The Rouges Moon

Chapter 5

The last time I'd walked through Ashgrave's main hall, I'd been carried out of it.

Nobody here knew that, of course. To every warrior and servant who glanced up as Rhys led me through the front doors, I was simply a rogue who'd dropped four fighters in a gully and was now being rewarded with a meal, and I made myself hold my spine straight and my face unreadable, cataloguing the room the way Garrick had taught me to catalogue any space I walked into. Exits. Threats. Who was watching me and why.

It was harder than it should have been, doing that in a room I already knew the layout of by heart.

The great hall hadn't changed. The same long tables, the same banners bearing Ashgrave's crescent-and-claw sigil hanging from the rafters, the same enormous hearth at the far end that I used to sit beside on cold nights, curled against Rhys's side, back when I still believed that was a permanent arrangement rather than a temporary mercy he could revoke without warning.

My chest tightened at the sight of it, and I forced the feeling down somewhere. Vera Sharp's cold competence could bury it before it reached my face.

"Sit," Rhys said, gesturing to a bench near the hearth, and I did, and tried not to notice that it was the same bench, or close enough to it that the memory sat uncomfortably close to the surface anyway.

A woman approached before I'd fully settled, dark-haired, sharp-eyed, moving with the particular economy of someone used to being taken seriously in a room full of warriors. I recognized her immediately, though four years younger and considerably less weathered by responsibility than the version I remembered.

Idris. Rhys's cousin and Beta, and, in my old life, one of the only members of the inner circle who'd never fully trusted Marisol Thorne, though it hadn't been enough to save me in the end.

She looked at me now with the same evaluating sharpness I remembered, though there was no recognition in it at all, because this Idris had never met me, would never meet the woman I used to be.

"Is this the rogue who cleared the gully?" she asked Rhys, not taking her eyes off me.

"This is her," Rhys said. "Vera Sharp."

Something flickered across Idris's face at the name, faint and quick, gone almost before I registered it, the same kind of small hitch I'd seen cross Rhys's expression back in the gully. I filed it away carefully, the way I filed away everything I didn't understand yet, and told myself again that it was nothing. Coincidence.

Rogue names sometimes overlapped with things people had heard before. There was no reason for it to mean what some small, hopeful, terrified part of me wanted it to mean.

"Four against one, from what my warriors are saying," Idris said, sitting across from me without being invited to, which I remembered was exactly her way. "That's not rogue luck. That's training."

"I've had some," I said.

"Where?"

"Around." I let just enough edge into the word to make clear I wasn't going to elaborate, and watched her weigh that, deciding whether to push. She didn't, not yet, though I could tell from the set of her jaw that she'd be watching me carefully from here on, filing away every detail the way I was filing away hers.

Four years of training under Garrick hadn't just sharpened my body. It had sharpened the part of me that could read a room and know, with reasonable certainty, exactly which person in it was going to be the hardest to fool.

Idris was going to be that person. I'd known it would be her before I ever set foot on Ashgrave land, because I'd known her once, trusted her once, and some part of the old Wren still believed, foolishly, that if anyone in this pack was ever going to see through me, it should probably be someone who'd once been something like a friend.

Food arrived, and I made myself eat it slowly, the way a person does who isn't sure when their next meal is coming but doesn't want to look desperate about it, and around me the hall filled with the low, layered noise of a pack going about an ordinary evening.

Warriors trading stories about the skirmish. Someone was laughing too loud near the far wall. A pair of children chased each other between the tables while an exhausted-looking mother tried to herd them toward the door.

It should have felt foreign. Four years in Hollow's End and the Rogue Territories had rebuilt nearly everything about how I moved through the world, and yet some part of me slid back into the rhythm of pack life so easily it frightened me, like a muscle memory I hadn't realized I still had.

Rhys sat down across from me without asking, in the space Idris had vacated to go deal with something one of the border warriors needed, and for a moment neither of us said anything at all.

"You could have kept walking," he said finally. "Back at the gully. Most rogues would have."

"Most rogues probably would have," I agreed.

"But you didn't."

"No.

He studied me for a long moment, and I made myself hold still under it, made myself remember that this was a man who had no memory of ever loving me, no context for the specific way I used to fidget with the edge of my sleeve when I was nervous, no reason to recognize anything about the way I held my mouth when I was hiding something.

And yet.

"Have we met before?" he asked, quiet enough that it didn't carry past our end of the table, and my whole chest went cold and still at once.

"I think I'd remember an Alpha," I said, which was true in the strictest technical sense and also the biggest lie I'd told since I woke up in that river.

He nodded slowly, though something in his face didn't quite settle, some small unresolved thing sitting behind his eyes that I recognized, with a jolt, as the exact expression he used to wear when he was working through a problem he hadn't found the shape of yet.

"There's something familiar about you," he said. "I can't place it. I'm sorry, that's probably strange to hear from a stranger."

"It happens," I said, keeping my voice light, though underneath the table my hands had curled into fists against my knees. "People say I remind them of someone all the time."

That was, at least, not technically a lie. I'd heard some version of that sentiment more than once in the last four years, usually from people who'd known Vera Sharp before whatever transformation had happened to me in that river, people who could tell something about her had changed even if they couldn't name what.

Rhys let it go, though I could tell from the careful, considering the way he kept glancing at me through the rest of the meal that he hadn't actually let it go at all, merely set it aside to examine later, alone, the way I remembered him doing with any problem he hadn't yet found the right angle on.

"Ashgrave could use warriors like you," he said eventually, once the meal had mostly finished and the hall had begun to empty out around us. "Formally, I mean. Not just gully rescues."

"I'm not packed," I said. "I don't have a place here."

"You could." He said simply, without the weight I remembered him putting into every decision as Alpha, still young enough here that offers like this apparently came easier to him, before a decade of advisors convinced him that generosity was a liability.

"We're always looking for warriors who can handle themselves. You clearly can. I'd rather have someone like you fighting with us than wondering, every time there's a border skirmish, whether you're going to be on the other side of it next time."

I sat with that for a long moment, because this was, more or less, exactly what I'd walked four years to arrange, and now that the offer was actually sitting in front of me, some part of me that I thought Garrick had trained out of me entirely wanted, badly, to say no.

To turn around and walk back into the trees and let this entire plan die here, unfinished, rather than spend however many years it took getting close enough to a man who was eventually going to break my heart and my body in the same terrible night.

I thought of the river. I thought of his back turned toward that window. I thought of seven months of marriage erased by a witch's lie he hadn't bothered to question.

"All right," I said. "I'll join."

Something in his face eased, just slightly, an expression I recognized with an ache I wasn't prepared for as relief, the exact particular shape of relief I remembered from a hundred small moments in a life he didn't remember having with me.

"Good," he said. "Idris will get you settled. Welcome to Ashgrave, Vera Sharp."

He said my false name like it meant something to him already, and I sat there with that unbearable familiar warmth spreading through my chest despite every single thing I knew about where this road eventually led, and understood, with a clarity that frightened me more than any fight I'd survived in the last four years, that the hardest part of this entire plan was never going to be becoming strong enough to face him.

It was going to be standing this close to him, every day, for however long it took, and remembering, on purpose, every single reason I wasn't allowed to let myself love him again.