# Chapter 5 — What He Knows### Torin
746 Words
I found my uncle in his quarters twenty minutes after he'd walked out of that dinner, and I didn't bother knocking.
"That was a strange thing to say to my wife." I kept my voice level, though the wolf under my skin was pacing, agitated, in a way it hadn't been since the night my father died and left this club in hands too young to hold it steady. "You knew her mother."
"I knew a great many people, Torin. It's the privilege of having lived longer than you." Halden didn't look up from the drink he was pouring, unbothered, infuriatingly calm. "Careful with that tone. I remember when you were small enough to sit on my knee."
"I remember you telling my father the Moonblood line was extinct. Personally. More than once." I stepped further into the room, close enough now that he had to look at me. "Strange thing to insist on so firmly, if you already knew exactly where the last heir had gone to ground."
Something flickered behind his eyes — gone fast, but not fast enough. "Suspicion doesn't suit you. It's an old man's game, and you're not old yet."
"Answer the question."
"I don't answer to you the way your father's men did," Halden said, quiet, and for the first time since I'd walked in, something genuinely cold moved behind his composure. "I answered to your father because I respected him. You inherited a title, Torin. Respect is a separate matter, and you'd do well to remember which one you're actually short on with this club's older members."
I left before I said something I couldn't take back, my wolf still pacing under my skin, every instinct I'd built over a decade of running this club screaming that my uncle had just told me, without technically admitting anything, that he'd known exactly who Bri Locke's mother was long before her name ever crossed a debt ledger onto my desk.
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I found Bri in the west room, awake, sitting by the window with her knees drawn up, the picture of a woman trying very hard to look calmer than she was.
"He knows something," she said, before I'd even closed the door. "About my mother. About me. He knew her name before I said it."
"I noticed." I crossed the room, sat on the edge of the bed near her, close enough that some part of me registered the same low, electric awareness I'd felt at the altar, quieter now but not gone. "I don't think the debt that brought you here was an accident, Bri. I think someone engineered your father's failure specifically to deliver you into this territory."
"Why." Her voice cracked slightly on the word. "What could I possibly be worth to anyone, twenty-two years after everyone decided I was broken?"
"I don't know yet." It was the truth, and I gave it to her plainly, because something about this woman made half-truths feel like a worse betrayal than they should have, three days into a marriage that was supposed to mean nothing beyond a cleared ledger. "But I intend to find out before my uncle decides what you're worth to him first."
She looked at me a long moment, something shifting in her expression — not quite trust, not yet, but the beginning of it, fragile and unfamiliar on a face that had clearly spent a lifetime expecting to be disappointed by everyone who'd ever claimed to be on her side.
The window behind her shattered inward without warning, glass exploding across the room in a spray of moonlight and splinters, and I had her pulled off the bed and behind me before conscious thought caught up with instinct, my wolf surging forward under my skin with a violence I hadn't felt since the night my father died.
A crossbow bolt was buried in the headboard exactly where her chest had been a half-second earlier.
Outside, in the dark beyond the broken window, I caught the barest flicker of movement — a shape retreating fast into the desert scrub, too controlled and precise to be a random attack, too well-timed to be anything but a message aimed directly at the woman standing frozen behind me.
"Bri." My voice came out rougher than I intended, adrenaline and fury tangled together in my chest. "Whatever you are — whatever my uncle thinks you're worth — someone just decided you're dangerous enough to kill before you finish becoming it."
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