The Captain's Forbidden Mate

Episode 24: MARCUS

COLE

Noah's cousin turned out to be younger than I expected, maybe twenty-five, with the nervous energy to spare, as he stood at Noah's kitchen table, eyes flicking towards the windows like he expected someone to be watching over his shoulder. His jacket was still up, even inside the warm kitchen, the hood pulled up over his head like he never expected to sit down in a place where he wasn't instantly on edge.

"You shouldn't have called me here," he said, before any hellos. "If Ridgeview finds out I'm talking to you about this, I'm as good as dead. You understand that, right? That what I'm about to tell you could get me killed."

"Then why are you here?" I asked.

He looked at Lena for a long moment, some sort of guilt flickering across his face. "Because I've been quietly digging into something that never sat right with me for the last three years, and I think she should know what I found before it's too late to matter," he said, pulling a worn folder out of his jacket and setting it down on the table like it might explode. "My name's Marcus, and I used to run intelligence for Ridgeview's border patrols, which means I had access to old pack correspondence that, supposedly, shouldn't still exist. Including files about the Corwin m******e that don't exactly align with either of your packs' stories for two generations."

He opened the folder to reveal photocopied letters from years gone by, some old and yellowing, others more recent transcriptions of the same names and dates.

"The treaty Damien showed you," Marcus said, looking at me. "It's real. The drought was real. The water rights dispute was real. But it wasn't the Corwins who broke that treaty first." He tapped one of the older letters. "It's Ridgeview, and Damien's grandfather personally poisoned those wells to make it look like an excuse to start a war, because the Corwins had territory Ridgeview wanted, and a treaty violation would give him the excuse to take it by force rather than negotiation. The 'retaliation' story Damien's family has been telling for two generations isn't a more complicated truth, it's the original lie, dressed up to seem more complicated than it is so that nobody bothers questioning it."

There was a very long pause in the room for that.

"And the man in the woods," Marcus continued, his voice quieter. "His name is Elias Thorne, and he was a Corwin ally. One of the smaller pack leaders who survived the m******e because he'd heard the news before the rest of them, tipped off by someone inside Ridgeview who couldn't stand what was about to happen. He's spent the last twenty years building something, quietly and patiently, gathering up every survivor and every piece of evidence he could find, waiting for the right moment to expose what actually happened that night and take back everything his people had lost." Marcus looked at Lena. "He's not your enemy, but he's not entirely your friend, either. From what I've been able to piece together, Elias Thorne has spent two decades planning on using whatever blood the Corwin bloodline has left for the center of a public reckoning, that would absolutely end Ridgeview's legitimacy completely, with or without the permission of that bloodline."

"He wants to use me," I said slowly, because the word had landed with an horrible new weight after everything Damien and my own father had tried to make me. "He wants justice."

"He wants consent," Marcus corrected gently. "Justice and consent aren't always the same thing, and I don't think Elias Thorne has spent much time worrying about the difference between the two that he's actually offering you," he said, closing the folder and sliding it across the table towards me. "There is one more thing. The most recent letter, on top, is dated two weeks ago and is addressed to your father, Cole. And it's signed by Elias Thorne."

I opened the folder and found the letter, reading it twice before the meaning of it could come to me. A formal notice, cold and precise, informing my father that the Corwin alliance was reactivating, that they had documentation of Ridgeview's founding lie, and that they expected Silverclaw's full cooperation in what they called "the coming correction," with an implied threat running under every carefully diplomatic sentence.

"Your father's known about this for two weeks," I said, looking up at Lena and feeling that the weight of the truth would hit her like it did me. "He's known there was a third player this entire time. That's why he's been pushing so hard for the claiming ceremony. He's not just protecting the throne from Ridgeview anymore."

"He's trying to get to me before Thorne does," Lena finished, her face paling. "Everyone's been trying to get to me before someone else does. This whole time."

My phone buzzed in my pocket, cutting through the heavy silence. I pulled it out and my stomach dropped through the floor.

It was a text message from my father, sent less than a minute ago, clearly knowing what conversation was happening in this apartment right now.

Council moved up. Three days, not eleven. Bring her. This is no longer a request, Cole. Thorne has made his first move tonight, and if we don't move faster, we lose everything--including her.

I set the phone down on the table, not entirely steady, and looked up to find every eye in the room waiting for what I was going to say next, to tell them how bad it all was. Three days. Three days to decide who to trust, what to tell the council, and how to keep Lena safe from at least two packs and a mysterious third that apparently all felt she belonged to them more than herself.

"Three days," I said out loud, mostly just to feel how impossible it would sound when it came out. "We have three days to figure this out."

Nobody said anything for a long moment, and outside the first gray light of dawn was just beginning to creep over the rooftops. I found myself thinking, incredibly, that we hadn't slept at all, and that somewhere in the next three days I was going to have to find time to sleep, to breathe, to be a person and not just a piece on somebody else's board--and right now, none of that felt even remotely possible.