CLAIMED BY THE ALPHA’S ENEMY

Chapter Ten: What Rhett Sees

Chapter Ten: What Rhett Sees

"You're not being careful," Rhett said, catching Cassius alone at the cabin one evening after Bryn had already gone, the fire burned down to embers and the map still spread across the table between two empty mugs.

"About the investigation?" Cassius didn't look up from the paperwork, though his shoulders had gone a fraction more guarded, the way they always did when Rhett's voice took on that particular edge, the one that meant a friend was about to say something an Alpha might not want to hear.

"About her." Rhett's tone stayed flat, not unkind, simply certain in the way old friends allow themselves to be after decades of shared history. "I've known you since we were pups running the same woods barefoot, Cassius, since before either of us understood what leading a pack actually cost a person. I know exactly what it looks like when your wolf's already decided something before the rest of you has caught up to admitting it out loud."

Cassius didn't deny it. There was little use denying to Rhett what Rhett had clearly already seen for himself, probably longer ago than Cassius wanted to admit even to himself. "Even if you're right," he said, setting down the pen he'd been holding without writing anything, "it changes nothing about what we're trying to stop out there. Two of our people were caged and bled for parts, Rhett. That matters more than whatever my wolf has decided about an Emberfall tracker."

"It changes everything about how this pack sees you leading it, and you know that as well as I do, better probably." Rhett's jaw tightened, worry plain on his face now that he'd let the careful neutrality drop. He pulled out the chair across from Cassius and sat, uninvited, the way he'd earned the right to years ago. "I stood with your father at the end, Cassius. I watched what ten years of guilt did to a man who never even led the raid that caused it, only inherited the aftermath. If this bond of yours turns out to be built on the same ground that broke him, I don't know that I can stand and watch it happen twice."

The words landed harder than Cassius had expected, some old grief of his own rising to meet them. "It won't be the same," he said, quieter now. "Because this time I know exactly what I'm choosing, and why, instead of inheriting a war I never agreed to."

Rhett studied him a long moment, something like resignation and something like respect both moving across his face at once. "Then I'll start working out how to sell it to the council," he said finally, "because you're going to need someone in that room who isn't you when the objections start, and there will be objections, Cassius. Prepare yourself for that much, at least."

Interlude: A Letter Never Sent

Bryn sat at her small writing desk late one night, weeks into the investigation, a blank sheet of paper in front of her for longer than she wanted to admit before she finally picked up the pen.

Mama, she wrote, then stopped, unsure how to continue something she'd never once tried before. She'd never been the kind of person who wrote letters to the dead. Sable did it sometimes, she knew, for her own lost family, but Bryn had always found the practice faintly embarrassing, a performance of grief rather than the real, private thing she carried.

Tonight, though, the words came easier than she expected.

I met someone whose pack I was taught to hate, and I think, if what we're finding is true, I owe you both an apology for how long I let that hatred stand in for actually missing you. I don't know yet what to do with everything I'm learning. I only know that whatever happened to you deserves the truth, not a story that was easier to hold onto. I miss you. I miss the bread. I miss Papa's terrible jokes at supper. I hope, wherever you are, you'd want me to find out what really happened, even if it changes everything I thought I knew about who to blame.

She never sent it, because there was nowhere to send a letter like that. She folded it instead and tucked it into the same drawer where she kept the few photographs she had left of them, and felt, for the first time in longer than she could remember, a little lighter for having written it at all.

Interlude: Training with Rhett

With the joint patrol running smoothly enough to allow it, Rhett occasionally took over Bryn's training sessions with the younger enforcers from both packs, an arrangement that started as simple practicality and became, within a few sessions, something closer to genuine friendship.

"You hit harder than most of my own enforcers," Rhett said, picking himself up from the training mat after Bryn had, for the third time that afternoon, put him flat on his back in front of a dozen watching pups from both packs. "I'm beginning to understand exactly why Cassius came back from that first ridge encounter looking like a man who'd been handed a puzzle he couldn't stop turning over."

"Careful," Bryn said, offering him a hand up she was fairly certain he didn't need. "That almost sounded like a compliment aimed at your own Alpha's judgment."

"Don't let it go to your head," Rhett said, though he was grinning as he said it. "I still think this arrangement is going to cause both our councils no end of headaches before it's through."

"Probably," Bryn agreed cheerfully. "But I imagine the headaches will be worth it."

"They usually are, with the good ones," Rhett said, and something in the way he glanced, briefly, toward where Sable stood watching from the edge of the training yard suggested he wasn't only talking about the alliance between packs.

