THE ALPHA WHO SCENTED MY SECRET

Chapter7

Wren's POV

Corwin's infirmary smells like dried sage and something sharper underneath it, metallic, the kind of smell I've come to associate with magic even though I couldn't have told you why a week ago. He's older than I expected, silver through his beard, sleeves rolled to the elbow like he's in the middle of a dozen tasks at once, even when he's sitting perfectly still.

"Give me your wrist," he says, no preamble, the moment Sable walks me through the door.

I do, and I try not to flinch when his fingers close around it, warm and steady, turning it toward the lamp on his desk. He doesn't say anything for a long moment, just looks, his thumb tracing slowly along the silver ring of the mark, and the silence stretches long enough that I start counting my own heartbeat to fill it.

"Who put this on you?" he finally asks.

"The pack healer. Ashgrove. Five years ago."

"Name?"

"Petra Ilsen." I've never had a reason to say her name out loud before, and it feels strange in my mouth, like a word borrowed from someone else's language. "She retired not long after. I don't know where she went."

"Convenient," Corwin mutters, mostly to himself, and reaches for a small brass instrument on his desk, something like a compass except the needle inside it isn't pointing anywhere near north. He holds it an inch above my wrist and the needle spins, once, twice, then locks hard in one direction and stays there, trembling like it's straining against something.

"What is that supposed to do?" I ask.

"Read what's underneath." He sets it down, frowning at it like it's personally disappointing him. "Sable said it lit up crossing the ward line."

"It burned," I corrected. "It didn't just light up. It burned."

"Bindings don't burn from ward contact. Not standard ones." He looks up at me properly for the first time since I sat down, and there's something in his expression I don't like at all — careful, the way you'd look at someone before delivering news you already know they don't want. "Tell me about the night it was placed on you."

"I don't remember much of it. I was in the infirmary for two days after the fire. When I woke up, it was already there."

"Did anyone explain what kind of binding it was? What was it meant to suppress?"

"My wolf." I say it automatically, the way I've said it a hundred times, and only as the words leave my mouth do I hear how strange it sounds, how thin, like a fact I've never actually examined closely enough to know if it's true. "So I couldn't hurt anyone again."

"You keep saying that," I say, "layers. Like it's a jacket. What does a memory-suppression layer actually do to a person? What does it feel like from the inside?"

"Depends on the skill of the one who built it." Corwin sets the brass instrument down and folds his hands, the posture of a man settling in to explain something he'd rather not. "A poorly made one leaves gaps a person notices. Missing hours, missing days, holes they can feel the edges of even if they can't see inside them. A well-made one is worse. It doesn't just remove the memory. It replaces the space where the memory should be with something that feels like an ordinary absence, the same way you don't notice you can't smell your own house until you've been away from it a week. You don't miss what you were never allowed to know you lost."

"So I wouldn't even know," I say slowly, "if something was missing."

"Not on your own. No." He watches my face carefully. "Which is why it's degrading now that matters. Something wore it thin enough, being near this territory maybe, or the stress of leaving Ashgrove, that it's starting to slip. And when a seal like this slips, Wren, it rarely slips gently."

Sable shifts beside me, arms crossed tight over her chest. "What happens when it slips?"

"Fragments, usually. Flashes. Sometimes, physical reactions before the memory itself surfaces: headaches, nausea, the wrist reaction we saw today." Corwin's voice stays even, clinical, but there's something careful underneath it, like he's watching me for signs I might break. "I'd expect more of it in the coming weeks. I'd rather you hear that from me now than be blindsided by it later."

Corwin exchanges a look with Sable that I catch the tail end of, quick, wordless, the kind of look people share when they've already had half a conversation without you.

"A shift-suppression binding is usually a single job," he says slowly, like he's choosing each word with care. "One layer." Clean, simple, does exactly what it says on the label. What's sitting on your wrist right now is three layers stacked on top of each other, and one of them has nothing to do with your wolf at all."

My mouth goes dry. "What does it have to do with, then?"

He hesitates, and I understand, watching him do it, that he's deciding how much of the truth I can hold right now, which is somehow worse than if he'd just said it outright.

"Someone built this to make you forget," he says finally, quiet, careful, like the words themselves might cause damage if he says them too loudly. "Not just to punish you, Wren. To make you forget."

I sit with that sentence for a long moment, turning it over the way I've turned over every version of that night for five years, except this one doesn't fit into the shape I'd already carved for it.

"Forget what," I finally managed. "If it's not just about the shift, what am I supposed to have forgotten?"

"I don't know yet." Corwin's honesty is somehow worse than a comforting lie would have been. "That's what troubles me most. Whoever built this knew exactly what they wanted buried. I intend to find out what that is, but it isn't something I can pull out of you by force, and I wouldn't if I could. Seals like this fight back when they're rushed. You'll get pieces back on your own terms, in your own time, and my job is to make sure you're not alone when you do."

Sable's hand finds my shoulder, warm and steady, and for the first time since I walked into this room, I let myself lean into it, just slightly, just enough to feel the weight of another person holding some of this with me instead of watching from a careful distance.

"Rest tonight," Corwin says, standing, gathering his instruments back into his case. "Tomorrow we will start slowly. No forcing anything. But Wren." He pauses at the door, and something in his voice drops lower, graver. "Whatever you start remembering, however small it seems, tell someone. Don't sit with it alone. Not this."

I nod, though I don't fully understand yet what I'm agreeing with, and long after he's gone, I sit there with my wrist still aching faintly under the lamp light, thinking about a version of myself five years younger who screamed something into smoke thick enough to swallow the sound whole, and wondering, for the first time in half a decade, whether that scream had actually been my own name I was calling, or someone else's.