THE ALPHA WHO SCENTED MY SECRET

Wren's POV The floor doesn't care that my hands are shaking. It still needs scrubbing. I've done this same stretch of hallway so many times I could map every warped board with my eyes closed. The third one from the east window creaks. The seventh one has a stain that never fully lifts, no matter how hard I scrub, like the house itself decided to keep a scar the same way I did. "You missed a spot." I don't have to look up to know it's Callum. I know the sound of his shoes on hardwood the way other people know a song. Slow. Unhurried. Like he's never once in his life had somewhere he needed to be. "Where?" I ask, because asking is safer than assuming, and assuming wrong costs more than my knees can afford today. He crouches down across from me, elbows on his knees, and points to a patch of floor that is, in fact, clean. Spotless. I scrubbed it twice already this morning out of habit more than need. "There," he says. I don't argue. I never argue. I dip the rag back in the bucket and scrub a floor that doesn't need scrubbing, and he watches me do it with the same mild, pleasant expression he wears for everything. Ordering breakfast. Signing pack documents. Telling the elders his little sister burned their parents alive. Five years and I still flinch at that thought like it's new. "You have good days and bad days," he told me once, back when I still cried in front of him, which I stopped doing early because it never once made anything better. "This is a good day, Wren. I'm giving you something to do. Some people in your position would have nothing at all." Some people in my position. He never says murderer out loud anymore. He doesn't have to. Everyone in Ashgrove already knows the story, the same way they know which roads flood in spring. It's just weather to them now. Just fact. I don't remember the fire. That's the part nobody wants to hear, because it doesn't fit anywhere useful. I remember smoke thick enough to taste, and heat that felt less like fire and more like the air itself turning solid, and then nothing, a long gray nothing, until I woke up in the pack infirmary with both hands wrapped in gauze and my brother's face hovering over mine, already sad in a way that looked rehearsed even though I was too out of it back then to notice. I noticed later. I've had five years to notice everything. "You'll want to hurry with that," Callum says, straightening, brushing invisible dust off his slacks. "We have company tonight. I need the hall spotless, and I need you in the kitchen by four." "Company," I repeat. "Alpha Vane. Nightfall." He says it lightly, like he's mentioning the weather, but there's something underneath it, something pulled tight. I've learned to listen for that thread in his voice, the one that means he's nervous even when his face refuses to show it. "We're finalizing the border contract. Water rights, timber access, the usual. It matters more than you need to worry about." "I don't need to worry about it," I say. "I'll be in the kitchen." "Good girl." He says it the way you'd praise a dog for not barking, and I keep my eyes on the floorboard because if I look up right now he'll see exactly what I think of that phrase, and it isn't worth the conversation that would follow. He leaves. I finish the hallway. My hands ache in the place where the binding mark sits, a raised silver ring around each wrist, thin as thread and cold no matter how warm the room is. The pack healer put it there five years ago on the elders' order, and told me it would keep my wolf asleep so I couldn't hurt anyone again. I used to think that was the worst part. Losing my wolf. Not being able to shift, not being able to run, not being able to feel that second self stretching awake under my skin the way I used to when I was seventeen and still allowed to be a person. I don't think that's the worst part anymore. The worst part is that I still, after five years, don't actually know what happened that night. I've built the story out of other people's certainty because I never had one of my own to replace it with. Maybe I did do it. Maybe some carelessness, some untrained flare of whatever my wolf was supposed to become, took both my parents in one night and left me alive out of nothing but bad luck. I don't remember loving my wolf enough to trust that answer completely. But I don't remember hating it enough to trust the opposite either. I'm still on my knees on that clean patch of floor when Old Maren finds me, a stack of linens balanced on one hip, her gray hair pinned up the same tight way it's been pinned up since before I was born. She was my mother's attendant once, back when this house still had an Alpha's mate walking its halls instead of a girl scrubbing them, and she's one of maybe three people left in Ashgrove who still looks at me like I'm a person and not a cautionary tale. "He has you doing the east hall again?" she asks, setting the linens down with a grunt. "It needed it." "It didn't need it yesterday either." She crouches slowly on her knees the way I am with mine, and lowers her voice even though there's no one else in earshot. "You know, I loved your mother, Wren. I loved her like my own blood. And I think about her every time I watch her daughter scrub a floor that's already clean, for a brother who wouldn't have lasted a season like Alpha if she were still alive to see what he's become." "Don't," I say, quiet, because words like that cost more than she knows if the wrong person hears them. "Please, Maren." "I know." She pats my hand, once, quickly, and picks the linen back up. "I know. I just needed to say it to somebody today." She's gone before I can answer, disappearing down toward the laundry room, and I sit there a moment longer with the rag going cold in my hand, thinking about how strange it is that the people who loved my parents most are the ones who never once ask me what actually happened that night. They just decided, the way everyone decided, and folded their grief around a story that didn't need me in it at all except as the place to put the blame. By four o'clock, the hall is spotless, and I'm in the kitchen, hair pinned back, wearing the gray uniform. Callum has the staff order for me specifically, plain enough that no one mistakes me for family. I used to be furious about that detail. Now it barely registers. "Nervous?" asks Dell, one of the cooks, sliding a tray of glasses toward me to carry out. "About serving dinner? No." "About Nightfall's Alpha." She says his name like it costs her something just to speak it. "They say his eyes are red. Not brown-red. Red like a fresh kill. My cousin met him once at a council meeting and said she couldn't hold his gaze for more than a second." "I'm not going to be holding anyone's gaze," I say, which is true. My job tonight is to be invisible. I've had five years of practice. I carry the tray out to the hall just as the front doors open, and the temperature in the room changes before I even see him. That's the only way I can describe it. Like something walking in what the air itself decided to make room for. I don't look up right away. I've learned not to look up at powerful men. It draws attention, and attention has never once been kind to me in this house. But I hear his voice, low and even, exchanging some formal greeting with Callum, and something about it makes the hair on my arms stand up, and against every instinct I've trained into myself over five years, I look. Crimson eyes. Dell wasn't exaggerating. They land on me for exactly one second before I drop my gaze back to the tray in my hands, heart going fast enough that I'm sure he can hear it, wolves always hear too much, and I tell myself it's nothing, it's just a stranger's gaze passing over a servant in a gray uniform the way it would pass over a chair or a lamp. Except when I glance up again, just once, just to check, he's still looking. And Callum has gone very, very still beside him.