The Last Ashford

Kael

It took four of Kael's own guards and a sworn oath from the pack doctor before the rumor mill in Hollow Pines settled on an official story — exhaustion, training strain, nothing to see. I knew better, and so, I think, did Kael, though neither of us said it out loud over the following two days. Mates feel each other's pain. He'd rejected me and it had nearly stopped his heart. That wasn't exhaustion. That was a bond refusing to be denied.

I didn't have time to sit with how strange that felt, because Elder Roan showed up at the diner an hour after closing on the second night, and she didn't knock.

"Lock the door," she said. "We need to talk, and I don't want an audience."

I locked it. My hands weren't quite steady doing it.

Roan sat at the corner booth like she'd planned exactly where she wanted to be sitting, and waited until I'd poured two cups of coffee neither of us drank before she finally spoke.

"Nineteen years ago, I was patrolling the border between our land and Crimson Moon territory," she said. "It was the night of the s*******r. I found you in the trees at the edge of it, wrapped in a blanket that didn't belong to anyone I recognized, with that mark behind your ear, and you weren't even crying. Just watching the smoke with eyes too old for a baby that age."

I sat very still, coffee going cold in front of me, my whole body braced like the next sentence was going to hit me.

"I brought you to Marcus," she went on. "We agreed — the two of us, no one else — that whoever did that to the Ashford line might come looking for survivors, and the only way to keep you safe was to make sure no one ever knew there were any. Marcus took you in as a found pup. We buried the truth on purpose. I have spent nineteen years telling myself that was protection, not a lie."

"And Della?" My voice came out smaller than I wanted it to.

Roan's mouth tightened. "Della knew. She married into a secret she never agreed to keep, and I think she has hated you for it every day since, because every day you lived was a day the danger was still out there, sitting in her house."

It explained nothing and everything at once. Nineteen years of being made to feel like a mistake, and the truth was I'd never been a mistake at all — I'd been a target someone decided to hide instead of protect honestly.

The bell over the door rattled, even though I'd locked it, and Della shoved her way inside like the lock had personally offended her.

"Get out," she said to Roan, not even looking at me. "She doesn't need to know any of this."

"She's nineteen tomorrow, Della. She has a right to know what she survived."

"She has a right to stay alive, which means she has a right to never repeat a single word of this conversation outside this room." Della's eyes finally landed on me, and for the first time in my life I saw something underneath the anger — real, old fear. "Do you understand what you are, if this gets out? Do you understand what's still out there?"

"No," I said. "Nobody's bothered to tell me."

Roan stood, gathering her cane, her face heavy with a decision she'd clearly been putting off for nineteen years. "Tomorrow," she said. "Come to my house tomorrow, alone, and I'll tell you everything I know. Tonight isn't safe to keep talking."

She didn't get the chance to explain why tonight wasn't safe. We found out twenty minutes later, when Roan's car didn't make it past the second stoplight out of town.

I heard it before I understood it — a c***k, sharp and wrong, cutting through the quiet street, followed by the shriek of metal meeting the curb. Della and I ran out of the diner together, our fight forgotten, and I saw Roan's old sedan slumped against a lamppost, the windshield starred with a hole that hadn't been put there by any accident.

"Roan!" I was running before I decided to, my bare feet hitting the cold pavement, Della's voice screaming something behind me that I couldn't hear over the sound of my own heartbeat.

I yanked the driver's door open. Roan was slumped over the wheel, blood dark and spreading across her shoulder, her eyes barely open, her mouth moving with words I had to lean in close to hear.

"Run," she whispered. "He's not done. He's never been done."

The next forty minutes happened in pieces — Della on the phone screaming for a pack medic, Finn arriving at a dead run with no shirt and no shoes, Roan's eyes fluttering shut as they lifted her onto a stretcher, the medic saying words like *stable* and *lucky* in a voice that didn't sound like he believed either one.

Kael showed up before the ambulance lights had even finished spinning.

I don't know who called him. I didn't call him. But he was there, stepping out of a black SUV with two of his guards flanking him, his face doing something complicated when he saw me standing barefoot on the curb in a stained apron with someone else's blood on my hands.

"Are you hurt?" The question came out of him fast, almost angry, like he resented having to ask it.

"It's not my blood." I was still shaking. "It's Roan's. Someone shot at her car."

His whole body went rigid. "Shot at her, or shot at you?"

I hadn't let myself think that far yet. "I don't know."

"I do." He turned to one of his guards and started giving orders in a low, clipped voice — perimeter, patrol routes doubled, something about the Ashwood border being a sieve — and I realized, watching him, that whatever had happened between us two nights ago, the wolf standing in front of me right now wasn't thinking about pride. He was thinking about a threat, and apparently I was on the list of things he intended to protect.

"You're coming with me," he said, turning back to me.

"Excuse me?"

"You heard me. Iron Claw territory is the most secure ground in three packs. Whoever did this isn't going to get through our patrols the way they got through Ashwood's."

"You rejected me two days ago in front of half the territory, and now you want to put me under your roof?"

Something in his jaw tightened. "I'm aware of how it looks."

"It looks like guilt," I said. "I don't need your guilt. I need to know who just tried to kill the only person who's ever told me the truth about my own life."

"Then come with me and I'll help you find out." He said it like it cost him something to offer. "I felt what happened to me two nights ago, Wren. Rejecting you should have ended it. It didn't end anything. I don't understand the bond, and I don't have to like it to admit it's real, and right now real is the only thing that matters, because real means whoever's after you can use it too."

I hated that he was right. I hated more that some small, exhausted part of me felt safer just hearing him say it.

"Fine," I said. "For Roan. Not for you."

He almost smiled. Almost.

Finn helped me throw a bag together at the house twenty minutes later, moving fast, both of us not talking about the thing we were both thinking, which was that nothing about my life had made sense in three days and it was about to make even less.

I was at the front door, bag over my shoulder, when Della's hand closed around my arm like a vice.

I turned, expecting another lecture about embarrassment, about duty, about everything I owed a house that had never once felt like mine.

Instead, her face was pale, and her voice, when it came, was lower and more frightened than I had ever heard it.

"If you go with him," she said, "you're not running toward safety. You're walking straight toward the wolf who already murdered your family once."