Rejected by My Alpha, Claimed by His Enemy

CHAPTER 12: WHAT GRANDFATHER TRADE

"Where did you hear that."

Not what are you talking about. Not I don't know what you mean. Just that. Quiet. Careful. Which told me more than any denial would have.

"Answer my question first," I said.

Draven's jaw worked. He looked past me, out toward the tree line, like he half expected to see something standing there. "You met one of them. Tonight. Alone."

"Yes."

"Ariella—"

"Don't." My voice cracked on it, which I hated. "Don't do the concerned Alpha thing right now. Answer the question."

He was quiet long enough that I thought he might actually refuse. Then he exhaled, slow, and something in his shoulders dropped, like a weight he'd been holding got too heavy to keep holding standing up.

"Come inside," he said. "This isn't a hallway conversation."

"It's exactly a hallway conversation. I'm not interested in candlelight and a nice chair for this one."

Something almost like a laugh escaped him. Bitter, not amused. "Fine." He leaned back against the wall instead, arms crossed, looking older than he had that morning. "My grandfather didn't fight in the founding wars. Everyone in Ashwood knows that story — the noble sacrifice, the territory held against impossible odds. It's carved into a wall in the pack hall, if you want to go read the official version."

"And the unofficial version."

"He didn't hold the territory. He traded for it." Draven's voice had gone flat, careful, a man reciting something he'd clearly never said out loud before. "There's a name in Ashwood's private ledgers — not the public ones, the ones only Alphas see — for a debt owed to a group called the Silent Choir. I always assumed it was some old rival faction. Extinct. Irrelevant."

My stomach turned over slow and sick. "Ravenshade."

"I don't know. Maybe. The names don't match on paper, but names change. Fronts change." He rubbed a hand over his face. "I found the ledger entry when I inherited the title. Nineteen years old, buried in grief, trying to understand what my father had actually left me, and there it was. A debt with no explanation attached. No terms. Just an acknowledgment that it existed and a note that it would be 'called' eventually."

"And you never told me this."

"Because I didn't know it mattered until about ten minutes ago." His eyes met mine, and there was real fear in them now, not performance, not careful Alpha calm. "Ariella, I swear to you, I thought it was old history. A closed account from before I was born. I never once connected it to you, to the prophecy, to any of this, until you just said the words what did your grandfather trade like you already half-knew the answer."

I stood there, arms wrapped around myself against the cold, trying to decide if I believed him.

"He said to look closer to the one holding my hand at night," I said finally. "That was almost word for word what he told me."

Something in Draven's face went white. "He's trying to turn you against me."

"Maybe. Or maybe he's telling me something true and counting on you to spin it into something forgivable." I heard how cold my own voice had gone and didn't try to soften it. "I don't know which one this is, Draven. I've spent this entire week not knowing which version of every single person is real, and I'm so tired of guessing I could scream."

"Then don't guess. Ask me anything. I'll answer."

"Fine." I stepped closer, close enough to see the fear behind the careful control, close enough that my next words came out low and sharp. "If Ravenshade calls that debt. If they show up at your gate and tell you it's time to pay. What do they get?"

Draven didn't answer right away. That silence told me more than anything he could've said.

"I don't know," he said finally. "That's the truth. I don't know what the debt actually is, or what paying it would cost, because the ledger never says. I've spent six years hoping I'd never have to find out."

"That's not a comforting answer."

"No," he agreed, quiet. "It isn't."

I didn't sleep. Went to find Fenrir instead, because apparently my new coping mechanism was hunting down every man in my life at increasingly inconvenient hours to demand answers they didn't fully have.

He was awake, of course. Standing watch near the northern wall with two of his own wolves, and something in his face shifted when he saw mine.

"What happened."

I told him. Faster this time, more clipped, running out of patience for my own careful storytelling. When I got to the part about the debt, about the Silent Choir, his expression did something complicated.

"I've heard that name," he said slowly.

My whole body went still. "Where."

"My father's private correspondence. After he died, I went through everything, trying to understand what I'd inherited. There was a letter, unsigned, referencing a debt between Ashwood and something called the Choir. I assumed it was slander. Political posturing meant to weaken Draven's standing before he'd even taken his title." Fenrir's jaw tightened. "I never followed up on it. I had my own prophecy to worry about."

"So it's real. Both of you heard the same name from different sources."

"It appears that way, yes."

I pressed my palms against my eyes. "Everyone in my life has half a secret. Nobody has the whole thing. I am so tired of half secrets I could lie down in this field and not get up."

"Don't do that," Fenrir said, and there was something almost gentle underneath the exhaustion in his voice. "The ground's frozen. You'd regret it in about four minutes."

Despite everything, that pulled something close to a laugh out of me. Small. Ugly. Real.

"I don't know if I trust him," I admitted, quieter now. "Draven. I want to. I keep wanting to, and every time I get close to just — deciding, something else shows up and knocks it sideways again."

Fenrir was quiet a moment. "For what it's worth. And I know my opinion is worth very little to you right now, given everything." A pause. "I don't think he's lying to you. I think he's scared, the same way the rest of us are scared, and scared people hide things badly even when they're trying to be honest."

"That's not the ringing endorsement you think it is."

"I didn't say it was an endorsement. I said it was what I actually think." Something flickered across his face. "Believe me or don't. I've lost the right to expect either from you."

I went back to my room eventually, too exhausted to keep hunting for answers nobody actually had. Sleep didn't come easy, but it came, thin and restless, until something woke me hard and sudden in the deep dark hours before dawn.

A sound. Close. Not outside — inside. My room.

I sat up too fast, head spinning, heart already hammering before my eyes had finished adjusting to the dark, and there, standing just inside my locked door, was a shape I didn't recognize. Too tall to be Talia. Wrong posture to be Selene.

"Who's there," I said, voice steadier than I felt.

The shape didn't answer. Just stepped forward, into the thin moonlight from the window, and I finally saw the face clear enough to place it.

Selene.

Except her eyes weren't right. Flat. Gray. Wrong in a way that had nothing to do with the dark.

"Hello, Ariella," she said, in a voice that wasn't quite her own. "We need to talk about your mother's ledger. And I'm afraid I'm not asking this time."