The Rouges Moon

Chapter 10

We asked for a private audience the next morning, before the council hall filled with its usual business, and I spent the walk there trying to steady a nervous energy. I hadn't felt this sharply since the night I'd woken up choking on river water.

This was the moment. Not the ending I'd originally planned for, not some carefully staged confrontation years in the making, but a real chance, unearned and unexpected, to stop everything before it ever became the tragedy I remembered living through.

If Rhys believed us, if the evidence Idris and I had gathered was enough to break through whatever careful hold Marisol had built over him in three years of patient manipulation, then maybe the version of him who'd once turned his back on me at a window would simply never come to exist at all.

Rhys was alone when we arrived, reviewing reports at the council table, and he looked up with the faint, warm surprise he still hadn't fully learned to hide around me, before his expression shifted into something more careful at the sight of Idris's grim face beside mine.

"This looks serious," he said, setting down his papers.

"It is," Idris said, and didn't waste time on the preamble. "We need to talk about Marisol."

Something in his face closed, just slightly, a door shutting partway before he'd even heard the argument behind it, and my chest tightened with a dread I recognized instantly.

I'd seen this exact expression before, I realized. Not on this Rhys, not yet, but on the one I remembered from four years in my future, the one who'd stood at a window and refused to turn around no matter how much I begged him.

This was the beginning of that same instinct. Small, still resistant, but unmistakably the same root.

"Idris," he said, tired in a way that suggested this wasn't the first time this particular conversation had started. "We've been through this."

"Not like this, we haven't," Idris said, and laid out everything, carefully, methodically, the pattern of Marisol's advice that consistently eroded trust within the pack, the timing of her arrival during his most vulnerable moment as a new Alpha, the border log from six years earlier, the name Cassian Thorne, Kestrel's spymaster, and the information I'd gathered on my own week-long journey into hostile territory to confirm the connection.

I watched Rhys's face throughout, cataloguing every flicker of doubt, every moment his expression seemed to waver toward genuinely considering what we were telling him.

There were more of those moments than I expected, more than the man I remembered from four years in the future would ever have allowed himself, and for a brief, fragile stretch of that conversation, I let myself believe we might actually be winning.

Then he asked what I should have anticipated and hadn't prepared well enough for.

"How did you get this information?" he asked, looking directly at me. "You said you crossed into Kestrel territory alone. Without pack sanction. Without telling me."

"Because if it went wrong, I didn't want it traced back to Ashgrave," I said. "And because Idris and I agreed that if Marisol found out we were investigating her before we had proof, she'd have time to cover her tracks."

"So you kept this from me too," he said, quietly, and something in his voice made my stomach drop. Not anger, exactly. Something worse.

A specific, wounded kind of disappointment that I recognized immediately, because I'd heard an early version of it once before, in a different context, four years from now, right before he ordered my death.

"We didn't have enough to bring you until now," I said. "That's why we're here."

"You had suspicion for months," he said. "Idris, you've had suspicion for years. And instead of coming to me directly, the two of you decided, on your own, to run an unsanctioned mission into hostile territory behind my back."

"Because you don't listen when it's just me," Idris said, sharp now, years of frustration finally breaking through her careful restraint.

"How many times have I raised concerns about her, Rhys? How many times have you told me I was being paranoid, or overprotective, or simply unable to accept that you don't need me managing every decision anymore?"

Something flickered across his face, guilt maybe, or the beginning of it, but before he could answer, the door to the council hall opened, and Marisol walked in.

I don't know how long she'd been listening outside. Long enough, clearly, from the careful, composed way she entered the room, no surprise on her face at all, no hesitation.

"I heard raised voices," she said, and her eyes moved to me with an expression that made my chest go cold, something sharp and assessing that told me, with sudden terrible clarity, that whatever careful cover I'd built over the last four months had just been fundamentally compromised.

"Should I be concerned?"

"You should probably explain a border log from six years ago," Idris said, before Rhys could speak, "and a man named Cassian Thorne."

