Marked In The Dark

CHAPTER 10

I did not go with her immediately.

That was the first thing I had ever done that Lena had not expected me to do. I saw it in her face, the small recalibration, the adjustment of someone who had prepared for a particular response and received a different one entirely.

"Give me ten minutes," I said.

"Nora, what I have to tell you is…"

"Ten minutes," I said again. Evenly. Without apology.

I walked back down the corridor toward the east wing and found Lillian exactly where I expected to find her, in the small sitting room off our rooms, her medical bag open on the table in front of her, reorganizing her supplies with the focused patience of someone who reorganized things when she needed something to do with her hands.

She looked up when I came in. Read my face in approximately two seconds.

"What happened?" she said.

"Lena is here."

Lillian set down the bandage roll she was holding with a deliberateness that communicated everything she was not going to say out loud in case someone was in the corridor.

"Why?"

"Delivery. Formally." I sat down across from her. "But she wants to talk to me privately. She says she has information about my mother." I pressed both palms flat on the table. "And about why Caden's father knew her name."

Lillian was very still.

"Caden's father," she said slowly.

"That is what she said."

"And you believe her?"

I thought about Lena's face in the corridor. The smile that had dropped away. The urgency that had not felt performed. The thing underneath her expression that had looked, for the first time in my memory, like genuine fear.

"I think she believes it," I said. "Whether the information itself is accurate or whether Gerald has sent her here to deliver something designed to destabilize me, I do not know yet." I looked at Lillian. "But I cannot not hear it."

Lillian nodded. The nod of someone who understood the logic even if they did not like it.

"I'm coming with you," she said.

"I know."

I found Lena in the small reception room near the east wing entrance, the bundle of delivery goods set aside on a chair, her formal posture abandoned in favor of sitting with her knees together and her hands folded tight in her lap. She looked up when I came in with Lillian behind me.

She looked at Lillian. Then at me.

"This is a private conversation," she said.

"Lillian stays," I said. "Or the conversation does not happen."

Lena pressed her lips together. Then she nodded.

I sat down across from her. Lillian stood near the door, quiet and present the way she was always quietly present at the things that mattered.

Lena looked at her hands for a moment. Then she looked at me.

"Gerald did not send me," she said.

I had not expected that.

"I volunteered to bring the delivery," she continued. "Because I needed to see you without him knowing why." She exhaled. "What I am going to tell you, if he finds out I told you, he will not forgive it. I want you to understand that I am taking a real risk."

"Why?" I said. "Why take the risk for me?"

She looked at me for a long moment. Something moved across her face that was complicated and genuine and did not have the clean lines of performance.

"Because I have been terrible to you," she said. "And because what I found out three days ago made me understand that everything he ever told us, about you, about your mother, about why you were brought into our house, was a lie." She paused. "And I am not, I am not going to sit with that and say nothing just because saying something costs me something."

The room was very quiet.

"Tell me," I said.

Lena breathed in slowly.

"Your mother's name was Sera Coles," she began. "Low ranking pack member, died of fever, left you behind, that is the story Gerald told. That is the story everyone in Clearwater believes." She looked at me steadily. "It is not the true story."

I kept my face still. "Go on."

"Your mother was not low ranking," Lena said. "She was the daughter of the former Ironpeak Beta. Her father served under Caden's father, Alpha Aldric Wolfe, for twenty years." She paused to let that land. "She grew up inside Ironpeak's walls. She was educated here. She was known here." Another pause. "She and Aldric Wolfe were close. Not, it was not that. It was not inappropriate. But they were close in the way that a young woman and an older mentor can be close when she has no father of her own and he has no daughter."

I was looking at the table. At the grain of the wood. At the place where two planks met in a straight clean line.

"What happened to her?" I said.

"She left Ironpeak when she was twenty two," Lena said. "There was a political situation, a treaty negotiation that required Ironpeak to distance itself from certain family connections to maintain neutrality. Her father, the Beta, was retired as part of that negotiation. She went with him." Lena's voice was careful and precise, the voice of someone who had rehearsed this. "She ended up in Clearwater because that was where her father had distant connections. She met a man. He died before you were born. She was left alone and low ranking in a pack that was not hers with a baby and no standing."

"And Gerald took me in," I said.

"Gerald took you in because Aldric Wolfe asked him to." Lena held my eyes. "Personally. Not through the Alpha. Through Gerald directly. Because Aldric had looked after your mother when she had no one and when she died he wanted to know you were provided for." A pause. "Gerald agreed because you do not say no to a request from the Alpha of Ironpeak, even an informal one. But he resented it every day because he never told anyone why he had taken you and so he could never explain to the pack why a ward with a dormant wolf and no standing was being housed and fed under his roof."

I thought about Gerald. His flat dangerous silences. The way he had looked at me every day of my life like I was a debt he had not chosen to take on. The way he had never once explained to me or anyone else why I was there.

He had not been able to.

Because to explain it he would have had to say that the Alpha of Ironpeak had personally requested my care. And that would have raised questions about who I was and who my mother had been that Gerald had decided were better left buried.

"Why are you telling me this now?" I said. "What changed three days ago?"

