The Last Ashford

Who am I?

Della didn't speak to me the entire ride back to the pack house, which should have felt like a mercy. It didn't. Silence from Della was never peace. It was a held breath before the slap.

Finn was waiting on the porch steps when we pulled in, and one look at my face told him everything the gossip chain hadn't already carried home faster than our car. He was off the steps and at my door before Della had even put the car in park.

"I heard," he said, low, just for me. "Ice, I heard, are you—"

"I'm fine," I said, which was a lie so big it should have had its own zip code.

"You are not fine," Della snapped, getting out of the car like the conversation was somehow about her. "Do you understand what you've done? The Alpha's son rejected an Ashwood wolf in front of every pack in three territories. Do you understand the embarrassment you've brought on this house?"

I stared at her. "He rejected me. I didn't do anything except pour his wine."

"You didn't have to be there to be rejected."

There wasn't a single thing in that sentence that made sense, but Della had never needed her words to make sense to make them hurt. She'd been finding reasons to be furious with me since I was old enough to remember being scared of her, and tonight she finally had a reason the whole town would agree with.

"Go to your room," she said. "I don't want to look at you."

I went. It was easier than fighting, and I was too tired to fight, and some small ugly part of me agreed with her — I didn't want to be looked at either.

My room was small, but it was mine, in the way nothing else in that house was mine. A narrow bed, a desk covered in recipe notebooks, a single window that looked out over the kitchen garden I'd planted myself three summers ago because no one else would. I sat on the edge of the bed and finally let my hands shake.

Nineteen years old tomorrow, and the first time my mate ever looked at me, he looked like he wanted to be anywhere else on earth.

Finn knocked twice and came in without waiting for an answer, the way he always did. He sat down next to me, not saying anything for a minute, which was its own kind of kindness.

"He's an i***t," Finn finally said.

"He's the future Alpha of Iron Claw."

"Doesn't mean he's not an idiot." Finn bumped my shoulder with his. "You're worth ten of him."

I almost smiled. Almost. "Elder Roan grabbed me outside. She saw my birthmark and said—" I stopped, because saying it out loud made it feel realer, and I wasn't ready for it to be real. "She said I'm supposed to be dead. Nineteen years dead."

Finn went very still. "What does that mean?"

"I don't know." I rubbed my thumb over the spot behind my ear, the crescent shape Della had spent my whole life telling me to hide under my hair. "I don't know, Finn."

We sat with that for a while, until a sound from downstairs cut the quiet — Roan's voice, sharp and demanding, and Marcus's, low and placating, and underneath both of them, the particular silence of Della saying nothing at all, which from her was always the loudest sound in the house.

I went to the top of the stairs. Finn followed.

"—the guardianship paperwork," Roan was saying. "I want to see it tonight, Marcus. Nineteen years ago, exactly. I want the file."

"Roan, it's late, can this wait until—"

"No. It cannot wait." Her cane hit the floor hard enough that I felt it through the soles of my feet. "I found that child myself. I know what I saw. I want the paper that says what we agreed to say, and I want it now."

I crept down two more stairs, careful, quiet, the way I'd learned to move in this house a long time ago. Through the gap in the study door I could see Della at the filing cabinet, her back to the room, her shoulders too stiff for someone who claimed not to care what was in that drawer.

She pulled out a thin folder. My stomach dropped before I even understood why.

"Here," she said, holding it just out of Roan's reach a second too long. "This is everything."

Roan snatched it and flipped it open, and I caught one single glimpse over her shoulder of a line of old, faded handwriting before Della's hand shot out and yanked the folder shut.

But I'd seen it. One word, written next to a birth date that was mine.

'Ashford.'

It took my brain a second to catch up with my eyes, and then it hit me like a second rejection, right on top of the first. Ashford. I knew that name. Every wolf in three territories knew that name, the same way you know a ghost story — the royal bloodline of Crimson Moon Pack, slaughtered in their own home nineteen years ago. Every single one of them. No survivors. That was the story. That was the story everyone told.