Interlude: The Photograph

Weeks into the investigation, Bryn brought Cassius to her quarters for the first time, not for anything improper, only to show him the small collection of photographs she kept of her parents, faded and careful in an old wooden box that had survived the decade better than most things from that period of her life.

"This was taken the summer before," she said, handing him a photograph of two people standing outside a modest cabin, her mother laughing at something outside the frame, her father's arm slung easily around her shoulders. "I was the one holding the camera. I'd just learned how to use it. Half the photographs from that summer are blurry because my hands couldn't hold steady."

Cassius studied the photograph with a care that told her exactly how seriously he was taking the gesture. "Your mother has your smile," he said. "Or you have hers, I suppose, since she came first."

"Everyone used to say that." Bryn's voice caught slightly, an old grief surfacing gently rather than sharply, softened by the strange comfort of sharing it with someone who was, in every way that had once mattered, supposed to be her enemy. "I don't show these to many people. It felt important that you'd have actually seen them, before all of this is finished, whatever it turns out to mean."

"Thank you," Cassius said, quiet and sincere, handing the photograph back with a gentleness that matched the weight of what she'd trusted him with. "For letting me see who they were, not just what happened to them."

Chapter Eleven: What Bryn Won't Say

"You're doing the thing," Sable said, watching Bryn stare at the same patrol map she'd been staring at for ten minutes without appearing to see a single line on it, sprawled across the other chair in Bryn's small quarters with the easy familiarity of a friend who'd stopped needing an invitation years ago.

"What thing."

"The thing where you decide something important and then spend three days pretending you haven't decided anything at all, hoping if you ignore it hard enough it'll sort itself out without you having to actually feel anything about it." Sable dropped into the chair across from her, entirely unbothered by the glare it earned, a knowing look settling over her familiar features. "It's him, isn't it. The Nightshade Alpha."

Bryn set the map down with more care than it needed, buying herself a moment before she answered. "It doesn't matter what it is. My parents died because of his pack, Sable. I don't get to just decide that stopped mattering because my wolf happens to like the way he smells, because some bond neither of us asked for decided we belonged to each other on a ridge three weeks ago."

"Your parents died," Sable said, gentler now, some of the teasing dropping out of her voice entirely as she leaned forward, elbows on her knees. "And you've spent ten years grieving them the only way Emberfall ever really let you: by hating Nightshade for it, loudly and completely, because a clean hatred is so much easier to carry around than a complicated grief that doesn't have a simple villain attached to it. That's not the same thing as loyalty, Bryn. Sometimes it's just the only shape your grief was ever allowed to take, and nobody in this pack has ever once asked you to check whether it still fits, or whether you're just wearing it out of habit at this point."

"When did you get so wise about my own grief," Bryn muttered, though there was no real bite in it.

"Since I've spent ten years watching you carry it and never once put it down long enough to see what you actually feel underneath it." Sable reached across and squeezed her hand, brief and sure. "I'm not telling you to forgive Nightshade for something they did. I'm telling you to at least find out what actually happened before you let an old story decide who you're allowed to love."

Bryn didn't have an answer ready for that, the words landing somewhere she wasn't prepared to examine yet. She wasn't sure, sitting there in the quiet aftermath of Sable's honesty, that she wanted an answer at all, or that she was ready to go looking for one before she absolutely had to.

Interlude: What Sable Wants

Sable had spent most of her adult life as Bryn's steady counterpart, the friend who listened more than she spoke, and it was only after weeks of watching Bryn's own life reshape itself so thoroughly that she let herself admit, mostly to herself, that she wanted something similar, a life that wasn't only defined by the feud she'd grown up inside.

"I used to think I'd be content just being your second for the rest of my career," she told Bryn one evening, unprompted, the two of them sharing a quiet meal after a long day of alliance council preparations. "Watching your back, keeping your secrets, never needing much beyond that for myself. I don't think that's true anymore. Watching you and Cassius, watching what became possible once someone was brave enough to ask a harder question, I think I want to ask a few harder questions myself."

"About Rhett," Bryn said, not quite a question.

"About Rhett," Sable admitted, something almost shy in it that Bryn had rarely seen from her steady, unflappable friend. "It's terrifying, wanting something like that. I don't know how you did it, choosing someone from the other side of everything you'd been taught."

"I didn't do it bravely," Bryn said. "I did it slowly, and with a great deal of arguing with myself along the way. But I don't think you need to do it bravely either. You just need to do it honestly, and let the bravery catch up eventually."