Lena was quiet for a moment.

"I found a letter," she said. "In Gerald's study. I was not looking for anything. I was getting something he asked me to get and it was in the wrong drawer and I opened it because the handwriting on the outside was old and I was curious." She pressed her hands together. "It was from Aldric Wolfe. Written fourteen years ago. When you were six."

I looked at her.

"What did it say?"

"It said that he had reason to believe your mother's bloodline carried something significant. A suppressed wolf ability that was not dormant but blocked, generational, passed through certain maternal lines in Ironpeak's founding families." She met my eyes. "He said if that ability manifested in you it would need to be handled carefully and not suppressed further. He asked Gerald to let him know if your wolf did not wake at the normal age." Lena paused. "Gerald never responded to that letter. He never told Aldric that your wolf had not woken. He just, kept you there, and kept the information, and said nothing."

The fire in the room had burned low without anyone tending it. The light was different now, flatter, the particular light of a morning that had moved past its bright early hours into something more complicated.

"Aldric Wolfe is dead," I said.

"Yes. Three years ago."

"But Caden would know." I said it slowly, turning it over. "If his father knew about my mother, if he knew about me, Caden would have access to his father's records."

"Yes," Lena said.

I thought about the gathering. Caden walking the line of unmated women. Stopping in front of me. Selecting me. Saying this one in that flat certain voice.

I thought about Rowan telling me they had been looking for an unmated female with a suppressed wolf.

I thought about Caden sitting across a dinner table from me asking if I was afraid of him.

I thought about three in the morning and a hand flat against a door.

He had not just found his fated mate on Mating Night.

He had found the daughter of a woman his father had loved like a child. The granddaughter of his father's most trusted Beta. Someone connected to Ironpeak by blood and history long before the bond had ever entered the equation.

"He knew who I was," I said. Not to Lena. To myself.

"I think so," Lena said quietly. "I think he has known since before the gathering."

The room absorbed that.

Lillian made a small sound near the door. I did not look at her because I could not afford to look at her right now. If I looked at her I would feel the full weight of it and I needed to stay functional for the next few minutes.

"Why does Gerald want me bound to Ironpeak?" I said. "If he has resented having me all this time, why not let me go quietly? Why the ultimatum? Why the three days?"

Lena looked at me.

"Because Aldric's letter mentioned one more thing," she said. "If your suppressed ability manifested fully, the bloodline you carry would make you relevant to Ironpeak's succession." A pause. "Not the Alpha succession. Something older than that. A founding family connection that carries certain rights within Ironpeak's pack law." She held my eyes. "Gerald has been sitting on that information for fourteen years. The moment you came home with a mating mark on your neck, he saw his opportunity. Not to protect you. To use you."

I stood up.

I could not sit still with this inside me.

I walked to the window and looked out at the training ground where two hours ago I had run forms with Bren and felt, briefly, like someone who knew what her body was for.

My mother had grown up inside these walls.

Caden's father had loved her like a daughter.

And Caden had known who I was when he stopped in front of me at the gathering and said this one in that certain voice.

He had known.

He had brought me here knowing.

I turned from the window.

"Thank you," I said to Lena.

She looked surprised. Like she had prepared for anger and received something she did not have a category for.

"Nora, I…"

"I mean it." I looked at her directly. "You did not have to come here. You took a real risk and you did it anyway." I paused. "That matters."

Something moved across her face. Raw and undefended and gone quickly.

She stood and gathered her things.

At the door she stopped.

"He is not a bad man," she said. Not about Gerald. "The things I have heard about him, the stories, Damien's warnings." She looked at me over her shoulder. "He chose you in a lineup of women who were prettier and better connected and higher ranking. He chose you and I watched his face when he did it and it was not political." She paused. "I just thought you should know that too."

She left.

I stood in the middle of the room with Lillian and the dying fire and the full impossible weight of what I had just been told.

Lillian crossed the room and took both my hands in hers and held them.

"Breathe," she said.

I breathed.

"He knew who I was," I said. "Before the gathering. Before the bond. He already knew."

"Yes," Lillian said.

"Which means when he chose me in that lineup it was not just the bond recognizing me." I looked at her. "He made a choice. A real one. With full information."

Lillian looked at me steadily. "Yes."

I thought about the study this morning. His grey eyes holding mine. I have been certain about everything for four years. You are the first thing I have been completely uncertain about.

He had been uncertain.

Not about who I was.

About whether I would stay.

I let go of Lillian's hands.

"I need to find Rowan," I said.

I was halfway to the door when it opened from the outside.

Rowan stood in the doorway with an expression I had not seen on his face before. Something tight and urgent underneath the careful surface.

"Nora," he said. "You need to come with me."

"What happened?"

"Caden." He glanced down the corridor. "He found something in his father's records this morning. Something he did not know was there." His eyes met mine. "He is asking for you specifically. Right now."

My heart turned over.

"What did he find?" I said.

Rowan looked at me for a moment with the expression of a man measuring how much to say in a corridor.

"A letter," he said. "From his father. Written fourteen years ago." He paused. "With your mother's name in it."

The corridor was very still.

He already knew I was here.

But he had not known everything.

Until now