Rejected by My Alpha, Claimed by His Enemy

CHAPTER 14: THE WRONG VOICE

We ran. Both of us, no discussion, straight toward the sound, and my legs remembered how to move faster than my brain did, which was probably for the best given what my brain wanted to do was sit down and refuse.

The scream came from the guest quarters.

Fenrir's door was open. Not broken — open, like someone had walked out through it calmly, which somehow made it worse than if it had been torn off the hinges. Draven got there first, shoved through, and went very still in the doorway in a way that made my stomach drop before I even saw why.

One of Fenrir's guards lay on the floor. Throat cut, four claw marks wide across it, exactly the pattern from Talia's attack. Blood everywhere, too much of it, the smell hitting me like a wall. I'd thought I was getting used to blood this week. I wasn't. You don't get used to it. You just get better at standing upright while your stomach does what it wants to do anyway.

Fenrir wasn't there.

"Fenrir," I said, stupidly, like saying his name might produce him.

"He's not here," Draven said, unnecessary, obvious, but I think he needed to say it out loud as much as I needed to hear it. He crouched by the guard, checked for a pulse he clearly already knew wasn't there. "Recent. Less than ten minutes."

"That's when we were on the balcony."

"I know."

I looked around the room properly for the first time, hands shaking, cataloguing without meaning to — overturned chair, a boot print in the blood that wasn't the guard's own, a window cracked open that hadn't been cracked open before.

And on the desk, weighted down under a candle holder so it wouldn't blow away, a single sheet of paper.

I recognized the handwriting before I finished crossing the room to it. Fenrir's. Rushed, uneven, nothing like the careful script I'd seen on Blackwood correspondence before.

Ariella —

They came for me, not you. I don't understand why yet. Tell Draven the debt isn't what he thinks it —

It cut off. Just stopped, mid-word, the pen dragged sideways like something had grabbed his hand before he could finish.

"He was writing this when they took him," I said. My voice sounded far away to my own ears.

Draven took the paper from me, read it twice, jaw tightening with each pass. "The debt isn't what he thinks it. Isn't what I think it." He looked up. "He knew something. Or figured something out, right before this happened."

"Convenient timing."

Something in Draven's face shut down, fast, cold. "Say what you mean."

"I mean he disappears right after telling us your family's secret might not be what either of you assume. Right after you and I stood on a balcony wondering if we could even trust each other." I heard how ugly it sounded coming out and didn't stop it. "I mean it's a very useful thing for him to go missing right now, if someone wanted to make you look guilty by association."

"You think I did this."

"I don't know what I think. I told you that already, and it's still true." My hands were shaking harder now, delayed shock catching up all at once. "I just watched a woman wearing my friend's face smile at me before it died in front of me. Forgive me if I've stopped assuming anything is what it looks like."

Draven's jaw worked. He didn't argue. That scared me more than if he had.

He turned away from me, toward the window, shoulders set in a way that told me exactly how much that landed even though he wasn't saying so. "I'm going to pretend you didn't say that," he said finally, "because I understand why you did. That's the only reason. Don't mistake it for me being fine with it."

"I'm not asking you to be fine with it."

"Good," he said. "Because I'm not."

Selene arrived within minutes, still favoring her bruised wrists, and went pale at the sight of the guard on the floor.

"Same mark," she said, quiet.

"Same mark," Draven confirmed.

"Then it's not us doing this to ourselves. It's them, trying to make it look like it's us." She crouched by the body, careful, professional despite everything she'd been through hours earlier. "This isn't random. This is precise. Whoever's doing this knows exactly which strings to pull to make every one of us suspect each other."

"It's working," I said.

Nobody argued with that either.

We searched the grounds for two hours. Found nothing. No trail, no scent that held for more than a few yards before vanishing entirely, which Draven said wasn't natural, which meant the mimics could apparently mask movement too, which meant I had one more thing to add to the list of impossible problems I didn't know how to solve.

I ended up back at the guest quarters near dawn, alone, staring at the bloodstain someone had started to clean but hadn't finished, my mind circling the same useless loop it had been circling for hours.

Tell Draven the debt isn't what he thinks it.

What had Fenrir figured out? What had he been about to say, in the two seconds before someone dragged the pen sideways and took him out a cracked window into the dark?

I picked the paper back up, read it again for the twentieth time, like the words might rearrange themselves into something more useful if I stared hard enough.

"You should sleep," Selene said, from the doorway. I hadn't heard her come in.

"I should do a lot of things I'm not doing."

She came and sat near me, careful, giving me space, which I appreciated more than I could say out loud right then. Her wrists were bandaged now, proper, and she moved like every part of her hurt in a different way. "For what it's worth. I don't think Draven did this."

"Why not."

"Because I've served him for six years, and whatever else is true about his family's ledgers, I've never once seen him lie to protect himself at someone else's cost. He tells hard truths. Even when they cost him." She studied the bloodstain too, like it might answer something for her as well. "That's not proof. I know that's not proof. It's just what I've got."

"Everyone keeps handing me things that aren't proof."

"I know," Selene said. "I'm sorry. It's all any of us have right now."

She was quiet a moment, picking at a loose thread on her sleeve. "You know what scares me most? Not the mimics. Not even Fenrir being gone." Her voice dropped. "It's that whoever's doing this understands exactly how we think. They knew hitting Fenrir right after that note would make you suspect Draven. They're not just attacking us. They're playing us against each other, and they're good at it."

I didn't have anything to say to that. It was true, and true things didn't need my agreement to stay true.

I found Draven at the border an hour after that, standing at the exact spot where Fenrir had first come to warn us, staring out at Blackwood territory like he could will an answer out of the tree line. He hadn't slept. I hadn't either. We were starting to match in that particular, miserable way.

"Any word," I asked.

"Nothing. No demands. No message. Whoever took him is either not interested in negotiating, or they're not done yet." His voice was rough, exhausted in a way that went past physical tiredness. "I sent scouts into Blackwood territory to inform his council. They didn't take it well."

"Do they suspect you."

"They suspect everyone. It's the reasonable response, given everything." He finally looked at me, and something in his face had gone raw, stripped of the careful control he usually wore. "Ariella. I need you to know something, and I need you to actually hear it, not just brace for another lie."

"Say it."

"I would not hurt him to protect a family secret I don't even fully understand myself. Whatever you believe about the debt, about my grandfather, about anything else — I would not do this. Not to him, not to you, not to anyone in that room tonight." His hands were fists again, that particular tell I'd learned to read on him this past week. "I know you have no reason to simply take my word for it. I'm asking anyway."

I studied him for a long time. The exhaustion. The fear underneath the fear. The particular way his voice had cracked, just slightly, on the word anyone. Some small, tired part of me wanted to just believe him and stop doing the math every single time he opened his mouth. The rest of me wasn't built that way anymore. Maybe never had been. Maybe the pack hall just finished the job.

"I want to believe you," I said, finally, the same thing I'd told Selene days ago, the same useless, honest sentence I seemed to keep handing out to everyone who might be lying to me.

"I know," Draven said. "I keep hearing that from you. I keep wondering when it's going to turn into something more than wanting."

I didn't have an answer for that. He didn't seem to expect one, which somehow made it worse — like he'd already resigned himself to waiting indefinitely and decided that was simply the shape his life had taken now.

Before I could answer, one of Draven's scouts came running, breathless, face white in the pale morning light.

"Alpha," she gasped. "You need to come. Now. There's a message. Left at the northern wall."

"What message."

She held something out, hands trembling. A scrap of Blackwood cloth, torn, stained dark at one corner.

And underneath it, pinned through the fabric like a signature, a single gray feather.