MARKED BY THE MOON

Ashes and Nothing Left

Luna POV

The records room is gone before I even open my eyes.

I smell it first. Smoke, thick and sour, crawling under my door before the sun is even fully up. My wolf is on her feet inside me before my human mind catches up, and I'm out of bed and moving before I decide to move at all.

The hallway is full of people running the wrong way toward the smell instead of away from it, because this is a pack, and packs run toward danger when it hits their home. I run with them.

By the time I reach the east wing, there's nothing left to save. The records room is a black hole in the side of the building, walls scorched, roof half caved in, smoke still rising thin and lazy into the morning air like it's in no hurry at all. Everything Cassia touched. Everything I found. Everything that could have proven the truth in front of the whole council. Ash now. Just ash.

Kian is already there, standing at the edge of the wreckage with his jaw locked so tight I can see the muscle jumping under his skin. He doesn't look at me right away. He's looking at the fire like it personally insulted him, which, in a way, it did.

"How bad?" I ask, even though I already know the answer.

"Everything's gone." His voice comes out flat, controlled in the way I've learned means he's holding something back. "Ledgers. Requisition records. Whatever else was in there we hadn't found yet."

"The requisition form"

"Already in your possession. That's the only reason we still have anything." He finally looks at me, and there's something in his face I don't expect. Not despair. Something colder. "Which means whoever did this either didn't know you took it, or didn't care, because they were burning something bigger than one piece of paper."

That thought sits heavy in my chest. If this fire wasn't about hiding Cassia's crime, then it was about hiding something else. Something older.

A guard jogs up, soot on his hands, breathing hard. "Alpha. We found the accelerator. Whoever did this knew exactly where to start it. It wasn't a careless job."

"Declan," I say, before I can stop myself.

Kian's whole body goes still. "Declan's locked in the east cell block."

"Was," the guard says quietly. "Cell's empty, sir. The lock kill i wasn't broken. Someone let him out."

For a second nobody says anything. The fire crackles behind us, the last of the flames giving up against the wet morning air, and I watch Kian process what that means. Declan didn't just escape. Someone inside Blackthorn opened that door for him.

"Search the pack house," Kian says, voice suddenly sharp, suddenly Alpha again instead of a man staring at his own burning history. "Every room. Every person unaccounted for gets flagged."

The guard runs off, shouting orders, and the yard fills with more people, more noise, more panic dressed up as urgency. I stand next to Kian in the middle of it and feel strangely still, like the eye of something much bigger than a fire.

"This isn't just about hiding Cassia's crime," I say quietly. "This is about hiding the reason behind it."

Kian doesn't answer right away. When he does, his voice is low enough that only I can hear it. "My father used to say secrets in this pack don't die. They just get buried deeper every time someone tries to dig them up."

"That's not comforting."

"It wasn't meant to be."

I look at the wreckage again, at the black skeleton of a room that used to hold five generations of paperwork nobody thought mattered until now. Somewhere in those ashes was proof of exactly who staged the border attacks, exactly who signed off on the herbs that framed my old pack, exactly who's been pulling strings since before I was born. All of it, gone, in one night, by someone with a key and no fear of getting caught.

"Cassia," I say suddenly. "Has anyone checked on her?"

Kian's face changes, fast, and he's already moving before I finish the sentence. I follow him on a run, through the pack house, down the narrow stairs to the holding cells beneath the main hall, my heart hammering harder with every step.

Cassia's cell is intact. Still locked. Still guarded.

But she's sitting in the corner of it, knees pulled to her chest, staring at nothing, and when Kian unlocks the door and steps inside, she doesn't even look up at him.

"Cassia." His voice is careful now, almost gentle, the way you'd talk to someone standing too close to a ledge. "Talk to me. What happened last night?"

For a long moment she says nothing. Then she laughs, quiet and broken, a sound that doesn't belong to the cold, composed woman who tried to expose me in open council two days ago.

"You think the fire was about you," she says. "You think it was about Declan, or me, or that stupid piece of paper your little liaison stole." She finally looks up, and her eyes are wet, terrified in a way I've never seen on her before. "It wasn't. It was a warning. To me."

"A warning about what?" Kian crouches in front of her.

"That I'm still useful," she whispers. "For now."

My stomach drops straight through the floor. Whoever burned that record room didn't do it to protect Cassia. They did it to remind her what happens to people who stop being useful.

Kian's eyes meet mine over her bowed head, and I know we're both thinking the same terrible thing.

Cassia was never in charge of anything. She was a tool. And tools get discarded the second someone decides they're done needing them.

"Who," Kian says, quiet and dangerous, "are you afraid of?"

Cassia's mouth opens like she might finally answer.

Then, from somewhere above us, a scream cuts through the pack house sharp, panicked, a woman's voice, and Kian is up and moving before the sound even finishes.

I'm right behind him, my heart in my throat, because whatever's happening up there, it's already too late to stop.

Behind me, Cassia doesn't move from her corner. She just watches us go, and the last thing I hear before I round the stairwell is her voice, small and hollow, talking to no one.

"It's already started," she says. "You just don't know it yet."

I don't have time to ask her what she means. The scream comes again, closer now, and Kian takes the stairs two at a time with me right behind him, both of us bracing for whatever new disaster this pack has woken up to on top of everything else.

One fire. One empty cell. One terrified elder who used to think she was safe.

Blackthorn hasn't even had breakfast yet, and already the whole morning feels like the first c***k in something much bigger about to fall.