Chapter 5
1184 Words
CLARA
Two years and eight months.
That was how long I spent trying before I finally stopped.
I want to be clear about something. I did not stop all at once. It was not one single moment where I woke up and decided I was done. It happened slowly, the way a candle burns down, a little less light every day until one morning you look and realise it has been dark for a while and you just did not notice when it happened. The first year was the hardest because I still had hope.
I kept the inner court running even though nobody officially acknowledged that I was doing it. I solved the Greywood family boundary dispute that had been sitting unresolved for eight months and the two families shook hands in the packhouse kitchen and one of the older women hugged me and said thank you Luna and that was the first time anyone in Ironveil had called me that like they meant it.
I brought Lucian a full report of everything I had resolved. He looked at it for thirty seconds and said he would pass it to Diana to review.
I smiled and left and went to my room and sat on the edge of my bed and breathed slowly for about ten minutes. Then I got up and went back to work.
Lyra was struggling. I could feel it every day, that flickering warmth inside my chest getting smaller and quieter. She needed the mate bond to stabilise her. Every wolf healer I had ever read about said the same thing. A rejected wolf without a proper bond would fade. It was not quick and it was not dramatic. It was just slow and quiet and unstoppable.
I asked Lucian once, in the second year, if we could spend more time together. I planned the conversation for three days beforehand. I kept my voice calm and my request reasonable and I explained about Lyra without making it sound like begging.
He listened to the whole thing with that flat grey gaze and then said, "I have pack business to attend to. Speak to Diana about the inner court schedule."
That was the end of that conversation.
Diana's campaign against me was so quiet and so consistent that if I had not been watching for it I might have missed it entirely. A comment here. A suggestion there. Always sweet, always reasonable on the surface and always aimed perfectly at making Lucian see me as a problem.
She told him I had been going through his private correspondence. I had not. She told him two pack members had complained about my involvement in their disputes. They had not. She told him I had been asking the warriors questions about pack security matters that were none of my business. That one I had actually done but only because there was a genuine security gap on the northern border that nobody was addressing and I had found it in the records.
Every time Lucian called me in to question me about something Diana had reported I told him the truth. Every time he looked at me with those unreadable eyes and said something flat and dismissive and sent me away. He never once asked Diana for her evidence. He never once asked me for mine.
In the second year I stopped bringing him reports. I kept working because the pack needed it and because I could not stop caring about people just because caring about them was costing me everything. But I stopped trying to make Lucian see it. I stopped trying to make him see anything.
The pack saw it though. Finn saw it. Mrs Graye saw it. The families I had helped, the warriors whose names I knew, the children who had started waving at me when I walked past. They saw it and they were quietly furious on my behalf and there was something both comforting and heartbreaking about that.
Comforting because I was not invisible to everyone.
Heartbreaking because the one person I needed to see me was the one person who refused to look.
In the third year Lyra went very quiet. Not the wounded quiet of after Sean's rejection. Something worse. Something that felt like exhaustion. Like a person who has been fighting for a very long time and is starting to wonder why they are still fighting.
I started talking to her at night. Out loud, quietly, in my isolated room at the far end of the east wing. I know it probably looked strange, a woman lying in the dark talking to her wolf. But Lyra was all I had that was completely mine and I was not going to let her fade without a fight.
"Stay with me," I told her every night. "Just a little longer. I will figure something out."
She pressed back against my ribs, faint and tired, and I took that as a yes.
And then one evening at a pack gathering in the great hall everything changed. Not in a good way.
I was standing near the edge of the room when Diana said something to the group of pack elders near her, something low and quick, and all of them looked at me at the same time. Then they looked away. Then two of them actually moved away from where I was standing, subtle enough that most people would not notice. I noticed.
I looked across the room at Lucian. He was already looking at me. And for one second, one single second, I thought I saw something move behind those grey eyes. Something that might have been guilt if it had been allowed to exist long enough to grow into anything.
Then Diana touched his arm and he looked away.And something in my chest went very quiet.
Not Lyra this time. Something else. Some last small stubborn flame that had been burning since my wedding day and had somehow survived two years and eight months of cold and dismissal and isolation. It went out.
I set down my glass and walked out of the great hall and went upstairs to my room and sat on the edge of my bed and looked at my hands and felt nothing for a long time.
After a while I heard footsteps in the corridor outside and then a knock at my door. I did not move.
The knock came again. Then Finn's voice, low and urgent. "Clara. Open the door. Right now." Something in his voice made me stand up. I opened the door.
Finn was standing there with his face completely white and his eyes wide and something in his expression that I had never seen from him before. Fear.
"What is wrong," I said.
He looked behind him quickly. Then he looked back at me and grabbed my hand and pressed something into it. A folded piece of paper.
"I found this in Diana's room," he whispered. "I was not supposed to see it. Clara I do not think it was an accident that Lena died.”
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