MARKED BY THE MOON

An Empty Hiding Place

Kian POV

Cassia's old chambers still smell like her.

That's the first thing I notice when we step inside, Luna close behind me, two guards posted at the door with orders to let no one else near this room. Cassia gave us the location before the guards dragged her back to her cell: a loose floorboard beneath the window, third from the wall, where she hid the key the same night she pulled it from Mira's cooling hand.

"Here," Luna says, already crouched by the window, running her fingers along the wood until one board shifts slightly under her touch. "This one."

I kneel beside her and pry it up.

The space beneath is empty.

Not empty like nothing was ever there. Empty like something was removed carefully, deliberately, by someone who knew exactly where to look. A faint outline in the dust marks where a small object sat for two years, undisturbed, until recently.

"It's gone," Luna says quietly, though the words are more for herself than for me. "Someone already took it."

"Recently." I run my thumb through the dust, checking the disturbance. "Days, maybe. Not weeks."

Luna sits back on her heels, frustration and exhaustion warring across her face. "Cassia said no one else knew where she hid it."

"Cassia's been locked in a cell since the council meeting. She couldn't have moved it herself even if she wanted to." I stand, scanning the room properly now, cataloguing every detail the way I've been forced to catalogue this entire pack house today. "Which means either she's lying to us, or someone else already knew this hiding place existed."

"Or someone followed her here, before we ever locked her up." Luna rises too, arms wrapped around herself against a cold that has nothing to do with the room's temperature. "The same night she took it off Mira's body, maybe. I watched her hide it and left it there, waiting, until it was useful."

The thought settles heavy between us. Whoever we're dealing with plays a longer game than either of us wants to admit. Patient enough to let a key sit hidden for two years. Patient enough to poison a cup of tea slowly instead of striking all at once.

A floorboard creaks somewhere down the hall.

I go still instantly, every instinct sharpening at once, and I catch Luna doing the same beside me, her body angling slightly, protective, toward the door rather than away from it.

"Guards?" she whispers.

I listen. The two men I posted outside would announce themselves, not creep. "Stay behind me."

We move toward the door together, and I ease it open slowly, scanning the corridor beyond.

Empty.

Both guards are gone.

Not fighting-gone, not blood-on-the-floor gone. Simply absent, their posts abandoned, no sign of struggle in the hallway at all, which somehow frightens me more than violence would have. Whoever did this didn't need force. They only needed the right words, or the right threat, to make two trained guards walk away from their duty without a fight.

"Kian." Luna's voice is low, tight with fear she's trying hard not to show. "Something's wrong."

I already know. I can feel it, the same way I felt the storm rolling in before the first clap of thunder hit, some ancient warning system built into every Alpha's blood screaming that we've stepped somewhere we shouldn't have.

"We need to get back to the main hall," I say. "Now."

We move fast down the corridor, and it's only when we reach the stairwell that I see it — a single word scrawled in what looks like charcoal across the stone wall, crude and hurried, like whoever wrote it didn't have long before they had to disappear.

TOO LATE.

My blood runs cold.

"Too late for what," Luna breathes, staring at the words.

I don't have an answer. I only have the sudden, violent certainty that whatever's happening right now, wherever it's happening, we're already behind by however many minutes it took us to search an empty hiding place instead of watching the rest of this pack house.

We run.

The main hall, when we reach it, is in chaos — pack members shouting, guards pushing through the crowd, and at the center of it all, Bettina the healer kneeling over someone on the floor, her hands pressed hard against a wound I can't see clearly from this distance through the crowd.

"Move," I roar, and the pack parts for me the way it always does, fear and instinct clearing a path faster than any command could.

I reach the center of the hall and my whole body goes cold.

It's Sable.

Blood soaks through the bandage on her ribs, torn wide open again, fresh wounds layered over the old ones Declan already gave her weeks ago. Her eyes are open, unfocused, fighting to stay conscious.

"She was attacked in her room," someone shouts. "Whoever it was, they're gone. Vanished before anyone could stop them."

I drop to my knees beside her, and Luna is right there with me, gripping Sable's hand, tears already spilling down her face.

"Sable." My voice comes out rougher than I mean it to. "Sable, stay with us. Who did this?"

Sable's lips move, barely enough sound to catch over the chaos of the hall around us.

I lean in close, straining to hear.

"The key," she whispers, so faint I almost miss it. "They wanted... to know if I had it too."

Her eyes flutter, losing their fight to stay open.

"Sable!" Luna's voice cracks with panic.

Bettina works fast beside us, pressing harder against the wound, shouting for more supplies, more hands, more time we might not have.

And somewhere in this pack house, I know, whoever did this is still here, watching, patient as ever, exactly one step ahead of everything we've done to try to stop them.

Bettina finally gets the bleeding under control, her hands moving with the steady, practiced calm of someone who's saved more lives than she's lost, though the fear in her eyes tells me this one was close. Too close.

"She'll live," Bettina says finally, sitting back on her heels, exhaustion written into every line of her face. "But she needs rest, real rest, somewhere guarded, somewhere no one can reach her again."

"My old chambers," I say immediately. "Double guard. No one gets near that door without my direct order."

Luna hasn't let go of Sable's hand, even now that the worst of the danger has passed, her thumb tracing small, steady circles against Sable's knuckles like she can strength into her through touch alone.

"Someone attacked her because they thought she still had the key," Luna says quietly, once we've stepped back to let Bettina's assistants carry Sable carefully toward safer quarters. "Which means whoever's been one step ahead of us this whole time doesn't actually know it's already missing."

I turn the thought over, and something about it settles wrong in my chest. "Unless they wanted us to believe that."

Luna's eyes meet mine, sharp and understanding immediately. "You think this was staged. To make us think there are two separate threats instead of one."

"I don't know what to think anymore." I run a hand down my face, the weight of the entire day finally threatening to catch up with me all at once. Fire. Murder. Poison. Now this. "I know that everyone who's touched this secret in the last two years has ended up dead, missing, or bleeding on my floor. And I know that whoever's responsible is close enough to this pack to walk its halls without anyone stopping them."

"Which means it could be almost anyone," Luna says softly.

"Which means," I say, "starting tonight, no one in this pack house is above suspicion. Not the elders. Not the guards. No one."

Luna looks at me for a long moment, and I can see her weighing the same terrible truth I'm weighing, the reality that Blackthorn, the place I've spent my whole life defending, has become a house full of strangers wearing familiar faces.

"Not even Cassia," I add quietly, "though she's the one person locked up tight enough that I know exactly where she's been every hour tonight."

"Then she's the only person in this entire pack house we can actually trust not to have done this," Luna says, something bitter and disbelieving in her voice. "A prisoner. That's where we've landed."

Down the hall, Sable is carried through the doors of my old chambers, guards falling into position on either side, and the great hall slowly begins to empty as the immediate crisis passes and pack members drift back toward whatever fragile sense of safety they can still manage to hold onto tonight.

I stand in the middle of the wreckage of the evening, Luna beside me, and for the first time since this entire nightmare began, I let myself feel the full weight of how far behind we actually are.

A key, stolen before we even knew to look for it. A ledger, still locked away, holding answers we desperately need and can no longer reach. A young woman nearly killed for information she didn't even have anymore. And somewhere in the shadows of my own home, someone patient enough to have planned all of this months, maybe years, before Luna ever walked back through my gates.

"We need a new plan," I say quietly. "Because whatever we've been doing today, it's not working fast enough."

Luna nods, exhausted but resolute, and together we start walking back toward the council chamber, already turning over every possibility, every name, every face in this pack house that might be hiding something none of us have thought to suspect yet.