BOUND BY BLOOD AND THE MOON

EVERYTHING FROM THE BEGINNING

Kade didn't start talking right away.

He moved instead, pulling the territory map down from the wall and spreading it flat across the table between them, then crossing to a locked cabinet at the far end of the room. Elira watched him retrieve a thin, worn folder, the edges soft with handling, before he finally sat down across from her.

"Your father," he said, "started working for the Ashworth pack before he ever worked for Larkspur."

Elira blinked. "That's not possible. My father was born in Larkspur. Everyone knew that."

"He was born in Larkspur," Kade agreed. "But he trained here. My father sent him this back when the two packs were allied, before the border disputes started. Daniel Voss spent two years learning security and tracking from our old Beta before he went home to run it for his own pack." He slid the folder toward her. "There's correspondence in there. Between your father and mine. It stopped eight years ago."

"Eight years ago is when he died."

"I know." Kade's voice was quiet. "I was fifteen. I remember my father coming back from Larkspur's funeral rites looking like he'd lost something more than an ally. He never told me why. I didn't think to ask when I was a kid, and then two years later my father was dead too, and there wasn't room to ask much of anything."

Elira opened the folder with hands that weren't quite steady. Letters, some formal, some not logistics, patrol schedules, notes about border wolves. And near the bottom, one that made her stomach drop: a short note in careful handwriting, dated three weeks before her father's death.

I think someone inside is feeding information out. I don't know who yet. If anything happens to me, don't let them tell you it was an accident.

"He knew," she whispered. "He knew something was wrong, and he still"

"Died in a hunting accident," Kade finished, grim. "That nobody investigated further, because Larkspur's Alpha at the time didn't want an internal panic on his hands. That's what my father told me, years later, when I asked why we'd stopped hearing from Daniel Voss's letters. He said Larkspur buried the question instead of the man who'd asked it."

Elira set the letter down carefully, like it might break. "You've had this for eight years."

"My father did. I found it in his study after he died, filled with things I didn't understand yet." Kade's jaw tightened. "I should have gone to Larkspur with it years ago. I told myself it wasn't my business that whatever politics killed your father died with him, and reopening it would just start a war between packs that had already stopped speaking. I was wrong. I know that now, watching your home burn for what I think are the same reasons."

"You think whoever silenced my father is the same person who burned Larkspur."

"I think it's too specific not to be. The armory. The Alpha's study. The record hall." He nodded at the folder in front of her. "Someone's been cleaning up a trail for eight years, and last night they finished the job."

The weight of it settled over her slow and cold not just grief now, but the shape of something deliberate, something that had been moving in the dark long before last night, patient and unhurried, the way real threats always were.

"Why tell me now?" she asked. "You could have kept this. I never would have known."

Kade was quiet for a moment, gold eyes steady on hers in a way that made the question feel bigger than she'd meant it.

"Because you asked me to," he said simply. "Because you stood in my war room this morning and told two Alphas twice your size that you weren't going to be talked about instead of talked to, and I decided I wasn't going to be a third."

Something in her chest that had been braced tight since the fire loosened, just slightly.

"There's something else," Kade said, and his voice changed and dropped into the register she recognized now, the one that meant he was steadying himself for something he didn't want to say. "The bond. Last night."

"You still haven't said the word."

"Mate," he said, and it cost him something visible to say if she watched it cost him. "You're my mate. I knew it the second the wind changed, and I've spent every hour since trying to find a reason it isn't true, because the last time I let myself believe in this, it nearly destroyed me and half this pack with it."

"Priya mentioned someone," Elira said carefully. "Serah."

His whole body went still at the name, the way it had at the border stones a stillness that wasn't calm, but its opposite, controlled so tightly it looked like calm from the outside.

"Not tonight," he said, and for the first time since she'd met him, the command in his voice sounded less like Alpha and more like a man asking, quietly, not to be pushed past what he could hold. "I'll tell you about Serah. I owe you that, especially now. But not tonight. Tonight I've already handed you your father's death and your home's murderer in the same conversation, and I don't have anything left to give you that won't come out wrong."

Elira studied him, really studied him, past the Alpha, past the reputation, past six years of stories that had painted him as something without a soft edge anywhere on him. She saw, instead, a man carrying two griefs he'd never let anyone see the weight of, sitting across a table from a bond he hadn't asked for and couldn't seem to stop wanting anyway.

"Okay," she said. "Not tonight."

Outside, the rain that had threatened all morning finally broke, drumming soft and steady against the windows of the war room, and for a long moment neither of them said anything else just sat with the folder between them, and her father's last warning, and a name neither of them was ready to speak again yet.