Shadows & Secrets

Chapter 19

"I don't. That's the honest answer, and I'm going to give you honest answers this morning even when they're worse than lies would be. The skirmish was real. The border dispute was real. Mara was killed in it. Whether she was killed because of it or whether someone used it as cover — I don't know. I looked. I could not find out. I have never been able to find out. And I have carried the not-knowing for sixteen years because the alternative was to stop protecting you in order to investigate, and I was not willing to make that trade."

Aurora closed her eyes briefly.

When she opened them, the courtyard was the same. The wall. The bench. The cold cup. The man beside her who had carried her eleven miles through a forest at night and had never once told her.

"You've known what I am my whole life," she said.

"Yes."

"You engineered my recruitment into the Order."

"I ensured it. Mara had already submitted your name before she died. I made certain the recommendation reached my desk instead of someone else's, and that when you accepted, you came into my chain."

"So you could watch me."

"So I could protect you." He turned to face her fully now. "And I know how that sounds. I know that from where you're sitting there may not be a difference. I've had four years to think about the fact that there might not be a difference, and I've never resolved it, and I'm not going to pretend to you this morning that I have."

That honesty was the hardest part.

She had come out to this courtyard prepared for a man who would defend himself. Who would explain and justify and reframe until the shape of what he'd done looked like something she was supposed to be grateful for. She had braced herself against that man.

This man was not that man.

This man was giving her the truth and then declining to tell her how to feel about it, and it was so much harder to stay angry at him for it, and she resented that too.

"There's more," she said. It was not a question. "Damien and Kiyiya both said there was more. Kiyiya paced me last night — she wouldn't let me take it all at once. But you're not Kiyiya. So I want to know if there's a version of this where you're still holding something back this morning because you've decided I can't handle it yet."

Mikhail looked at her for a long moment.

"There's one thing," he said.

Aurora's stomach tightened.

"Tell me."

"It's not a secret I've kept to control you. It's a thing I don't fully understand, and I don't want to hand you half of it and have you build the wrong shape out of it." He paused.

"But you've earned the right to decide for yourself whether a half-truth is better than none. So I'll tell you the half I have, and I'll be clear about where it ends."

"Tell me."

He was quiet for a moment, ordering it.

"The hardliner faction that wanted your line ended," he said. "It never fully disbanded. It went quiet after the purge because it believed the work was finished. There was nothing left to hunt."

He held her eyes. "The disappearances near Bloodmoon's border — the ones that pulled us here — they've woken it up.”

“Someone is taking root-bonded women, and the way they're being taken carries a signature the network recognizes. It's the same method that was used to find Silverveils during the purge. Old detection work. The kind almost no one alive still knows how to do."

The pull at the edge of Aurora's awareness — the frequency, the almost-voice, the thing that had followed her from Mooncrest — moved through her like cold water finding a lower level.

"You think whoever's taking these women," she said slowly, "is connected to the people who killed my parents."

"I think the methods are connected. Whether the people are the same, or students of the same knowledge, or something else that learned the old work and is using it for its own reasons — I don't know. That's where my half ends."

His voice was level.

"But I'll tell you what frightens me most, Aurora, because you should be frightened of it too. The old detection work was built to find Silverveils. It found your line, over and over, for generations, no matter how well you hid. And it is being used again, right now, along a border you are currently standing forty miles from."

The morning did not change.

But something in Aurora went cold and clear and very focused, the way it did before a fight.

"It's looking for me," she said.

"It's looking for what you are. Whether it knows you specifically exist yet, I can't say. But the moment your abilities fully wake — and they are waking, I've watched it happening for two days, the wards recognized you, you've been hearing something none of the rest of us can hear — the moment that happens, you will be findable in a way you have never been before."

He held her gaze.

"That is the thing I've been managing since Mooncrest. Not to control you. To buy time. To get you somewhere protected before the waking finished."

"Bloodmoon."

"Bloodmoon. The safest place you could be.”