Shadows & Secrets

Chapter 18

Mikhail was already awake.

Aurora had expected that. He was a man who slept the way alphas slept when something in their territory had gone wrong — lightly, and not for long, and never past the first gray edge of morning.

She found him in the small side courtyard off the eastern wing, where a low stone bench sat against a wall worn smooth by decades of weather. He was sitting with his forearms on his knees and his hands loose between them, watching nothing in particular. A cup of something had gone cold beside him. He had not touched it in a while.

He heard her before she reached him.

Of course he did.

"You didn't sleep much," he said, without turning.

"No."

"Neither did I."

Aurora stopped a few feet away. She did not sit.

The morning was cool and quiet. The pack house had not fully woken. Somewhere behind them the kitchen had begun its work, but out here there was only the wall, and the bench, and the two of them, and the thing that had been sitting between them since Mooncrest finally with enough light to be looked at directly.

Mikhail turned his head and looked at her.

Whatever he saw in her face made something in his own settle into resignation.

"Damien told you," he said.

"Damien told me what Damien knows."

"Which is most of it."

"Not all of it." She kept her voice level. "He said there were pieces only you could give me. He said one of them was who brought me to Emerald Forest."

Mikhail did not look away.

That, she would think later, was the thing that kept her from turning around and walking out of the courtyard. He did not look away. He did not reach for the cold cup to buy himself a moment.

He did not arrange his face into the careful diplomatic composure she had watched him wear across four years of Council meetings.

He looked at her, and he let her see that he had been dreading this exact morning for a very long time.

"Sit," he said. "Please. Not because I'm asking you to make this easier on me. Because you've been standing since before dawn and you're going to be standing for a lot of it today and there's no reason to start now."

She almost refused on principle.

Then she sat. At the far end of the bench. With space between them.

Mikhail accepted the space without comment.

For a moment neither of them spoke.

"I brought you to Emerald Forest," he said.

Aurora had known it. Damien's silence the night before had already told her. But hearing it in Mikhail's own voice, in his own mouth, in the cool quiet of this courtyard, was a different kind of knowing.

"You," she said.

"Me."

"Eighteen years ago you were seven years old," Mikhail said, "and you had just watched something no seven-year-old should watch, and you had a hole in your memory where the last day of your life should have been, and I carried you eleven miles through a forest at night because you would not let go of my collar long enough for me to shift and run."

The morning went very still around them.

Aurora did not move.

"I was not Council then," Mikhail said. "I was not an Alpha then. I was a young wolf attached to a network — the same network Damien would have described to you, the one that had spent a generation trying to keep the last of your line alive. We had been watching your parents from a distance for years. We were not close enough. When the hardliners found them, we were half a day behind." His jaw tightened. "Half a day. I have thought about that half day every day of my life since."

Aurora's hands had gone very still in her lap.

"My parents," she said.

"Your mother did something before they reached her. To your memory. I don't fully understand it — none of us did, it was Silverveil work and the Silverveils were nearly gone — but she reached into you and she took the last day and she hid it somewhere the hardliners couldn't read it out of you. She knew they would try. She knew that if they could read what you'd seen, they could use it to find the rest of the network. So she took it from you to protect all of us."

His voice did not break, but it came close.

"And then she and your father held the door long enough for you to run. And you ran. And we found you at the tree line, and I carried you out, and I took you to the one pack we trusted to raise you without asking questions we couldn't afford to have answered."

Aurora sat with it.

She sat with it the way you sit with a wound you can feel the shape of but not yet the depth.

"Mara," she said.

"Mara Wildheart was one of ours. Yes."

"She died two years later."

Mikhail was quiet for a moment.

"Yes."

"Was it an accident."

He did not answer immediately.

And in the not-answering, Aurora felt the thin ground under her go a little thinner.

"I don't know," Mikhail said finally.

"You don't know."