old ones. From before the war ended. Some of his people never stopped operating in the shadows even after we thought his forces scattered.”

The floor tilted under me.

“They took her,” I said, the words tasting wrong even as I said them. “This wasn’t an escape. This was an extraction.”

“An extraction implies planning,” Cassian said, grim. “Contact. Trust built over time, not a single opportunistic snatch.”

“Weeks,” I said, understanding arriving cold and complete. “It would have taken weeks to build that kind of trust. To coordinate something this clean.”

Kian’s hand found my shoulder, steady, grounding, though I could feel the tension radiating off him too.

“You think she was talking to them,” he said. “Before any of this. Before the retrieval party. Maybe even before the letter she sent you.”

I thought of Selene’s face in Ironwood’s court, pale and shaken after everything she’d testified to. I thought of the sister who’d once fed intelligence to enemy forces for reasons that had, eventually, turned out to be more complicated than simple cruelty.

I thought, too, of how easily people believed the worst version of someone once they’d already been cast as a villain.

“I don’t know what to think anymore,” I admitted. “I want to believe she wouldn’t choose this. I don’t know if that’s faith or just me not wanting to be wrong about her twice.”

We rode out at dawn, the trail leading deeper into unclaimed territory than any of us had traveled before, trees growing thicker and older with every mile, the world around us going quiet in a way that felt deliberate rather than peaceful.

“This land doesn’t belong to anyone,” Maren said, scanning the tree line with the wary focus of someone who’d fought in places just like this before. “No pack claims it. No treaty covers it. Which means whoever’s using it as a hiding place chose it because nobody’s supposed to be watching.”

“Convenient,” Kian said, low.

“Deliberate,” Dorian corrected.

The trail went cold just past midday, the boot prints vanishing into a stretch of rocky ground that held no tracks at all, as if whoever we were following had simply stepped off the earth entirely.

We made camp reluctantly, unwilling to press forward blind in failing light, and I sat apart from the others for a while, staring into the trees, trying to imagine my sister somewhere out there , scared, or complicit, or some impossible tangle of both.

Kian found me there, settling down beside me without a word, his shoulder warm against mine in the cooling evening air.

“You’re not responsible for whatever she chose,” he said quietly. “Whatever it turns out to be.”

“I know that logically.”

“But.”

“But she’s my sister.” I pulled my knees up, wrapping my arms around them. “And I spent so long being angry at her for the ways she hurt me that I don’t know how to hold space for the idea that she might also be a victim in this. Both things feel true. I don’t know how to carry both at once.”

“You don’t have to figure it out tonight.” Kian’s arm came around me, careful, warm. “You just have to keep breathing until we know more.”

I let myself lean into him, grateful, exhausted, the ache of uncertainty easing slightly under the steady fact of him beside me.

We were still sitting like that when Petra’s voice cut through the camp, sharp with urgency.

“Ivy. You need to see this.”

I was on my feet before I’d finished processing the words, Kian right behind me, crossing to where Petra stood at the edge of camp, a folded piece of parchment held out in her hand.

“A rider left this at the edge of our perimeter,” she said. “Didn’t stay to be seen. Just dropped it and rode off before anyone could give chase.”

I took it with hands that weren’t entirely steady.

I recognized the handwriting immediately , elegant, precise, every loop exactly as I remembered it from a letter that had once asked only for my location and nothing else.

Selene’s hand.

But the words themselves were wrong. Stilted. Careful in a way that didn’t match the fluid, confident script forming them, like someone had dictated exactly what to write and watched every stroke of the pen to make sure she didn’t deviate.

Ivy , I’m safe. Please stop searching. Whatever you’ve heard about how I left, know that it was my choice, and that I need you to trust me on this the way I never gave you reason to trust me before. Stay away from the eastern territories. For your own sake. , S.

I read it twice, my chest going tight and cold with a certainty that had nothing to do with the words on the page and everything to do with what wasn’t there.

Selene had never once, in her entire life, signed a letter to me with anything less than her full name.

She’d told me herself, months ago, that initials felt cold. Impersonal. Beneath the formality she’d been raised to perform even when she didn’t mean it.

She’d used her full name every single time.

Until now.

Kian read over my shoulder, and I felt him go rigid the instant he reached the signature.

“That’s not her,” he said, low, dangerous. “Someone’s making her write this.”

I stared at the page, at the careful, coerced precision of every letter, and understood, with a dread that settled deep and permanent in my chest, that wherever my sister was, she was trying to tell me something true buried inside a lie someone else had forced into her hand.