The Rouges Moon

Chapter 9

Petra found me alone three weeks later, in the equipment shed behind the training yard, and the careful way she checked over her shoulder before stepping inside told me immediately that whatever she'd come to say wasn't something she wanted to be overheard.

"You've been asking about Marisol," she said, without preamble. She was older than most of Ashgrave's active warriors, silver threading through dark hair, the kind of quiet competence that came from decades of service rather than any need to prove herself anymore. "Idris too, though she's better at hiding it than you are."

My stomach dropped. "I don't know what you mean."

"You don't have to pretend with me," Petra said, and something tired and old settled into her face. "I served under Rhys's father. I remember what this pack was like before that woman arrived. I've watched it change, slowly, in ways I can't quite point to on their own but add up to something I don't trust."

I set down the blade I'd been cleaning and gave her my full attention. "What do you know?"

"Not enough," she admitted. "But I know she doesn't sleep in the guest quarters most nights.

I know she leaves the territory sometimes, alone, and comes back a day or two later with explanations that never quite add up if you ask enough follow-up questions, which most people don't bother doing because she's very good at making you feel foolish for asking." She paused. "And I know that six years ago, before Rhys's father died, there was a young Kestrel scout caught on our border.

Rhys's father let him go, as a gesture of goodwill during a period of tense but not yet hostile relations between the pack. Nobody thought much of it at the time. I've thought about it a great deal since Marisol arrived."

"You think that scout was connected to her."

"I think it's worth someone looking into," Petra said. "I'm too old and too tired to go digging through decades of border logs myself, and frankly, I'd rather not have my name attached to accusing the Alpha's most trusted advisor of treason without something solid to back it up. But you and Idris seem determined enough to actually do something about it.

I thought you should have the thread, even if I can't finish pulling it myself."

I thanked her, meant it more than my careful, measured voice probably conveyed, and she left the same quiet way she'd arrived, leaving me alone with a piece of information that felt like it might finally c***k something open.

I brought it to Idris that night, and this time, instead of another careful, patient month of gathering more fragments, we decided it was worth the risk of digging directly.

The border logs from six years ago were kept in the deepest part of the archive, in a section that hadn't been properly organized in longer than either of us had been alive, and it took the better part of two nights, working by candlelight after the rest of the hall had gone quiet, before we found the entry Petra had described.

A Kestrel scout, captured near the eastern border, was released on the elder Alpha's orders after a brief period of custody. The scout's name was recorded, faded but legible: Cassian Thorne.

Idris went very still, staring at the page.

"Thorne," she said quietly.

"A brother," I said. "Or a cousin. Something."

"It's not exactly a common name in these territories," Idris said. "This can't be a coincidence."

We sat with that discovery for a long moment, the weight of it settling over both of us in the flickering candlelight.

It wasn't proof, not yet, not the kind of airtight case Idris kept insisting we needed before bringing anything to Rhys. But it was a thread, a real one, connecting Marisol Thorne directly to Kestrel territory in a way that went beyond pattern and instinct.

"We need to find out what happened to Cassian Thorne," Idris said. "Whether he's still alive, still at Kestrel, still connected to whatever's happening here."

"That means someone crossing the border," I said, already understanding where this was heading and already knowing I wasn't going to like the answer.

"It means someone crossing the border who Marisol won't recognize, who can move quietly, and who has the skill to get back out again if things go wrong." Idris looked at me directly, and I understood, with a sinking certainty, exactly what she was about to ask. "You fit that description better than anyone else in this pack."

I thought about it for exactly as long as it took to remember every version of this story I'd already lived through once, every year I'd spent building myself into someone capable of this exact kind of mission, and understood that Garrick hadn't spent four years turning me into a weapon just so I could stand in a training yard sparring with warriors who already trusted me.

"I'll go," I said. "But Rhys can't know. Not yet. If this goes wrong and Marisol finds out we're investigating her, she'll have three years to cover her tracks even more carefully than she already has, and we lose whatever advantage surprise still gives us."

"Agreed," Idris said, though something in her expression told me she didn't love asking a relatively new recruit to take on a mission this dangerous without official sanction. "You understand what happens if a Kestrel catches you inside their territory without pack backing. Nobody's coming to get you out."

"I understand," I said, and thought, with a grim, private irony she couldn't have understood, that I'd already died once without anyone coming to get me out either, and had survived that too, in whatever strange way I'd survived it.

I left three days later, slipping out of Ashgrave territory under cover of a supply run that gave me a legitimate reason to be near the border, and spent the better part of a week moving carefully through unfamiliar country, using every skill Garrick had drilled into me and a few I'd apparently inherited from Vera Sharp's original life that I still didn't fully understand the origins of.

Kestrel territory was colder than Ashgrave land, more heavily patrolled, run with a kind of rigid military discipline that told me a great deal about the Alpha in charge before I ever laid eyes on him.

I moved through the border villages carefully, asking quiet questions in taverns and market squares, piecing together fragments the way I'd learned to piece together everything since I woke up in that river four years and a lifetime ago.

Cassian Thorne, it turned out, wasn't just alive. He was Kestrel's ranking spymaster, a senior figure in Alpha Duskfell's inner circle, responsible, according to careful, quiet rumors I gathered from three separate sources over the course of that week, for a network of operations aimed at weakening neighboring packs from the inside long before any open conflict ever became necessary.

I didn't get close enough to confirm the family connection directly, not without risking exposure I couldn't afford, but I got close enough to understand something far more important.

This wasn't one manipulative witch working her own private angle inside Ashgrave's council. This was a coordinated, patient, years-long operation, and Marisol Thorne was very likely only one piece of a much larger campaign aimed at destroying my pack from the inside, exactly the way I remembered it eventually succeeding.

I made it back across the border on the eighth night, exhausted and colder than I'd been in years, with information that was going to change everything about how Idris and I approached what came next.

She met me in the same small archive room, and I watched her face shift through disbelief, fury, and finally a grim, determined resolve as I laid out everything I'd learned.

"This is bigger than we thought," she said, when I finished.

"It's bigger than I thought too," I admitted, which was true in ways I couldn't fully explain to her. In the timeline I remembered living through once already, I'd never learned any of this. I'd simply died, believing my death was about a personal betrayal, a witch's private cruelty, a husband's failure of faith in me.

I hadn't understood, not until this exact moment, standing exhausted in a candlelit archive room with a piece of pack history stitched into something far larger and colder than I'd ever imagined, that my death had never really been personal at all.

I'd just been a convenient casualty in a war I hadn't even known was being fought.

"We bring this to Rhys," Idris said. "Together. Now. Whatever risk that carries, we've got enough here that he has to listen."

I nodded, and felt something settle into place inside my chest that had been sitting unresolved since the night I woke up drowning in that river. Three years still stood between me and the deadline I remembered with terrible clarity. But for the first time since I'd arrived in Ashgrave territory, I let myself believe, fully and without careful hedging, that this story might actually end differently than the one I'd already survived once.