Broken But Not Forgotten

CHAPTER 4

I didn't sleep.

I lay on my mattress in the dark and stared at the ceiling and listed, very deliberately, every reason that what Damon had said was impossible.

He was Alpha of the largest pack in the northwest. I was a pack slave who ate dinner off the floor.

He was powerful, respected, and had spent the last four years building something worth being afraid of. I was the person people called a murderer for surviving my own birth.

He had dark eyes and a scar and walked into rooms like the walls moved for him. I had a broken rib and three years of fraying sweatpants and a wolf I'd been hiding since I was twelve.

And even if, even if, the Moon Goddess had some catastrophic sense of humour and had actually paired us, it didn't matter. My father would not allow it. My father would sooner put me in the ground than let me be claimed by an Alpha. It would raise too many questions. It would demand too many explanations about why the Alpha's own daughter was living as a slave. It would unravel eighteen years of a story he had told himself and everyone else.

He would kill me first.

I pressed my fingers against my broken rib.

So it doesn't matter, I told my wolf. Even if it's true, it doesn't matter.

She didn't respond. She was very good at not responding to arguments she considered already settled.

I closed my eyes and waited for morning.

I heard them an hour before dawn.

Low voices in the corridor outside my room, my father's and Beta Rowan's, too quiet to be casual but not quiet enough to be entirely private. I stayed still on my mattress and let the words come to me.

"He knows."

"He doesn't know. He suspects."

"Theo was watching her all evening. And Damon…"

"Damon is unmated and his wolf is reaching for anything stable. She was in his room, Rowan. Her scent was everywhere in that room. It means nothing."

"If he makes a claim…"

"He won't. Not here. Not based on a scent." A pause. "And even if he did, she can't be claimed. You know why."

A silence.

"We handle this carefully," my father's voice continued. "We give him nothing to react to. The summit ends tomorrow. Once they leave, this is over."

Footsteps moving away.

I lay in the dark and translated what I had heard.

My father already knew.

He was already working out how to make sure it went nowhere.

She can't be claimed. You know why.

I turned that sentence over in my mind for a long time.

There was something under it. Something that wasn't just about rank or status or the story he'd told about me for eighteen years.

You know why.

Like Rowan already had the information. Like it was a shared fact, not an explanation.

I sat up slowly in the dark.

My wolf was very still and paying very close attention.

By six in the morning I had breakfast on the table and was moving through the dining room with coffee when Damon's Beta, Theo, caught my eye and held it for just a moment.

He didn't say anything. He thanked me for the coffee, which again was so unusual it almost broke my rhythm.

When I came back with the juice, he said quietly, without looking at me: "He's not trying to make your life harder."

I poured the juice. "I know."

"Do you?"

"I think he believes what he told me," I said. "I think he's not lying. I also think it doesn't change anything practical."

Theo looked at me then, properly, with those warm and sharper-than-they-looked eyes. "It changes quite a lot of practical things, actually."

"Not for me."

He was quiet for a moment. "Can I ask you something?"

"You'll ask it regardless."

He almost smiled. "How long have you been in this pack?"

"I was born here."

"And your rank?"

I kept my voice even. "I don't have one."

He looked at the fading bruise on my jaw. At the cut above my brow that had almost closed. Something settled in his face that wasn't pity, it was the specific expression of someone doing an accounting.

"Okay," he said. Just that.

I went back to the kitchen.

The morning summit session was long. I served and cleared and served again, moving in and out of the meeting hall on the edge of a conversation I was not supposed to hear but couldn't entirely avoid.

Trade agreements. Border patrols. Pack membership disputes.

And then: the question of Iron Crest's continued expansion.

My father raised it. Diplomatically, carefully, with the specific tone of someone who has prepared the question in advance and pretended it was spontaneous. Three other Alphas added their voices, all of them smaller packs, all of them bordering Iron Crest territory.

Damon listened to all of it without expression.

Then he said, with the same flat, efficient clarity I was already starting to recognise: "If your concern is stability, the most stabilising thing I can do is find my mate. The council agrees. I'm here, in part, for that reason. I'm not interested in territorial discussion until that's resolved."

Silence.

"And have you found her?" one of the other Alphas asked. Cautious. Curious.

A pause. Two seconds, maybe three.

"I'm working on it," Damon said.

I was standing in the doorway with a water jug.

I didn't look up.

But my wolf was absolutely beside herself.

I was cleaning the hallway outside the meeting room an hour later when the door opened and my father came out.

He saw me on the floor with the mop.

He crossed the corridor in three steps, got very close, and said in a voice that was almost gentle: "If you speak to him again, I will send you to the border and let the rogues have you. Do you understand me?"

I looked at the floor. "Yes, Alpha."

He walked away.

I kept mopping.

My hands were shaking. I gripped the mop handle harder and breathed through it. In the eighteen years of my life my father had said many things to me. He had raised his hand and his voice and thrown things and taken things and ground me down so many times that I had lost count.

But he had always said these things in front of people who agreed with him, or at least who didn't care enough to disagree.

The threat about the border was different.

It was specific.

It was the kind of specific that meant he had already thought about it.

I leaned the mop against the wall.

You know why she can't be claimed.

The sentence was still sitting in me, unresolved, the way a splinter sits under skin. Not visible. But there. Constant.

I thought about the morning of my birth. The blood moon. My twin, who had died before his first breath. The story I had been told my whole life, that I had taken something from him, that my survival had come at his cost.

I had believed it. The whole pack believed it. My parents had said it so many times and with such consistency that I had never thought to look for a different version.

But what if there was one?

What if you know why wasn't about my status or my rank?

What if it was about something they knew, about that night, about what actually happened, that they had buried under eighteen years of a lie?

I picked the mop back up.

My wolf wasn't humming anymore.

She was watching the door my father had just walked through with the careful, focused stillness of someone who has just decided that the time for hiding is almost over.

I didn't know yet what I was going to do with that.

But for the first time in eighteen years, I was asking a question instead of accepting an answer.

And that was something.