ThorneVale

Chapter Ten

Three days into whatever new arrangement had settled over her life, Wren found herself steadier than she'd been since the rite, the color back in her face, the shaking in her hands mostly gone, thanks to what Del called maintenance visits, brief evenings where Callum sat across the room from her doing very little beyond simply being present, and her body, apparently, took what it needed from that and asked no more questions than her mind was already asking.

It wasn't enough. She still felt the absence of something under the surface of every ordinary moment, a low hum of incompleteness that no amount of proximity seemed to fully quiet. But it was enough to function, enough to think clearly again, and thinking clearly meant she'd started doing what she always did when a situation refused to make sense.

She went looking for answers on her own.

The historical society occupied the ground floor of Thornevale's old library, a narrow building with tall windows and the particular hush of a place built for quiet study. Ines looked up when the bell over the door rang and, unlike their first meeting, didn't look surprised at all.

"I wondered when you'd come by properly," Ines said, setting down the ledger she'd been working through. "Del tells me you're stabilizing."

"Stabilizing, sure. Understanding, not so much." Wren pulled out a chair across from the older woman's desk, settling in with the particular determination of someone who intended to stay until she got what she came for. "I know what I am now, or what's happening to me, at least in the broad strokes. Del explained the bond, the wane, all of it. What I don't know is why the Ferro family in particular is so frightened of this happening at all. There's history here I keep bumping into the edges of and never getting the full shape of."

Ines was quiet for a moment, studying her, and then, with the air of a woman making a decision she'd clearly been weighing for a while, reached into a drawer and pulled out a thin folder of old clippings, setting it on the desk between them.

"I've kept this town's records for almost thirty years," she said. "Most of it is ordinary history. Founding families, old disputes, the occasional scandal not nearly as interesting as people hope. But there's a thread running through the Ferro line specifically that I've never been able to fully explain, not because I don't have the facts, but because the facts don't add up to anything comfortable."

Wren opened the folder. Newspaper clippings, yellowed and brittle, spanning what looked like decades. The same name she'd found online her first week in town. Ferro. Three separate incidents, each described in the same careful, bloodless language, each ruled an accident by whatever local authority had been responsible for ruling on it at the time.

"Three deaths," Ines said quietly. "Three generations. Always a woman connected to the Ferro Alpha line. Always ruled accidental, always investigated with a thoroughness that somehow never turned up an actual cause. I was young when the most recent one happened. Marianne Ferro. Callum's mother."

Something cold settled in Wren's chest that had nothing to do with the wane. "What actually happened to her?"

"I don't know the full truth. Nobody outside the pack does, not really. But I know enough to say it wasn't an accident, and I know that whoever or whatever was responsible was never caught." Ines's expression had gone grave, the careful diplomacy she usually wore stripped back to something more direct. "There's an organization. I've heard fragments of it over the years, mostly things I wasn't meant to hear, conversations that stopped when I walked into a room. They call themselves the Ashen Circle. As far as I understand it, they believe the mate bond is a vulnerability, a way for wolves to be controlled or manipulated through the people they love most. And they've made it their purpose to eliminate that vulnerability wherever they find it, particularly in Alpha bloodlines, where the stakes of controlling a mate would be highest."

"By killing the mates."

"By killing the mates." Ines nodded slowly. "Marianne Ferro was killed when Callum was eleven years old. I don't know the full details, and I wouldn't presume to give them to you even if I did, because that's a story that belongs to his family to tell, not mine. But I think you deserve to understand the shape of what you're standing in the middle of, Wren. When Callum rejected that bond in front of the whole town, he wasn't rejecting you. I'd stake my reputation on that. He was trying to keep you off a list he's spent his entire adult life terrified of seeing your name added to."

Wren sat with the folder open in front of her, the old clippings blurring slightly as she read and reread the same careful, evasive language, three women reduced to a handful of column inches and a ruling that everyone in this room understood to be a lie.

"That doesn't excuse what he did," she said finally, though her voice had lost some of its earlier certainty. "Not telling me. Deciding for me, without giving me the chance to understand what I was choosing."

"No," Ines agreed. "It doesn't excuse it. I don't think anyone in this town, including his own sister, would tell you it does." She closed the folder gently, her hand resting on top of it for a moment before she pushed it toward Wren. "But I think it explains it. And I think there's a difference between a man who doesn't want you and a man who's so afraid of losing you that he's willing to hurt you first, if it means keeping you safe from something worse. Whether that difference matters enough to you is not something I can decide. That part is yours."

Wren left the historical society an hour later with the folder tucked carefully into her bag, granted with Ines's quiet permission, the weight of it feeling heavier than the thin stack of papers should have accounted for.

She walked home through streets that had started, slowly, to feel less foreign than they had two weeks ago, past the Copper Spoon and the old library and the turn that led up toward the ridge where a house full of careful, complicated people was quietly trying to keep her alive.

She didn't know yet what she was going to do with the truth she'd just been handed.

But she understood, walking home under a sky just beginning to dim toward evening, that she couldn't unknow it either, and that whatever came next between her and Callum Ferro was going to have to be built on more honesty than either of them had managed so far.