Scent of Forever

Chapter Ten: What Selene Knew

I found her the next afternoon in the pack house gardens, alone on a stone bench beneath a bare-branched oak, staring at nothing in particular with the kind of stillness that looked less like peace and more like exhaustion.

"I didn't come to fight," I said, stopping a respectful distance away. "I came because I think we both got handed the same impossible situation, five years apart, and neither of us actually chose it."

Selene didn't look up right away. "You want absolution," she said flatly. "For showing up with his son and turning my entire life sideways for the second time."

"I want the truth," I said. "Jax told me some of it. That your father threatened Hollow Creek's destruction if Corin didn't proceed with you exactly as planned. That the rejection wasn't really about wanting me gone."

That got her attention. She finally looked at me, something complicated moving behind her eyes. "He never told you the rest of it, did he? The part where I begged my father to release me from the arrangement the moment I felt Corin's bond lock onto someone else in that hall. The part where he told me, very calmly, that Hollow Creek would burn within the month if either of us tried to back out." Her jaw tightened. "I have spent five years engaged to a man who has never once looked at me the way he looked at you for three seconds in a crowded room. Five years, Maren. Do you have any idea what that does to a person?"

I hadn't expected the honesty, hadn't expected the raw exhaustion underneath it, and it disarmed some of the defensiveness I'd walked into the garden carrying. "I'm sorry," I said, and I meant it, surprising myself with how much I did.

"I don't want your pity." But some of the sharpness had gone out of her voice. "I want it to be over. All of it — the arrangement, my father's leverage, five years of pretending I don't know exactly what it feels like to stand next to someone who's already given his heart to a memory of somebody else." She looked at me directly. "If you're here to stay — if Corin claims you and the boy properly — that's the first real chance I've had in five years to walk away from this without my father burning an entire pack down out of spite."

"Does your father know you're here now? Talking to me?"

"No." Selene's mouth twisted, something bitter and tired in it. "He believes I'm still smoothing things over with the council, protecting what's left of the arrangement's dignity. He'd be furious if he knew I was sitting in a garden with the woman who wrecked it instead." She glanced toward the house, as if the walls themselves might be listening. "I've gotten good at telling him what he wants to hear. Five years of practice will do that to a person."

"Would he? Actually, do that?"

"My father built his entire reputation on people believing his threats are never empty ones." Selene's expression turned grim. "That's exactly why Halden showed up in your little diner yesterday instead of simply waiting for the wedding invitations. He wanted you to understand, personally, that patience was never really the plan."

"Has he ever actually followed through? On a threat that size?"

"Once, that I know of. A border pack that refused a trade agreement fifteen years ago." Her voice had gone flat, careful, the way people speak of things they've trained themselves not to feel anymore. "There isn't much of that pack left to ask about it now. My father doesn't consider it cruelty. He considers it a demonstration. He's been very patient about needing a new one."

I studied her for a moment, this woman I'd spent five years imagining as some cold, distant rival, and found instead someone as trapped by circumstance as I had ever been, just in a different shape entirely. There was something almost dizzying about it — realizing the villain I'd built so carefully in my head, brick by brick, over five long years of quiet resentment, had spent that same stretch of time trapped in a cage of her own, one she hadn't chosen any more than I'd chosen mine.

"What will you do," I asked, "once it's over? Once there's no arrangement left to hold you here?"

"I honestly don't know." A ghost of something almost like a smile crossed her face, brittle and unpracticed. "I haven't let myself think that far in longer than I can remember. It's strange, imagining a version of my life where I get to choose the next part of it myself."

"You should let yourself think about it," I said. "It's a good feeling once you get used to it. Terrifying, but good."

"Is that what Millbrook was? Good and terrifying?"

"Mostly just ordinary," I said, and found myself almost smiling at the memory of it — the diner, the corner booth with a clear line of sight to both exits, Dahlia's coffee going cold while I cried over things I never fully explained. "I didn't understand how much I needed ordinary until I finally had it. I think you might need the same thing once you're free to choose it."

"I wouldn't know where to start."

"Neither did I," I admitted. "You just start. Badly, probably, at first. Nobody gets it right the first week. I burned so much toast my first month at Dahlia's that she nearly fired me before she ever really hired me."

She studied me a moment, something shifting behind her careful composure, and for the first time since I'd arrived at Thornridge, I felt something that wasn't quite friendship yet, but might, given time, become the beginning of it.

A sharp bell began ringing somewhere behind us, urgent and continuous, cutting through the quiet garden like a blade.

Selene was on her feet instantly; all the exhausted stillness burned away in a heartbeat. "That's the perimeter alarm," she said. "Eastern boundary."

We ran.

By the time we reached the courtyard, half the pack house had already spilled outside, guards moving fast toward the tree line, Corin already shirtless and shifting halfway to wolf form before he'd even fully cleared the front steps. Jax caught my arm before I could follow further, his grip firm, urgent.

"Where's Rowan?" he asked, and the sharp edge in his voice sent ice straight down my spine.

"With Dahlia's cousin, the nursery room, second floor—" I was already turning, already running, Jax half a step behind me, the alarm still screaming across the grounds as guards converged on a breach in the eastern fence line that had apparently opened, without warning, at the exact hour Selene had just finished telling me her father's threats were never empty ones at all.

The garden bench where we'd been sitting only moments before already felt like it belonged to some other, calmer afternoon entirely, one I wasn't sure I'd get the chance to return to anytime soon.

I thought, sprinting across the courtyard with my lungs burning. My heart slamming against my ribs, I thought that I had spent the last ten minutes finally letting myself trust someone new inside these walls, and that the universe, apparently, had decided I wasn't allowed to keep that feeling for longer than the length of one quiet conversation. Somewhere ahead of me, past the shouting and the smoke already curling thin against the darkening sky, my son was alone in a room with an open window, and nothing else in the world mattered more than closing the distance between us before whatever had triggered that alarm reached him first.