The Rouges Moon

Chapter 8

Idris and I didn't find anything useful for three months, and the waiting taught me more patience than four years of rogue life ever had.

We were careful about it, deliberately careful, because both of us understood that Marisol Thorne hadn't survived three years at an Alpha's right hand by being sloppy about covering her tracks.

Idris took the archives, quietly working through old council records during hours when nobody would question why the Beta was reviewing pack history.

I took the warriors, listening to the kind of loose talk that happens in training yards and mess halls, the small unguarded comments people make when they don't realize anyone's paying attention.

What I learned, slowly, piece by careful piece, was that Marisol's rise to influence hadn't been an accident.

She'd arrived at Ashgrave territory four years ago, not long after Rhys's father died in the border dispute that put a seventeen-year-old boy in charge of a pack he wasn't remotely prepared to lead, offering counsel during a period of chaos when the pack desperately needed someone who seemed to have answers.

That timing alone should have raised more suspicion than it apparently had. Grief and crisis make people vulnerable to exactly the kind of confident, reassuring presence Marisol had clearly cultivated, and a boy burying his father while simultaneously being handed an Alpha's title had been, I understand now with a clarity that made my chest ache, exactly the kind of vulnerability that made manipulation easy.

"She didn't create the opportunity," Idris told me one evening, in the small back room off the archives where we'd taken to meeting once every week or so, always separately, always careful about who saw us arrive and leave. "She just made sure she was standing there when it opened."

"That's worse, somehow," I said.

"It's smarter," Idris said, grim. "Worse and smarter aren't mutually exclusive."

We found the first real thread by accident, the way most real threads get found.

A warrior named Petra, one of the older fighters who'd served under Rhys's father, mentioned in passing during a training break that Marisol had come to Ashgrave from Kestrel territory originally, something about family there, though she never talked about it and nobody had thought much to ask.

I went very still when I heard that name.

Kestrel Pack. The rival territory Garrick had mentioned once, years ago in Hollow's End, without either of us understanding at the time how important the name would eventually become.

Kestrel Pack, whose Alpha, I remember now with a sick, cold clarity, had expanded aggressively into disputed territory in the years after Ashgrave weakened, in the version of this timeline I'd already lived through once, following exactly the kind of internal collapse a manipulated Alpha and a devastated, dead Luna would leave behind.

I brought it to Idris that same night, my hands not quite steady as I laid out what I suspected, careful to frame it as instinct and pattern rather than the kind of certainty that would require explaining how I possibly knew any of it.

"You think she's working for Kestrel," Idris said slowly, turning the idea over with the same careful skepticism I remembered her applying to everything, back when I was still Wren, and she was simply my friend rather than a cautious ally I was still, four months in, only half trusting with fragments of the truth.

"I think it fits the pattern," I said. "An advisor who arrived during a moment of maximum vulnerability, from a rival territory, whose advice consistently seems to weaken Ashgrave's internal trust rather than strengthen it. That's not a coincidence. That's strategy."

"If you're right," Idris said, "this isn't just one manipulative advisor with her own private agenda. This is a rival pack's operation, running for years, aimed at destabilizing Ashgrave from the inside before Kestrel ever has to risk an open war to take what it wants."

"Yes," I said, with more certainty than I could fully explain to her, because in the timeline I remembered, that was exactly what had eventually happened.

Kestrel Pack's expansion into Ashgrave's weakened territory, three years after the night Marisol's forged evidence convinced Rhys to kill his own Luna and destroy his own pup, had never been framed to me as anything more than opportunistic aggression by a hostile neighbor.

I understood now, standing in that small back room with Idris's suspicion finally starting to align with my certainty, that it had never been opportunistic at all. It had been the plan, all along, and my death had simply been one carefully engineered step along the way toward Ashgrave's eventual collapse.

"We need proof," Idris said. "Real proof, not pattern-matching and old gossip about where she used to live. If I bring Rhys a theory without evidence, Marisol will have an explanation for it before I finish the sentence, and he'll believe her over me. He always does, these days."

I heard something raw underneath that admission, a hurt she was clearly trying to keep out of her voice and not quite managing, and I understood, with an ache that surprised me, that Idris had been fighting this exact battle alone for years before I ever arrived to help her carry it.

"We'll find it," I said. "We have time."

I believed that when I said it. I had three years, after all, before the deadline I remembered with terrible clarity, three years to build the kind of case that could actually stop what I already knew was coming instead of simply preparing myself to survive it a second time.

What I hadn't accounted for was how much watching Rhys, every single day, slowly falling deeper under Marisol's careful influence, was going to cost me emotionally, especially as the same weeks that built my case against her also kept building whatever strange, complicated thing was growing between him and me.

He found me in the training yard again, three days after Idris and I identified the Kestrel connection, working through forms alone in the late evening the way I often did when the weight of everything I was carrying got too heavy to sit indoors.

"You've been distracted lately," he said, settling onto the low wall at the yard's edge, watching me work through a sequence Garrick had taught me years ago in a different life entirely.

"Council politics," I said, which was true enough. "It's a lot to adjust to, still being new here."

"You don't seem like someone who adjusts slowly to much of anything," he said, and there was something warm in his voice that made my chest ache in the specific, complicated way it always did lately, grief and want tangled together so tightly I'd mostly given up trying to separate them.

"Everyone adjusts slowly to some things," I said, and stopped moving, breathing hard, and looked at him properly for the first time since he'd sat down.

The last of the evening light caught the line of his jaw, and for one unguarded moment I let myself simply look at him the way I used to, back before the river, back before I understood exactly what he was capable of when the right lie was placed in front of him at the right moment.

"What is it?" he asked, catching something in my expression I hadn't quite managed to hide.

"Nothing," I said. "Just tired."

He studied me a moment longer, and I watched him decide not to push, the same careful restraint I'd noticed in him more and more over the last few months, a quality I didn't remember him having as much of, later, in the version of him I'd married.

I wondered whether that restraint was something Marisol's influence was slowly eroding, one careful year at a time, whether the man ordering my death four years from now in the timeline I remembered was simply what happened when this exact patience finally ran out entirely.

"You know," he said, standing to leave, "whatever's weighing on you. You don't have to carry it alone.

I know you've only been here a few months, but for whatever it's worth, I'd rather you brought things to me than carried them by yourself."

I thought of Idris's words in the archive room, about how Rhys always believed Marisol over her, always found some reason to trust the advisor's careful counsel over his own cousin's instincts, and I understood, with a sadness I hadn't expected, that the man standing in front of me right now genuinely believed what he was offering me. He wanted, in this moment, to be someone people could trust with the truth.

He just hadn't yet learned how easily that same openness could be turned into a weapon against him.

"I'll remember that," I said, and watched him walk away across the darkening yard, and stood there a long time afterward, alone with the ache of loving a man I hadn't allowed myself to fully admit I still loved, and the cold, patient certainty that I was going to need every single one of the next three years to save him from becoming the man who once ordered my death without turning around to look at me.