MARKED BY THE MOON

Finding Priya

Luna POV

Nobody has seen Elder Priya since she said my mother's name out loud.

It takes me most of the walk back to the council chamber to remember that detail, buried under everything else that's happened today, but once I do, it settles into my chest with a weight I can't shake.

"She vanished right after the meeting," I say, stopping Kian mid-stride. "The old woman who let Elena's name slip. Nobody's mentioned her since."

Kian's face shifts, sharp focus replacing exhaustion. "You're right. I sent guards to find her hours ago. Gently, I said." He curses under his breath. "I never followed up."

"Today's been a lot," I say, though it doesn't make either of us feel better.

We find the two guards Kian assigned near the kitchens, both looking uneasy, both admitting they never actually located her. Her chambers were empty. Nobody's seen her since council.

"Show me where she stays," I say.

Priya's room is small, tucked into an older section of the pack house that smells like dust and candle wax, the kind of quarters given to elders who've outlived most of their usefulness in the eyes of a council that only respects power while you're still wielding it. The door is unlocked. Inside, everything looks untouched. A shawl draped over a chair. A cup of cold tea, half-finished, sitting on the table.

"She didn't pack," Kian says, scanning the room. "Didn't run."

"Then someone made her disappear," I say quietly, "the same way they made two guards abandon their post tonight without a fight."

I move toward the small writing desk in the corner, drawn to it without fully understanding why, and find a single sheet of paper half-hidden beneath a stack of older letters. The ink is fresh. Recently. Like she wrote it today, in the hours after council, before whoever came for her arrived.

I unfold it with shaking hands.

"If you're reading this, I didn't get the chance to tell you myself. I'm sorry for what I let slip in council. Twenty-three years of silence, and it took one look at your eyes to break it. You have your mother's eyes, child. I should have told you that the moment you walked back into this pack, false name or not."

"I know things I was never supposed to know. I helped hide Elena's disappearance, may the moon forgive me, because I was told it was the only way to keep her safe. I believed that lie for years. I don't believe it anymore."

"There is a list. Names of everyone who was involved in the original decision to disqualify Elena's claim. I kept it hidden, because some part of me always knew this day would come, that someone would need it eventually. It's sewn into the lining of my second shawl, the gray one, in the chest at the foot of my bed."

"Find whoever comes for me tonight. They'll lead you to the truth faster than any ledger could. I'm not afraid anymore, Luna. I'm tired of being afraid. Twenty-three years is long enough."

"Forgive an old woman for her silence. And forgive this pack for what it did to your mother, if you can.

Priya

My hands are shaking by the time I finish reading. Kian takes the letter gently from me, reading it himself, his jaw tightening with every line.

"The chest," he says.

We find it fast, at the foot of her narrow bed, and inside, folded neatly beneath a stack of old clothes, a gray shawl with something stiff and rectangular sewn carefully into the hem. Kian tears the stitching open with careful, urgent hands, and a small folded piece of parchment falls out onto the bed between us.

I unfold it.

Names. A dozen of them, written in careful, aging handwriting, dates beside each one going back over two decades. Elders. Council members. Some names I recognize immediately from meetings I've sat through since I returned. Others I don't know at all.

And at the very bottom of the list, circled twice in ink darker than the rest, like it was added later, added with urgency, a single name that makes my whole body go cold.

Not a name I recognize from the council.

A name I recognize from somewhere much closer, much more painful, much harder to accept.

Kian goes rigid beside me, staring at the same word I'm staring at, and for a long moment neither of us says anything at all, because the name circled at the bottom of Priya's list isn't an elder, isn't a stranger, isn't anyone either of us expected.

It's Declan's mother.

"That's not possible," Kian says slowly, though his voice carries more shock than denial. "Declan's mother died when he was a child. Fever, the pack records say. I've known him my whole life. I was there for her funeral."

"Were you," I ask quietly, "or were you told you were there for a funeral, the same way this whole pack was told Elena simply died?"

Kian doesn't answer right away. I watch the realization move across his face slowly, painfully, the same way it moved across mine when Cassia first told us the truth about the throne.

"If she's alive," he says finally, "if she's been alive this whole time, hidden somewhere, protected or imprisoned or worse, that would explain everything about Declan. The leverage. The debt his family supposedly owed. All of it."

"They're not holding leverage over him because of some old family debt," I say, the pieces falling into place faster than I can speak them. "They're holding his mother. Alive. Somewhere. And they've been using her to control him since before either of us even knew there was a conspiracy to control anything."

Kian's hands curl into fists at his sides, and I can feel the fury radiating off him through the bond, sharp and hot.

"He's not a traitor," he says quietly. "He's a hostage negotiator who's been trying to save his mother's life for years, and I've been hunting him like an enemy."

"We don't know that for certain," I say, gentler now, though I believe it as much as he does. "But it fits. It fits better than anything else has fit all day."

Kian folds the list carefully, tucking it inside his jacket alongside Priya's letter, and for a moment he just stands there in the small, dusty room, staring at nothing, carrying the weight of a friendship he's spent weeks believing was a lie.

"We need to find him," he says finally. "Before whoever's behind this decides he's outlived his usefulness the same way they decided Priya had."

"And if he doesn't want to be found? If he's still protecting his mother the only way he knows how?"

Kian looks at me, something fierce and determined settling into his expression, the same look I remember from five years ago, right before everything between us fell apart.

"Then I'll convince him there's a better way to save her," he says. "One that doesn't cost him everything else he has left."

Outside, the storm has finally passed, leaving the territory washed clean and quiet under a sky just beginning to clear. But standing in Priya's small, abandoned room, surrounded by the last honest words of a woman who paid for her silence with her freedom, I don't feel any of that quiet.

I feel like we've just found the edge of something enormous, and whatever's waiting beneath it is far from finished with any of us yet.