Rejected Before The Pack

Chapter 7

Damon’s POV

Elder Rowan found me before I could leave the clearing, his hand light on my arm, his voice pitched low enough that only I could hear it.

"Walk with me," he said. "Before you go anywhere with that king, you should hear this from someone who isn't asking anything of you."

I followed him past the healer's hut, past the training yard, until the noise of the gathered pack faded behind us. Ash had finally fallen asleep against my chest, worn out from all the commotion, and I was grateful for the small, steady weight of him while everything else in my life came apart.

"You knew," I said. "Last night. You saw something happen to me, didn't you?"

Rowan didn't deny it. "I saw markings. Silver, under your skin, gone before anyone else could notice. I've only seen them once before, a long time ago, on a woman who came through this territory and never gave her real name."

"My mother?"

"I believe so. Yes."

I stopped walking. "Everyone told me my parents died in an accident. A cart went off the northern road. That's the story I grew up with."

"It's the story the pack was told to protect you," Rowan said. "Your parents didn't die in an accident, Aria. They were murdered. I didn't know that for certain until last night, but I suspected it for years. They arrived here quietly, asked for nothing, kept to themselves. Six months later, they were dead, and you were left an orphan with no family willing to claim you."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because telling you would have put a target on your back before you were old enough to survive it." He said it without apology, but not without regret either. "Your mother made me promise, before she died, that if anything ever happened to her, I'd let you grow up believing you were ordinary. Unremarkable. Safe."

"Safe," I repeated. "I spent twenty-two years being treated like garbage. That wasn't safe, Rowan. That was cruel."

"I know." He met my eyes, and for the first time since I'd known him, he looked old in a way that had nothing to do with his years. "I let you suffer because the alternative was worse. I've asked myself every day whether that was the right choice, and I still don't have an answer that lets me sleep easy."

I didn't know what to do with that. Anger would have been simpler. Anger I understood. This — this quiet, aged guilt from a man who'd at least tried to protect me in his own broken way — was harder to hold onto.

"Who killed them?" I asked instead.

"I don't know his name. I know he wanted something your mother carried, something tied to your bloodline, and when she wouldn't give it to him, he took her life instead." Rowan's jaw tightened. "Whatever woke inside you last night, Aria, it's the same thing he was after twenty-two years ago. If he's still alive, he'll know you've awakened. That king isn't wrong to worry about your safety."

The hum beneath my ribs pulsed once, like it had heard its own name spoken. I pressed a hand against my chest without meaning to.

"What am I supposed to do with any of this?" I asked. "Yesterday I was an omega nobody wanted. Today I'm apparently a queen with a target on her back and a dead mother who kept secrets from me my whole life."

"You do what your mother did," Rowan said. "You survive long enough to become whoever you're meant to be. I can't tell you if that's the girl who forgives this pack, or the queen who burns it down. That part isn't mine to decide."

I looked back toward the clearing, where I could just make out Kael's convoy still waiting, patient, banners hanging still in the windless morning. Damon was there too, standing apart from everyone, watching the space where I'd disappeared like he expected me to come back through it any second.

"Will you tell me the rest?" I asked. "Everything you know. Not pieces. All of it."

"I'll tell you what I know," Rowan said. "It isn't everything. Some of it died with your parents."

"Then it'll have to be enough."

He nodded slowly, and for a moment something like relief crossed his face, like he'd been carrying this alone for twenty-two years and was grateful, finally, to set part of it down.

"Go with the king," he said. "Whatever else is true, he's the only one here who can actually keep you alive while you learn what you've become. I'll send word if anything changes on this end. And Aria—" He paused, waiting until I looked at him fully. "I am sorry. For all of it. That won't undo what this pack did to you, but I needed you to hear it anyway."

I didn't answer right away. Some apologies needed time before they could be accepted, and I wasn't ready to give this one yet.

"I'll remember that you said it," I told him instead, and turned back toward the clearing, toward the king waiting to tell me who I really was.