The Captain's Forbidden Mate

Episode 11: ASTRA KNOWS EVERYTHING

LENA

Astra did not let me take off my shoes.

"You found out," she said immediately, cards fanned out on her bed, as though she had been waiting for me to appear at any second. "I can smell it on you. New wolf energy. Confusion, mostly. A touch of anger."

"You could smell it." I sighed, already past being surprised at how easy it was for her to read me. "Of course you could. What are you?"

"Pack liaison," she responded airily, straightening the cards in front of her, giving herself a pause before continuing. "Correll pack, sent us to check up on you when we found out the scholarship application bearing your surname turned up at the university on the Silverclaw territory. Trust me, this is not a coincidence, Lena. Someone had managed to intervene with your adoption proceedings, to ensure that you would be within the Corvin lands at least until you graduated. Perhaps they also took care of your foster care arrangements before that." She paused, giving me an assessing look. I was still on the threshold of her room, my borrowed hoodie still clinging onto me. "That someone," she said softly, "managed to do all of that without knowing, for all these years, exactly who you were."

I closed the distance with a step, sitting heavily on my own bed. My heart pounded in my ears, a deep rhythmic percussion that mirrored the tension in my spine. I could hardly believe that she knew, but somehow, she did. Somehow, it was not a surprise at all, and that was almost a worse shock than the fact of it itself.

"Managing how?"

"All of it." She hesitated, and I saw something almost like guilt flicker across her face briefly. "Your foster care, the scholarship, even your room here. Me, in fact." She frowned at me, her expression softening as she waited for whatever reaction I was about to have.

"You're spying on me."

"Lying to you." She paused before continuing, her tone suddenly insistent, as if she was determined to convince me despite all the evidence to the contrary. Her eyes locked onto mine, and something in their depths made me freeze; a strange mix of desperation and almost reverence. "There is a difference, even if it does not feel like one right now. Your mother ran away, Lena. She left the Corwin territory the night before the m******e and never looked back, never told anyone, not even her own pack contacts, where she went because she knew that if the others learned that she survived, that she brought her daughter with her, they would spend the rest of their lives trying to find you." Her mouth twisted in something like pain. "It's an open secret among the packs that Damien's family was responsible for the m******e, for the death of the Corwin pack. His grandfather's name is spoken in hushed tones, sometimes with awe, sometimes with contempt, in certain circles. But it is an undeniable fact that he and his people committed it. They wiped out an entire pack, and in doing so, drew the wrath of the other packs upon themselves. That is why your mother ran, and that is why she lied to everyone, including herself, all those years ago. She thought, perhaps, that it would be safer for you if you grew up without a pack, without anyone knowing about you or your heritage, but she was wrong."

The room seemed to spin. "You mean Damien knows."

"Damien has known ever since that party." Her expression was unreadable as she met my eyes. "If you think about it, it would make sense. He probably knows about your mother as well, for all intents and purposes. That is why he invited you to his house to begin with." A strange tightness in my chest unfurled as I realized what she was saying. "That is why he was so attentive to you, Lena. He probably spent days putting together the pieces until it became obvious to him, and then he decided that it would be best for everyone if you came to his town, to his pack."

The memory of how he had smiled by the fire, warm and genuine, was suddenly a bit terrifying. I thought of the soda he had given me when we first met, and how it had felt so very much like a sincere gesture at the time. Perhaps it had been, in its own way, but in retrospect, it was clear to me that it could have also meant something else entirely. Every kind word he ever uttered to me unraveled before me like threads of some dark tapestry, revealing their true meaning beneath the surface. All of them were warnings. Even now, I could see the careful way he had looked at me when he gave me that can of soda, how his fingers had lingered on the can's surface as if trying to determine whether or not I would accept it. I was not wrong to fear him.

"What does he want with me?"

Astra looked genuinely pained, and suddenly afraid. "The last surviving member of the Corwin pack, awakened blood and bone, claimed by another pack's Alpha instead of her own?" She shook her head. "It makes you a prize, Lena, rather than a person. A trophy. That boy would kill you if he thought it would grant him even an iota of power with his father." She paused and looked at me closely for a moment, before gripping my hand in hers. The first genuinely warm gesture I had seen from her. "You must be especially careful with boys, trust neither of them implicitly, because one of them wants to use you, and the other has already decided that he will kill you if he cannot."

"You keep saying that as if it is obvious, but how exactly am I supposed to know for certain?" My voice was sharper than I intended. "You keep telling me not to trust him, but Cole broke pack laws to tell me this in the first place. That fact alone should prove that he is not as dangerous as you claim."

"It is not a matter of who is more dangerous," Astra said softly. "It is a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils when the time comes. I do not tell you not to trust him, but rather, to trust no one implicitly. Your mother trusted too easily, and it got her killed running from people who thought they were protecting her until the very end. They were right to run, but they should have run faster, and they should have left no traces of their existence for others to follow."

I sat in the silence that stretched between us after that, and listened to the soft sound of her flipping the cards over in her hands again. She folded them neatly and turned off the light, finally lying down on her bed as if the task was suddenly too great for her to endure alone.

When the dawn began to pierce through the windows in thin shafts of light, I sat thinking about the accident, about how easily it had happened, about what my parents' medical records actually said. I turned that thought over and over in my mind, listening to the soft murmur of Astra's breathing as she pretended to sleep. It was not the first time that I had questioned it, and it certainly would not be the last, but somehow, I could not ignore this particular feeling of unfairness the way I had ignored the others. Perhaps it was because I felt, impossibly, as if I was being watched. Some part of me was aware of a presence just beyond my vision, in the space between the rooms, listening to everything I said. I was beginning to believe, with every passing day, that some pieces of information simply refused to be ignored, no matter how hard one tried.