married to the wolf

The empty stable

Marguerite's words hung in the healer's wing long after she'd gone quiet, long after Rourke had stopped asking questions he clearly didn't want answered.

*Your father didn't die peacefully.*

Wren watched him absorb it the way she'd watched patients absorb bad diagnoses — the stillness first, then the small, useless motions. He straightened a jar of dried yarrow on the shelf that didn't need straightening. He rolled his shoulder, the one she'd stitched three nights ago, like the ache in it was easier to think about than the ache underneath.

"Rourke."

"I heard her." His voice was flat. Controlled in the way that meant it wasn't, not really. "Twenty years. Twenty years my father let me believe he died of a weak heart, and it was—" He stopped. Looked at his aunt. "What was it, Marguerite? If not his heart."

Marguerite's hands twisted the hem of her healer's apron. "I don't know for certain. I only know I was asked not to examine him too closely when it happened. And I was young enough, and grieving enough, that I didn't push."

"Asked by who?"

"Your father's second. Before Talia's mother held the position." Marguerite's eyes flicked to Wren, apologetic, like she wished this part could be private. "He's been dead eight years himself. There's no one left to ask but the box, and the box is gone."

Wren felt it before she understood why — a low, tight coil of grief moving through the bond that wasn't hers. She stepped toward Rourke without deciding to, the way her body had learned to answer his pain the same night they'd bound themselves together. He didn't move away when her hand found his forearm. That, more than anything he'd said, told her how badly he needed the anchor.

"We're going to find it," she said. "The box. Whoever has it."

"You don't know that."

"No. But I know what it feels like to bury a father you didn't get to say goodbye to properly, and I know that not knowing eats you slower than knowing does, even when knowing is worse." She held his gaze. "I burned my father's files, Rourke. I thought getting rid of them would let me stop carrying what he did. It didn't work. The only thing that's ever helped was facing it."

Something in his jaw loosened, fractionally. Not comfort, exactly. Recognition.

Marguerite cleared her throat, quiet mercy in the sound. "I'll leave you both to it. But Rourke — the note. If someone inside this pack knows enough to threaten your wife by name, you cannot treat this as a private grief. You have people to protect."

---

They read the note again in Rourke's study, spread flat on the desk under lamplight, like rereading it might make the handwriting confess something new.

*Stop looking for the box. Some debts are better left buried.*

"Talia's list," Wren said. "Eight names. We start crossing them off."

Rourke exhaled through his nose. "Or we start asking why someone in my own house is protecting a twenty-year-old debt more fiercely than they're protecting me."

"Maybe those are the same question." Wren tapped the paper. "Whoever wrote this isn't gloating. Kade gloated, at the border — he wanted us to know he had power over the timeline. This is different. This reads like fear." She turned the note toward him. "Look at the pressure on the pen. Someone wrote this fast, and hard, like they didn't want to write it at all."

Rourke studied her for a beat too long. "You sound like you've read a hundred of these."

"I've read a hundred discharge forms filled out by people who didn't want to be honest about how they got hurt. It's the same handwriting, emotionally." She shrugged, a little embarrassed by how easily that had come out. "People who are protecting someone write differently than people who are hunting someone."

"So you think this was written by someone protecting the mole. Not the mole themselves."

"I think it's possible whoever took the box and whoever wrote this note aren't the same hands." Wren hesitated. "Which means there could be two people keeping this buried instead of one. Someone who wants the debt exposed enough to steal evidence of it — and someone terrified of what happens if it comes out."

Rourke was quiet for a long moment. Then: "Talia's mother held my father's second position before her. Talia was raised inside this house, inside every one of its secrets, since she was a child." He said it carefully, like each word cost him something. "I don't want it to be her."

"Then let's make sure it isn't, instead of hoping it isn't." Wren softened the words with her hand over his on the desk. "That's not an accusation, Rourke. It's a process of elimination. She helped build the suspect list. Let her help us narrow it — and if she flinches at the wrong name, we'll know something either way."

He turned his hand over beneath hers, palm to palm, fingers closing slow. The bond hummed warm between them, something that had nothing to do with grief or conspiracy and everything to do with the simple, terrifying fact that four days into a marriage neither of them chose, she no longer wanted to let go of his hand first.

"You're better at this than I expected," he said quietly.

"At reading suspicious notes, or at being married to you?"

The corner of his mouth moved — not quite a smile, but close enough that the tightness in the room eased half a degree. "Both, apparently."

---

A knock cut through it. Talia, at the study door, breathless in a way that immediately put both of them on their feet.

"You need to see this," she said, and there was no argument in her voice, only urgency. "The stable hand — the one on the list, the boy who tends the west paddock — he's gone. Bed not slept in, gear left behind except his boots and a bag." She held up a folded scrap of paper, edges rough like it had been torn quickly. "This was under his mattress."

Rourke crossed the room in three strides and took it from her.

It was a bank slip. A deposit, dated the morning after the box went missing, for an amount that made Wren's stomach drop even before Rourke said the number aloud.

"Ashgrove," Talia said grimly, before either of them could ask. "The routing traces back to a shell account we've seen Kade's people use before."

Wren looked at Rourke, and for the first time since the binding, she watched something other than duty settle over his face. Fury, yes — but underneath it, a terrible, focused clarity.

"He's not hiding," Rourke said quietly. "He's running to the person who paid him."

"Which means he's already crossed the border," Talia said. "Which means Kade already has whatever was in that box."

The lamplight flickered once, caught in a draft none of them had noticed until now — a window, cracked open at the far end of the study, one none of them remembered leaving unlocked.

Wren's pulse spiked half a second before Rourke's hand shot out to pull her behind him, before Talia's eyes went wolf-gold and sharp toward the dark beyond the glass.

Someone had been listening.