Seduced By My God-Father

chapter ten

NEVER SAFE

My darling girl,

If you're reading this, then Roger found the right moment, which means he was more patient than I ever managed to be, patience was always more his gift than mine, as your father would tell you if he could.

I need to tell you three things.

The first: you are not ordinary. You have never been ordinary, even when the world asked you to be. The thing inside you, the part that hasn't woken yet by the time you're reading this, is not a defect or a delay. It was waiting for the right conditions. It will come when it's ready, and when it does, it will be worth every year you spent waiting.

The second: the box contains what you'll need. Roger will know how to use it. Trust him. I know that may require some complexity to navigate. I am not unaware of how these things work, or how they have a way of resolving themselves regardless of what we plan, but trust him, Sera. He has never once failed either of us.

The third thing is this:

We made choices when you were born. Your father and I made them freely and we do not regret them, not one of them, not even knowing how it ended. If someone asks you to believe that our deaths were the result of anything other than people who wanted power they hadn't earned don't believe them. We knew the cost. We paid it willingly.

You were worth every single thing we gave.

Love you to the last line of the last page, Mum

P.S. Don't be small to make it easier. Not for anyone. Not even him.

I read it four times.

Then I folded it carefully along its original lines and held it against my chest and looked at the ceiling.

Outside the window the pack land was dark and cold and alive with the night sounds I had grown up inside. The wolves were out,some of them, the ones who ran late and I could hear them in the trees, far enough away that it was just the suggestion of them, the memory of sound.

My wolf stirred.

I sat up.

The window was cold when I pressed my hand against it. Beyond the glass, the forest was dark, and the moon was high and half-full, and the night spread out beyond the pack lands into territory that was ours and territory that was contested and territory that belonged to people who had been waiting years for an opportunity they had helped create.

We were not safe.

I had known this since the eastern patrol, since the formal claim, since the box opened and the document lay on the table and Roger's face had done the thing it did when a long-running calculation finally resolved.

We were not safe, and the things being asked of me were larger than anything I had known how to hold at seventeen, and I was not seventeen anymore.

I thought about my mother's last line.

Don't be small to make it easier. Not for anyone. Not even him.

I stood up.

I went to Roger's door and knocked.

He opened it immediately, he hadn't been sleeping either, still dressed, a stillness about him that suggested he had been standing in the exact centre of his room and thinking.

"She knew," I said. "About us. Whatever this is. She knew."

He leaned against the doorframe.

"Yes," he said.

"She told me to trust you."

"She told you several things," he said carefully. "She told me you'd read the letter and then come find me."

"She put that in your letter?"

"She was very thorough."

Despite everything, a laugh moved through me. Short, involuntary, the kind that happens when grief and absurdity arrive at the same moment.

He looked at me when I laughed, and his face did the thing that it had been doing more frequently over the past days, that almost-unguarded thing, the thing that existed in the moment before he remembered to manage it.

"We have a council case to build," I said. "An agent of Ashvale operating inside our territory. A bloodline that invalidates their claim." I looked up at him. "And whatever this is, which we are both going to have to stop pretending is not happening."

He was quiet.

"One thing at a time," I said. "But I'm done being protected from the full picture."

"I know," he said.

"And I'm done letting you carry all of it alone."

Something in his face moved, slow and tectonic, the way things move when they've been held still too long.

"Sera," he said.

"I know," I said. "One thing at a time."

He nodded once.

"Tomorrow," he said, "I'll tell you everything I know."

"Tomorrow," I agreed.

I turned to go.

"Sera."

I stopped.

I heard him take a breath.

"Your mother was right," he said quietly. "About most things."

I didn't ask him which things.

I went back to my room, and lay in the dark, and felt the wolf settle in my chest like she had always lived there, and outside the forest held the pack lands in its dark arms, and everything was about to change.

I was ready."