The Last Ashford

Truths or Lies

For a second, I couldn't move.

Della's hand was still on my arm. Her fingers hadn't loosened. Her face was the same pale, tight, frightened thing it had been in the diner when Roan was talking, and I stood there in the front doorway of the only home I'd ever known and felt every version of this woman I had spent nineteen years memorizing — cold, cutting, dismissive, always two steps ahead of whatever I tried to say — collapse into this one, smaller thing.

Fear.

"What did you just say to me?" My voice came out quiet. Not soft. Quiet is a different thing. Quiet means you are paying very close attention.

"You heard me." Her grip tightened just slightly, like she was trying to hold me in place by force of will more than muscle. "Don't go with him."

"You just told me the person who killed my family is connected to Kael." I kept my voice at that same flat level. "That is not something you get to say and then refuse to explain."

"I said what I said."

"Della." I pulled my arm free. She let it go this time, which told me something — she wasn't trying to stop me physically. She was trying to scare me into stopping myself. "You have nineteen years of answers I've never been allowed to ask for. Roan is in a hospital bed with a bullet in her shoulder. Someone shot at her car tonight on a quiet street in the middle of town, and the last thing she said to me before she passed out was that *he's never been done.* So you are going to tell me what you know, right now, tonight, or I am walking out that door with whatever pieces I have and you can live with that."

Finn was on the stairs behind me. I could feel him there — he hadn't moved since Della grabbed my arm, holding himself still the way he always held himself still when his mother was in the room and something was wrong, like a man standing near a fire and trying not to breathe.

Della looked at him. Something crossed her face when she did. Not guilt exactly — but something adjacent to it, something with the same shape.

"Go to your room, Finn."

"I'm staying," he said.

"Finn—"

"I'm staying, Mum."

She looked back at me. The silence stretched long enough that I could hear the clock on the hallway wall ticking, the distant sound of Kael's SUV still idling at the curb outside, and the particular kind of quiet that falls over a house when everyone in it is waiting for the same thing to break.

"Sit down," she said finally.

I didn't want to sit down. I wanted to keep my bag on my shoulder and stay exactly where I was, close enough to the door to leave. But I sat at the hallway table — the small one under the mirror, the one nobody ever used except to drop keys on — because I needed what she knew more than I needed to look ready to run.

Della didn't sit. She crossed her arms over her chest instead, and for a long moment she looked at a spot on the wall above my head, jaw working, like she was sorting through everything she knew and deciding how little she could give me and still call it the truth.

"I don't know his name," she said.

"Start with what you do know."

"What I know is what Marcus told me when I married him. He told me there was a child in the house who came from somewhere dangerous, and that dangerous meant I was never to ask questions, never to push on her history, never to draw attention to the mark on her ear." She said ‘the mark on her ear’ the way someone says the name of a thing they've been superstitious about for a long time. "He told me the people who would come looking for her wouldn't announce themselves. They'd look ordinary. They'd be close. And if I ever suspected anyone of asking too many questions about her or about how she came to be here, I was to tell him immediately and no one else."

"Did anyone ever ask?" I said.

Her jaw tightened. "Once. About six years ago. A wolf from outside the territory came through on a routine alliance visit, and at dinner he asked Marcus — very casually, very politely — whether he had any children and how many. Marcus said two, both natural born. The man looked right at you across the table and said what a lovely family. And then he left, and Marcus moved the annual review to a different location the following year and never explained why."

My stomach turned over slowly. I had been thirteen years old six years ago. I had sat at that dinner table a dozen times during alliance visits, refilling bread baskets and clearing plates and making myself small the way I had been trained to, and someone had looked at me across the table and been searching for something specific.

"Why didn't you tell me?" I asked.

"Because knowing would have made you ask questions, and asking questions would have made you visible." Her voice cracked on the last word, just slightly, just enough for me to hear. "Visible girls in your position don't survive."

I sat with that. Part of me wanted to take it as something close to care — the closest Della had ever come to it, maybe. The rest of me remembered nineteen years of dismissal and cold shoulders and being made to feel like a burden she'd inherited, and couldn't quite make the two things fit together.

"You said Kael's family," I said. "You said I was walking toward the wolf who murdered my family. That's not a guess. That's specific."