So why was that name written down next to my birthday?

I didn't sleep. I doubt anyone in that house did, but by morning Della had decided the official position was that nothing unusual had happened at all, and she ran the breakfast table like a woman daring anyone to bring it up.

I went to work instead. The diner was the only place in Hollow Pines that was fully, completely mine — three years of saved tips and one terrifying loan had bought it from old man Petrov when he retired, and not even Della could find a way to take credit for it. I unlocked the front door before sunrise, turned the griddle on, and let the smell of coffee push everything else out of my head for exactly forty-seven minutes.

Then the bell over the door rang, and my forty-seven minutes were over.

"We need to talk." Kael filled the doorway the way storm clouds fill a sky — like the room had been smaller before he walked into it. He looked like he hadn't slept either. Good.

"We really don't," I said, and went back to flipping eggs.

"Last night—"

"Was humiliating. For me, mostly. I was there, I remember it." I didn't look up. "If you're here to apologize, save it. If you're here for breakfast, sit down and I'll bring you a menu like every other customer."

He didn't sit. He stood at the counter like a man bracing for a fight he didn't want. "My father is making me apologize. Pack protocol. A public rejection requires—"

"There it is." I finally looked at him. "Not because you want to. Because protocol says you have to."

Something flickered across his face — not quite guilt, but close enough to its neighbor that I almost believed it was real. "I shouldn't have done it the way I did it. In front of everyone."

"You shouldn't have done it at all," I said, "but I notice you're not actually taking that part back."

He didn't answer, which was an answer.

The bell rang again, and Vivian Thorne walked in like she owned the floor under her boots. I'd seen her before, at gatherings, always one step behind Kael like she was waiting for an invitation that hadn't come yet. Today she looked like she'd already gotten one.

"There you are," she said to Kael, sliding an arm through his like it belonged there. Her eyes flicked to me, head to foot, the kind of look that's designed to make you feel smaller than you are. "I heard you had some unfinished business in town. I didn't realize it was here." She said 'here' the way some people say the word 'gutter'.

"Vivian," Kael said, and there was a warning in it, but he didn't pull his arm away.

"I'm Wren," I said, because I refused to let her pretend she didn't know exactly who I was. "I run this place. Can I get either of you anything, or did you just come to look at the décor?"

Vivian's smile went thin and sharp. "We're fine."

"Good. Then you can wait outside, this is a working kitchen and you're blocking the register."

For one second, just one, Kael's mouth twitched like he wanted to laugh, and then he caught himself and looked furious about it instead.

"We're leaving," he said, tugging his arm free of Vivian's grip with more force than the moment called for. He looked at me one more time, and whatever he was about to say, he never got the chance.

His face went white.

"Kael?" Vivian's voice changed completely, the smugness gone in an instant.

He grabbed the edge of the counter like the floor had tilted under him, one hand fisted hard against his chest, right over his heart, right where the bond had snapped into place the night before. His breathing went ragged. His knees buckled.

"Kael!" I was around the counter before I decided to move, catching him as he went down, his full weight nearly taking us both to the floor. Up close his skin had gone gray, sweat breaking across his forehead, and underneath my hands I could feel his heart slamming against his ribs like it was trying to escape.

"What's happening to him?" Vivian was useless, frozen by the door, her hand pressed over her mouth.

I didn't know. I only knew that some part of me — the same part that had howled the night before when the bond snapped — was howling again now, in pain, in panic, in something that felt disturbingly like 'mine, mine, something is wrong with what's mine.'

Customers were staring. Someone was already pulling out a phone. And Kael Drummond, the strongest Alpha-heir in three territories, the wolf who had rejected me twelve hours earlier in front of two hundred witnesses, was collapsing in my arms like the rejection itself was trying to kill him from the inside out.