THE ALPHA WHO SCENTED MY SECRET

Chapter 6

Rhydian's POV

I'm still fielding questions about her when Corwin finds me, which tells you everything about how the last few hours have gone.

"So she's just going to live here," Adrian says, from the far end of the council table, arms folded, that particular tone in his voice that always sounds like a question and never is. My cousin has a gift for making everything sound like an accusation wrapped in polite curiosity. "A stranger, straight out of a rival pack, given quarters in this house, on the strength of what, exactly? A hunch?"

"On the strength of a contract clause, I'm well within my rights to negotiate," I say, not looking up from the paperwork in front of me. "Same as the water access, same as the timber terms. It's done, Adrian. There's nothing here for the council to weigh in on."

"There's plenty for the council to weigh in on when the Alpha brings home an unknown quantity from a pack we've spent three generations not trusting." He leans back, and I can feel Sable's brother, Tomas, shift uncomfortably beside him, the way people do when they're caught between two personalities they'd rather not choose between. "I'm only asking the question everyone else in this room is too polite to ask."

"Then ask it plainly instead of dressing it up as concern for the pack."

"Fine." Adrian's jaw tightens. "Why her, specifically? Out of an entire household of staff, you named her, by sight, before you'd exchanged a single word. That's not diplomacy, Rhydian. That's an obsession, and I'd like to understand what I'm supposed to tell people when they ask why their Alpha is suddenly making decisions about something other than his head."

The room goes quiet in the particular way rooms go quiet when someone's said the thing everyone else was thinking but not brave enough to voice. I could answer it honestly. I could tell them about a scent I haven't smelled since I was six years old, about a debt my family has carried since before I could walk, about a legend most of them think died out with their grandparents' generation.

I don't, not yet, not until I understand it myself.

"When I have something worth telling the council, you'll hear it," I say instead, and end the meeting before Adrian can push further, though I catch the look he gives me on his way out, the kind of look that means this conversation isn't over, it's just been postponed to a room with fewer witnesses.

Corwin doesn't bother knocking before he walks into my study twenty minutes later, which tells me before he even opens his mouth that something's wrong.

"You need to see this," he says, and there's an edge in his voice I don't hear often, my uncle being a man who's spent forty years treating pack emergencies like Tuesday afternoons.

"See what?"

"The girl's mark. It reacted to the ward line." He drops into the chair across from my desk without being invited, which he also never does. "Lit up like a struck match, according to Sable. I've examined it twice since they got in, and I need you to understand something, Rhydian, because I don't think you fully grasped what you brought home tonight."

"I grasped it fine."

"Did you?" He leans forward. "That's not a binding punishment. I've seen punishment bindings. I've made punishment bindings, back when the council still asked for them. They suppress the shift. That's it. That's all they're built to do." He taps the desk once, sharp. "This one is layered. Three separate workings stacked on top of each other. One suppresses the shift, yes, fine, standard enough. The second suppresses scent, actively, which is why it took you to sit three feet from her to catch anything at all through it. And the third—"

"The third," I prompt, when he stops.

"The third is a memory seal. Not total. It's degrading, which is why it flared tonight; wards this old started slipping after enough years, but it was built to keep her from remembering something specific. Not the shift. Not general trauma. Something specific, Rhydian, and it was built by someone with real skill, someone far beyond what a small pack council usually has access to."

I sit back, the weight of that settling somewhere behind my ribs. "So whatever happened to her five years ago—"

"Wasn't what her brother's been telling everyone." Corwin finishes it for me, grim. "I'd stake my name on it."

I think about the way Calloway's face went pale when I asked her name. The way his lie came a half second too fast, too smooth, a story he'd told so many times it had worn a groove. The scent under the binding, buried but unmistakable, that I haven't smelled since I was six years old at a dead man's grave.

"Ember-blooded," I say quietly.

Corwin's expression doesn't change, which means he already suspected it too. "It would explain the layers," he says. "Nobody builds a triple-seal binding for ordinary shift-suppression. Somebody knew exactly what she was, and went to considerable trouble to make sure nobody else ever found out, including her."

"Including her," I repeat, and something cold moves through me at the thought of it, five years of a girl not even knowing what was taken from her, five years of believing whatever story her own brother handed her because nobody ever gave her a reason to doubt it.

"There's something else," Corwin says, quieter now. "You should talk to her yourself. About what she remembers, if anything, about that night. Because if the seal's degrading the way tonight suggests, she may start getting pieces back whether anyone intends it or not. And Rhydian." He holds my gaze, steady. "If I'm right about what was done to her, and I think I am, then whoever did it isn't going to be pleased that she's not in that house anymore."

I stand, already moving toward the door, toward the guest wing where Sable said she settled the girl an hour ago. "You think Calloway's in danger of losing more than a servant."

"I think Calloway built a cage around something valuable enough that people were willing to help him build it," Corwin says. "And I think you just walked her straight out the front door in front of everyone at that table."

I stop in the doorway, my hand on the frame, thinking about the way she looked standing at that gate this morning, gray uniform, single bag, like she owned nothing in the world worth more than what she could carry. Thinking about the way she flinched when I said her name, like being noticed at all was a kind of danger she'd trained herself to avoid.

"Then we'd better find out what she remembers," I say, "before whoever's watching decides to make sure she never does."

Behind me, Corwin doesn't answer. He doesn't need to. We're both thinking the same thing, and neither one of us says it out loud.

Somebody helped Callum Calloway build that binding. And whoever they are, they're not going to let their investment walk away without a fight.

I don't knock when I reach the guest wing. I stopped myself just short of the door instead, hand raised, and stood there a moment longer than I'd ever admitted to Sable, listening to nothing at all, because there was nothing to hear, just a girl on the other side of a wall who'd had exactly one day to learn that everything she thought she understood about her own life might have been built on a lie designed specifically to keep her from ever asking the right questions.

I think about Adrian's face in the council room. I think about the scent under that binding, and the man who died holding back a fire for my father twenty years before I ever learned his gift had a name.

Whatever she remembers, whenever she remembers it, I intend to be standing next to her when it happens.

I just haven't worked out yet whether that's a promise I'm making for her sake, or for my own.