THE FORGED LUNA

Chapter 8: Brother’s Visit

Wren spent half the night with a needle between her teeth.

Marlene’s lily charm lay on the washstand beside the hand mirror, pulsing faintly, patient as a sleeping insect. She had considered everything. She could crush it under her heel, flush it, or throw it into the river. Every plan ended the same way, with a Healer in a cream coat standing in her bedroom, asking so gently why it had stopped.

So she did the one clever thing she had ever managed. She slid the charm back into the hem of her brown coat and stitched it closed with thread from the cook’s sewing basket, using her smallest, neatest stitches. The new thread was a shade too bright, so she rubbed it with ash from the grate until it dulled. Then she hung the coat on its hook in the hall, left side dipping exactly as before.

Let it listen. A charm that believed she was safely at home would stay quiet. It was the only lie she could tell without speaking.

Rowan was due at eleven. By then the paint on her nape had dried to a perfect, glittering ring, and even the cook, setting the table, had not looked twice. She heard her brother long before the bell.

She was at the kitchen table, sorting Theo’s crayons, when an engine cut off at the bottom of the drive. Then came footsteps on the gravel, uneven, a man who kept starting and stopping. Then his heartbeat, fast and light, like a bird trapped in a man’s chest.

She had not known she could hear a pulse through a wall. She wondered what else the silver in her neck had been keeping from her.

Wren opened the door before he could knock. “Hello, Rowan.”

Her brother stood on the step with a bakery box held in both hands. He was twenty-nine, tall as their father had been, with fair hair already thinning at the temples and a gray suit that hung wrong at the shoulders, as if he had lost weight in a hurry. She smelled pine soap and starch. Beneath them, so faint she almost lost it, lingered something that made her wolf lift its head. Scorched hair. Cold metal.

Her wolf pressed against her ribs, restless, unsure whether the man on the step was a threat or a mourner.

“Wren.” He did not kiss her cheek. He nodded, like a man greeting a stranger at a bus stop. “I brought lemon cake. The kind Mother used to make.”

He had brought one every holiday for five years. Every holiday she had thanked him, and he had looked at the floor.

Once, he had been her whole world. After the funeral he had stood beside her at the graveside with his hand heavy on her shoulder, the only person who had not looked at her as though she were a murderer. She had clung to that hand for weeks. She had never asked why it had stopped reaching for her once the brand healed.

They sat in the morning room, where Marlene had sat the day before. Wren poured the tea and was proud that her hand did not shake. Rowan held his cup without drinking, turning it a quarter turn at a time, the way he used to turn his fork as a boy whenever Father asked a question he did not want to answer.

“Marlene tells me you have been ill,” he said.

“A fever. It is nearly gone.”

“You look thin.”

“You look tired.”

A ghost of a smile crossed his face and died. For a moment he looked like the boy who had once carried her, shrieking with laughter, out of a snowdrift on his back. Then the shutters came down again.

“I came to talk about the estate,” he said. “Abernathy has been writing to me. He wants you to sign some papers, claims, affidavits, I do not know what else. I need you to promise me something.”

“What?”

“Sign nothing.” He set down his cup too fast, and tea slopped into the saucer. “Not a line, Wren. Not for Abernathy, not for anyone. If he sends papers, give them to Gideon. Gideon’s people will read them first.”

“Gideon’s people.”

“They are careful. You are not built for this sort of thing.” He winced at his own words. “I do not mean it as an insult. Mother’s lawyers are wolves in suits. They would eat a gentle person alive.”

Under the table his knee jittered. In her ears his pulse raced and stumbled on the word *Mother’s,* like a runner catching a toe on a root.

Wren folded her hands. “Gideon will handle it. Of course.”

She watched the relief slide down his shoulders. She watched him believe her. It had never occurred to him that she could be anything but obedient, and she suspected that was the most expensive mistake anyone in this family had ever made.

She thought of Gideon in the registrar’s office, saying her brother had never refused him anything. So this was what that looked like: a grown man carrying someone else’s warning into her house, and hating every step.

“Rowan.” She kept her voice light. “Why didn’t you come to my wedding?”

The cup rattled against the saucer.

“I was away.”

“You never asked what it was like. Five years, and not once.”

“I could not be in that room.” His jaw worked. “I could not.”

“Why not?”

He did not answer. His gaze slid to her hair, to the soft brown curtain that covered her nape, and his right hand lifted from the table and rose to the back of his own neck, pressing there as if it hurt. He seemed to realize what he was doing and dropped it.

She had never seen him do that, and something cold crawled down her spine.

Behind Wren’s ribs, her wolf went absolutely still.

“Do you ever think about that night?” she asked quietly. “The night Mother and Father died?”

“No.”

His heart missed a beat, a hard stumble like a foot through a rotten stair. *Liar,* said the thing behind her ribs, so clearly that she nearly turned to see who had spoken.

“I think about it every day,” Wren said. “I cannot remember any of it. They told me I killed them, and for six years I have taken that on faith, because I could not remember well enough to argue. Do you remember, Rowan? Do you remember what I did?”

“Stop.” The word came out cracked. “Please. Wren, do not do this. It was a terrible night. Let it be.”

For a moment she nearly told him everything: the forged seal, the voices through the wall, the paint on her neck. Then she remembered the pulse that stumbled whenever he lied, and the hand that had flown to his own nape, and the words stayed in her throat.

“I only want to understand what Mother left me.”

She had not planned the next words. They rose from somewhere beneath the exhaustion, the bitterness, and the lingering taste of silver, and she heard them leave her mouth a moment too late to call them back.

“She was careful, wasn’t she? She wanted to protect me, whatever it cost. That is why she put that clause in the trust. The one that says if I am bound to no one, everything is mine.”

Mr. Abernathy had told her to say nothing to her brother. She had just said everything.

The silence that followed was so complete she heard the tea settle in the cups.

Rowan’s face drained until his skin looked like candle wax. His eyes went to the door, the windows, the corner of the ceiling where a small brass vent let in the winter air, flicking from one to the next like a man searching a dark house for a hidden listener. When they came back to her, they stayed.

For the first time in six years, her brother looked her straight in the eyes.

He was terrified.

“Who,” he whispered, and his hand shot across the table and closed hard around her wrist, “told you about Mother’s clause?”