Bound to My Step-brother

Chapter Eleven

Roseline's POV

I hired the spy on a Tuesday, in a coffee shop three towns over from Ridgeview, because I no longer trusted a single phone line inside my own house.

His name was Halloran, a wiry, unremarkable man who came recommended by a contact so old I'd nearly forgot I still had him. He represents a leftover thread from the life I'd lived before Marcus. I told him what I needed in the fewest words possible: a girl, taken by the Ashen Order Wolf hunters, last seen at the tribunal gathering. Find out what happened to her. Find out if she's alive.

He didn't ask why a woman with no visible pack affiliation needed information like that. I paid him well enough that he didn't need to.

He came back four days later, and the moment I saw his face across the same corner table, I knew whatever he'd found wasn't going to be gentle.

"The organisation runs a pelt trade out of Greywatch," he said, keeping his voice low even though the shop was nearly empty. "Wolf skins to collectors, werewolf skins to magicians, the second pays triple, apparently, because of what the skin actually is when it's taken mid-shift. They move captives north to an auction house that serves regional Lords. Buyers, mostly. Some collectors."

My hands had gone cold around my cup. "And Lila?"

"A girl matching her description was seen there. Alive." He hesitated, and that hesitation told me more than anything he'd said so far. "Flagged high grade, Roseline. That's their term, not mine. It means whoever's running the auction thinks she's valuable. Rare bloodline, probably. It's not a good thing to be flagged as, but it does mean they're keeping her alive for now instead of... killing her." He didn't finish that sentence. He didn't need to.

I made myself breathe. Alive. Whatever else that word carried with it, it was still the only word that mattered right now. She was alive.

"There's something else," Halloran said,"The timing of the ambush at the Tribunal grounds , the hunters knew exactly when and where to hit. That kind of precision doesn't come from luck. Someone inside your household fed them the schedule."

I sat very still, the coffee shop's noise fading into a dull roar around me. "Who?"

"I don't have a name yet. I have a pattern. Whoever it was had access close enough to know things only a handful of people in that house would know." He met my eyes. "I'd start looking closer to home if I were you."

I didn't sleep that night. I lay awake running through every face in the mansion, every servant, every guest who'd passed through since the wedding, and found no comfort in any direction I turned. There are five maids in the mansion, each undergoing different tasks. Which of them sold my daughter out?

I’d been good to all of them. So for what reason did they do that to her?

I have to reach Lila by all means.

***

The witch's house sat at the end of a road that didn't appear on any map I'd ever trusted, tucked behind a stand of black spruce.

I'd been given the address by someone who owed Marcus a favor older than my marriage, with instructions not to write it down.

Her hair fell white-silver past her shoulders, though her face held no wrinkles at all, smooth, ageless, unreadable. Pale grey eyes, almost colourless in the firelight. She wore a plain dark shawl over simple robes, no jewelry, no adornment. Nothing to give a clue of what she clearly knew.

She was younger than I expected. I understood within moments that her age meant nothing at all. She let me in without asking my name, set a kettle to boil and studied me for a long, unhurried moment before she finally spoke.

"You didn't come here for tea," she said.

"My daughter's missing. Taken by the Ashen Order."

"I know." She said it simply, without ceremony. "I've been watching the threads around her since before you walked through that door. She's remarkable, your daughter. They don't know what she is yet. Not truly."

My pulse jumped. "What is she?"

The witch's eyes didn't leave mine. "Mighty Wolf bloodline. Not merely rare... foundational. The kind of line that predates the packs themselves." She let that settle in the small, dim room between us. "If the Ashen Order understood what they were actually holding, they wouldn't be treating her as ordinary inventory. They'd be fighting each other for the right to keep her. Every Lord, every Alpha, every mage with enough ambition to want a claim on something that old would want her under their roof."

"Is she alive?" I asked, my voice breaking on the word. "Please. I need to know she's alive."

"Alive," the witch confirmed, and something in her face tightened, just slightly, in a way that told me the rest wasn't going to be comforting. "But not well. She's still in her captor's hands, kept in conditions no mother should have to picture, hungry, cold, worked past what her body should be asked to bear. They haven't understood what they're starving yet. That ignorance is the only mercy she has right now."

I pressed a hand over my mouth, the image of it, my daughter, hurt and unfed.

"It won't stay that way," the witch went on, quieter now. "Power like hers doesn't remain hidden for long, no matter how carefully she keeps her head down. The moment it surfaces -and it will - chaos will follow. Every faction that's ever wanted a piece of the old bloodlines will descend on wherever she's standing."

"Then I have to reach her before that happens." My hands had gone cold around the cup I hadn't touched. "Tell me how. Please."

"You won't have to," the witch said. "Help is already near her. Closer than you think."

"How," I demanded, leaning forward, every raw nerve in my body straining toward the answer. "How will it reach her? Who's going? I need to know so I can..."

"Go home, Roseline."

I stared at her, certain I'd misheard. "That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I have for you tonight," she said, unmoved, folding her hands in her lap with a finality that closed the conversation as surely as a door. "Go home. When it's time for you to move again, you'll know it. Until then, the kindest thing you can do for your daughter is not be reckless before the help comes."

I wanted to argue. I wanted to shake the answer out of her the way I'd wanted to shake answers out of Victor, out of Draven, out of every person who seemed to know more about my daughter's fate. But something in her stillness told me pressing further would earn me nothing except a closed door and a wasted night.