The Rouges Moon

Chapter 7

I met Marisol Thorne on a grey morning in early autumn, six weeks after I'd joined Ashgrave's warriors, and every instinct in my body told me, before she'd said a single word, that I was standing in front of the person who was going to ruin my life.

I'd been summoned to the council hall along with a handful of senior warriors to discuss the border situation with the neighboring territory, the same dispute that had put me in that gully six weeks earlier, and I'd expected the usual mix of Rhys, Idris, and the pack's ranking warriors.

I hadn't expected the woman seated at Rhys's right hand, close enough to lean in and murmur something in his ear partway through a border captain's report, close enough that he tilted his head to listen without seeming to think anything of it.

She was younger than I remembered, or maybe I'd simply never gotten a good look at her the first time, back when I was Wren and too consumed by my own slow unraveling to pay proper attention to the woman quietly engineering it. Dark hair pulled back severely, sharp features, a way of holding herself that suggested someone who'd spent years learning to be underestimated and had decided to make a weapon of it.

I hated her on sight, and I made myself bury that hatred somewhere deep enough that it wouldn't show on my face, because Vera Sharp had no reason to hate a woman she'd never met.

"Vera Sharp," Rhys said, when the border discussion wound down and introductions apparently became necessary. "This is Marisol. She advises the council on matters beyond typical pack law."

"Beyond typical pack law" was, I already knew, a diplomatic way of saying blood magic and the kind of old, dangerous power that most packs kept carefully separate from formal council business, tolerated by exactly the sort of Alpha who hadn't yet learned to be suspicious of advisors who offered convenient answers to complicated problems.

"A pleasure," Marisol said, and her eyes moved over me with an assessing quality that made my skin crawl, lingering half a second too long in a way that made my pulse spike with something close to panic.

She knows, I thought, wild and sudden. She recognizes me.

But her expression didn't shift into recognition, only into the kind of careful cataloguing I imagined she gave everyone who came within Rhys's orbit, and I forced myself to breathe normally, forced myself to remember that whatever magic she'd used four years from now to fake evidence against me had nothing to do with recognizing a face she'd never actually seen wearing this particular set of features.

"The pleasure's mine," I said, and something in her small, thin smile told me she didn't believe the warmth in my voice any more than I meant it.

"I hear you cleared four fighters alone," she said. "Impressive, for a rogue with no formal pack training."

"I've had training," I said. "Just not the kind that comes with a pack crest attached to it."

"How resourceful." Her tone was pleasant enough that anyone else in the room would have heard nothing but polite small talk, but underneath it I caught something colder, something that told me she'd already decided I was worth watching carefully, for reasons that had nothing to do with courtesy.

“Rogues who survive as long as you clearly have usually learned things the rest of us never do."

"Some things," I agreed, and held her gaze until she was the one who looked away first, back toward Rhys, murmuring something about the council's next agenda item.

I spent the rest of that meeting cataloguing her the same careful way I'd once cataloged every threat in a room since Garrick taught me how, and by the time it ended, I understood two things with absolute clarity that I hadn't fully appreciated before walking into that hall.

The first was that Marisol Thorne's influence over Rhys was already well underway, three years before the night she'd use it to convince him I'd betrayed him.

I watched the small, practiced ways she inserted herself into every decision, the careful cultivation of being indispensable, the specific vocabulary she used, always framing her suggestions as protecting Rhys from threats he couldn't see clearly on his own.

It was a slow poison, patient and methodical, exactly the kind that would take years to fully take root, and exactly the kind that would look, by the time it finished its work, indistinguishable from an Alpha simply growing harder and more suspicious with age and experience.

The second thing I understood was more frightening. Idris caught my eye twice during that meeting, both times immediately after Marisol had spoken, both times with an expression I recognized instantly because I'd worn it myself a hundred times in the last six weeks.

Suspicion. Careful, quiet, unspoken suspicion that clearly predated my arrival by a considerable margin.

Idris already didn't trust her. She just hadn't found a way to prove anything yet, and from the frustrated set of her jaw every time Marisol offered another piece of convenient advice that Rhys accepted without much question, I understood that Idris had been trying and failing to find that proof for a long time already.

I caught up with her afterward, in the corridor outside the council hall, and made a decision I hadn't fully planned for.

"She makes my skin crawl," I said, quiet enough that it wouldn't carry, testing the water carefully.

Idris went very still for a moment, studying me with an intensity that made me wonder if I'd moved too fast, revealed too much too soon.

Then something in her shoulders eased, just slightly, like a person setting down a weight they'd been carrying alone for longer than they wanted to admit.

"You noticed that in one meeting," she said. "Rhys has known her for three years and still can't see it."

"Maybe he doesn't want to."

"Maybe," Idris said, and there was something bitter in the word, something tired. "He trusts her judgment more than he trusts mine, most days, and I've been at his side since we were children. I don't know what she's done to earn that, exactly, but I know it isn't luck."

I filed that away carefully, another piece of a puzzle I was slowly, deliberately assembling. Idris didn't trust Marisol. Idris had never trusted Marisol, apparently, for three years running, and had never once been able to prove why that instinct was correct.

I could prove it. I knew, with absolute certainty no one else in this pack could claim, exactly what Marisol Thorne was capable of and exactly what she was eventually going to do with that capability.

The question, the one I turned over carefully in the days that followed, was how much of that knowledge I could actually use without revealing far more about myself than I was ready to risk.

"If you ever find something," I said carefully, "concrete, I mean. Not just instinct. I'd like to know."

Idris studied me for a long moment, something calculating behind her eyes that told me she was filing away my interest the same way I was filing away hers, both of us building a careful, wordless alliance out of mutual suspicion neither of us had fully explained to the other yet.

"Why would a rogue with six weeks in this pack care that much about pack politics?" she asked.

It was a fair question, and I didn't have a fully honest answer for it, not one I could give her yet.

"Because I don't like watching someone manipulate a man who doesn't see it happening," I said instead, which was true enough not to feel like a lie, even if it left out considerably more than it revealed. "Alpha or not."

Something in Idris's expression shifted again, a decision settling into place behind her eyes.

"Keep your ears open," she said finally. "Same as I have been. If either of us finds something real, we bring it to each other before we bring it to him.

He won't believe it just from me. Not anymore. Maybe he'll believe it from someone Marisol hasn't had three years to poison him against yet."

"Agreed," I said, and something about the exchange, quiet and careful in that empty corridor, felt like the first real foundation I'd built since arriving in Ashgrave territory, the first alliance that had nothing to do with Rhys at all and everything to do with protecting a pack I still, despite everything, couldn't quite stop caring about.

I walked back to the training yard that afternoon with something new sitting alongside the old, familiar weight of grief and fury I'd carried since the river. A plan starting to take real shape, three years ahead of the deadline I'd been counting down toward since I woke up gasping in that cold water.

Maybe I didn't have to wait for the night when Marisol's lie finally destroyed everything. Maybe, with Idris's suspicion and my knowledge combined, there was a version of this story where I stopped it three years before it ever had the chance to happen at all.

I didn't let myself hope too hard. Four years of rogue life had taught me exactly how dangerous hope could be when it moved faster than the evidence supporting it.

But that night, for the first time since I'd arrived in Ashgrave territory, I fell asleep without dreaming of the river at all.