married to the wolf

The note

Rourke unfolded the note slowly, as though handling something that might detonate, and Wren felt his composure narrow into something razor-sharp through the bond even before he'd finished reading it aloud.

*"Stop looking for the box. Some debts are better left buried with the men who owed them. If you keep digging, Dr. Callahan, you won't like what you find about your own father — or what it costs the people around you to protect you from it."*

No signature. No name. Just careful, deliberate handwriting that told Wren nothing except that whoever had written it wanted her to be afraid, and wanted her to know they'd been close enough, recently enough, to leave it exactly where she'd find it.

"They know we'd come back to this room," Rourke said, turning the paper over as if the blank side might yield an answer the front hadn't. "Which means they were watching us this morning, or they anticipated we would return the way anyone would after finding a ransacked hiding place."

"Or," Wren said slowly, a colder thought settling into place, "they never left. If they knew exactly when to plant this, without being seen by either of us or by Talia's people combing the halls — that's not luck. That's someone who has legitimate reason to be anywhere in this house at any hour, without anyone questioning it."

Rourke's jaw tightened. "Someone in my inner circle."

"Or someone who serves your inner circle. A steward. A healer. Someone whose presence in any room of this house would never draw a second look." Wren took the note from him, studying the handwriting more closely, the particular slant of certain letters nagging at something in the back of her memory that she couldn't yet place. "This feels personal, Rourke. Not pack politics. Someone wrote this like they actually care what happens to me — like the warning is real, not just a threat dressed up to sound protective."

"Threats and warnings aren't always different things," Rourke said grimly. "Sometimes the person threatening you believes, completely, that they're protecting you. That doesn't make them less dangerous. Sometimes it makes them more."

They found Talia in the great room twenty minutes later, a short list of names already assembled on a single sheet of paper, her expression grim in a way that suggested she hadn't enjoyed compiling it.

"Twelve names," she said, sliding the paper across the table without preamble. "Anyone with west-wing access, knowledge of the last war, and standing high enough to have heard about the binding before the announcement went out. I've crossed off four who were confirmed at the border fight all night — can't ransack a study while fighting off Ashgrove's war party at the same time."

Wren scanned the remaining eight names, most meaning nothing to her, until one near the bottom made her breath catch.

*Marguerite Sinclair.*

"Your aunt," she said, looking up at Rourke. "Talia has your aunt on this list."

Something flickered across Rourke's face — not quite denial, more complicated than that. "Marguerite raised me after my mother died. She's been pack healer for thirty years. She has keys to every room in this house because half the pack trusts her with things they wouldn't tell their own Alpha." He shook his head slowly, though the motion looked less like certainty and more like a man trying to convince himself. "She wouldn't do this."

"I'm not accusing her," Talia said carefully. "I'm telling you she fits the profile, same as everyone else on that list. If we start crossing off names because we don't want them to be guilty, we're not investigating anything. We're just hoping."

Rourke didn't answer right away, and Wren felt, through the bond, something she hadn't expected — not defensiveness, but genuine, aching uncertainty, the particular pain of a man realizing that loyalty and evidence didn't always point the same direction.

"Talk to her," Wren said gently. "Not as a suspect. As family. See what she says, see how she reacts. You'll know, Rourke, better than any list Talia builds, whether something's wrong."

He found Marguerite in the healer's wing an hour later, and Wren went with him — not entirely by choice, the bond pulling at her with an insistence she was beginning to recognize as involuntary, some magical stubbornness that apparently didn't care whether proximity was convenient. Marguerite was exactly what Wren expected from the description: silver-haired, sharp-eyed, moving through her small apothecary of herbs and tinctures with the unhurried competence of someone who'd spent decades keeping this pack's bodies alive.

"You have questions," Marguerite said, before either of them spoke, not looking up from the mortar she was grinding. "I can feel it radiating off both of you like heat off a stove. Ask them."

"Someone broke into Father's old study last night," Rourke said. "Took the box he kept hidden under the floorboards. Left a note warning us to stop looking into it, addressed specifically to Wren." He paused. "You're one of the few people who could move through that wing without anyone questioning why."

Marguerite set down the pestle slowly, and for a moment her expression held something Wren couldn't quite read — grief, maybe, or the particular weariness of someone finally being asked a question they'd spent a long time dreading.

"I didn't take the box," she said. "But I know what's in it. Or what was in it, twenty years ago, before your father decided some truths were kinder left buried."

The room went very still.

"Your father didn't die peacefully in his sleep, Rourke." Marguerite's voice had gone quiet, careful, the voice of someone choosing each word like it cost her something. "He died because the last war with Ashgrove never actually ended the way the histories say it did. There was a deal struck at the end of it — a debt owed, a promise made, that your father spent the rest of his life trying to quietly pay down without ever telling the pack what it cost him. I helped him hide it because he asked me to, and because I believed, at the time, that protecting the pack from that knowledge was the right thing to do."

"What deal," Rourke said, voice tight. "What promise."

Marguerite's eyes moved to Wren, and something in her expression shifted into something almost like pity. "Your father wasn't the only supplier your family dealt with, Dr. Callahan. He was the second. The first was a man your father inherited the arrangement from — a man who struck the original deal with my brother twenty years ago, to end a war neither pack could actually afford to keep fighting." She set the mortar aside fully now, turning to face them both directly. "The debt Kade mentioned at the border isn't six weeks old, or even six years old. It's twenty years deep, and it was never fully paid — because the man who struck the original bargain died before he could finish settling it, and left the rest of the debt to be quietly absorbed by whichever Callahan came after him."

"Who," Wren said, though some sick, sinking part of her had already begun to guess the answer, "was the first supplier?"

Marguerite's gaze held hers, steady and sorrowful.

"Your grandfather," she said. "This didn't start with your father, Dr. Callahan. It started with the man who raised him — which means whatever's really buried in that ledger doesn't just implicate one generation of your family. It implicates two. And whoever stole that box last night knows exactly how far back this goes, which is precisely why they wanted it gone before either of you had the chance to find out."