Here is where Della went still in a different way. Not the tight, controlled stillness of a woman managing what she says, but the stillness of a woman who has gone one word too far and knows it.

"I spoke out of fear," she said. "I don't have proof of anything."

"What do you have?"

"Nothing that would hold up."

"Della." I stood up. "I am walking out that door in two minutes regardless of what you tell me. The only choice you have right now is whether I leave knowing something or knowing nothing. And if I leave knowing nothing and something happens to me, that is a thing you will carry for the rest of your life, which I suspect is already heavy enough."

She flinched. I hadn't meant it cruelly, but I hadn't not meant it either.

She looked at Finn again. He looked back at her steadily, the way he always did — not pushing, not judging, just present, which from Finn was always the most pressure he ever needed to apply.

"There was a council," she said. "Not Ashwood, not Iron Claw. The old Crimson Moon council. Before the m******e. Marcus said they had allies in every pack — wolves loyal to the Ashford bloodline who held positions in other territories on purpose, so the Crimson Moon Alpha always had eyes inside other houses."

"Okay," I said slowly.

"After the m******e, those allies went dark. Some of them died too. Some of them just disappeared. But Marcus always believed — and this is Marcus, who doesn't say things lightly — he always believed that whoever ordered the m******e didn't just want the Ashford family dead. They wanted that network. Those positions. They wanted the influence the Ashford line had spent generations building, and they wanted it without the Ashfords in it." She paused. "That kind of thing doesn't happen without planning. It doesn't happen without someone who already had access."

"Someone inside the packs," I said.

"Someone at the top of them," Della said. "Someone who is still at the top. That's what Marcus believed. That's why he was so careful, all these years, about who he told and how much." She looked directly at me for the first time since we'd sat down, and her eyes were old and tired and carrying something I had never once in nineteen years seen on her face before. Regret. Real regret, the kind that's had years to settle in and harden. "Iron Claw sits at the top of three packs, Wren. It always has."

The words hit me the same way the bond had hit me three nights ago — physical, sudden, knocking the air out of me in a way I hadn't braced for.

"That could be anyone in Iron Claw," I said. "That's not Kael."

"I said I had no proof." Her voice was flat again. "I said I had fear. Fear and nineteen years of watching a very powerful family stay very powerful, and never once being able to explain exactly how."

Outside, a car door opened and closed. I heard boots on the front path — one set, unhurried, and I knew without looking that it was one of Kael's guards coming to find out why I hadn't come back down yet.

I picked up my bag.

"Wren." Della's voice stopped me at the door. I looked back. She was standing in the middle of the hallway with her arms still folded tight across her chest, and she looked — for the first and only time I could remember — like a woman who needed to say something and didn't know how to make herself say it. "If I made it harder for you here than it needed to be — "

"You did," I said. "We can talk about that when I get back."

I didn't wait to see her face when I said *when* instead of *if.* I picked that word deliberately, and I needed her to hear it, and I needed to believe it myself, so I walked out before either of us could take it back.

Kael was still by the SUV. He looked at me when I came down the path. He looked at my face and then at the bag and then back at my face, and he didn't ask any of the obvious questions, which I was grateful for, because I didn't have any answers I was ready to say out loud yet.

I got in.

The drive to Iron Claw territory was twenty minutes on dark mountain roads, and neither of us spoke for most of it. The guard was up front. Kael sat beside me in the back, not close, arms resting on his knees, looking out his own window at the trees going past.

We were almost at the gates when he said, quietly, "What did she say to you?"

I stared at the road ahead. "She said she was afraid."

He waited. He was patient in that deliberate way of someone who has learned that patience costs less than pushing.

"She said the person who ordered the m******e didn't just want the Ashfords dead," I said. "She said they wanted the power the Ashford line had, and they took it, and they've been running on it ever since. And she said whoever it is, they're still here. Still at the top." I paused. "She said Iron Claw sits at the top of everything."

The silence that followed had weight in it. Kael didn't look at me immediately. He kept looking forward, his jaw working once, slowly, the way it did when he was moving something difficult through his head.

Then he turned, and his gray eyes landed on mine, and whatever I had expected, it wasn't what I saw. What I saw was a man who had been carrying his own version of this question for a very long time, and was not surprised to hear it said out loud.

"I know," he said.

Two words. Quiet. Certain.