I watched Marisol's face very carefully in that moment, looking for the c***k, the flicker of panic that would confirm everything we'd pieced together. She didn't give me one. Whatever else she was, she was good, better than good, and the small, considering pause she took before answering felt less like someone caught and more like someone calculating exactly which lie would land hardest.

"Cassian," she said slowly, "was my brother."

The admission landed in the room like a struck bell, and I saw Rhys's face shift toward something that looked, for one terrible moment, like vindication for us. Then Marisol kept talking.

"He died three years ago," she said, quiet, controlled, grief woven carefully into every word. "Killed during a Kestrel border raid he was ordered to lead against his own conscience.

I never told anyone here because I didn't want my grief mistaken for divided loyalty, exactly the mistake, it seems, that's happening right now."

I felt the ground shift under the entire conversation, watched Rhys's careful, wavering doubt curdle back into something closer to guilt over having doubted her at all.

"That's not what the border logs suggest," Idris said, though I heard the first note of uncertainty creeping into her voice. "He was released as a young scout, years before that. Alive, and apparently active in Kestrel's inner circle."

"I don't know what logs you're reading," Marisol said, "but I buried my brother myself. I can show you the grave, if that would help settle whatever this is." She turned to Rhys, and something in her expression shifted into something softer, wounded, the exact careful performance of a woman who'd spent years perfecting how to make herself sympathetic in precisely this kind of moment. "I understand suspicion, truly, given what I do.

But I didn't expect it to come from people I considered friends."

I watched Rhys's face and understood, with a sinking, furious clarity, exactly how this was going to end. Not because our evidence was weak, but because Marisol had spent three years building exactly the kind of trust that made an unverified counter-story more believable than a stack of old border logs and a rogue's unsanctioned border crossing.

"I need time to think about this," Rhys said finally, and I could hear, underneath the careful diplomatic phrasing, that the decision had already mostly been made. "Marisol, I'd like you to gather whatever documentation you have. Idris, Vera, I appreciate you bringing me your concerns, but I need more than a border log and a coincidence of names before I act against someone who's advised this council faithfully for three years."

"Rhys," Idris started, and he held up a hand, not sharply, but with enough finality that she stopped.

"I'll consider everything," he said. "That's what I can offer right now."

We left the council hall separately, careful not to look like we were retreating together, and I found Idris an hour later in the training yard, arms crossed, jaw tight with a fury. She was clearly struggling to keep contained.

"She's better than I thought," Idris said. "I've watched her operate for three years and I still didn't see that coming fast enough."

"Neither did I," I admitted, though something in me, some old, exhausted, patient part of myself that remembered exactly how this story had gone the first time, wasn't entirely surprising.

Marisol Thorne had spent seven years, in the version of events I remembered, building toward a single devastating lie sturdy enough to convince a grieving, trusting Alpha to kill his own Luna.

A counter story about a dead brother, delivered on short notice under pressure, had probably taken her considerably less effort than that.

"What now?" Idris asked.

"Now we find the grave she mentioned," I said, "and we find out whether it's real."

Idris looked at me for a long moment, something like grim respect settling into her expression.

"You don't give up easily," she said.

"I've had a lot of practice not giving up," I said, which was truer than she could possibly understand, and turned to look north, toward wherever Marisol Thorne had supposedly buried a brother who, if the border logs were accurate, should have still been very much alive.

I didn't know yet whether we'd find a real grave, an empty one, or nothing at all. I only knew that three years still stood between me and the night I remembered dying, and that I wasn't going to spend a single one of them assuming the fight was already lost simply because the first attempt hadn't gone the way I'd hoped.

Somewhere inside the council hall behind us, Rhys was sitting with a decision he didn't yet know was going to define the rest of his life, and mine, and I understood, walking away from that yard with Idris's grim determination beside me, that the next three years were going to be a longer, harder war than I'd allowed myself to imagine when I first walked north out of Hollow's End.

I was ready for it anyway.