Rejected by My Alpha, Claimed by His Enemy

CHAPTER 6: CRACKS

I kissed him first. I want that on record, even if it's just for myself — Draven didn't pull me in, didn't do anything smooth or practiced. I closed the distance because some reckless, exhausted part of me had decided it was done waiting to see what would happen and just wanted to make something happen instead.

It wasn't perfect. Our noses bumped. He made a small surprised sound against my mouth that I'd probably tease him about later, if there was a later where teasing felt appropriate again. His hand came up to my jaw like he wasn't sure he was allowed to, and honestly? Neither was I. I kept waiting for the guilt to show up — Fenrir two doors down, the ghost of a bond still humming faint and stubborn in my chest — and it did show up, a little, but it didn't stop me.

We broke apart because I laughed. Actually laughed, this awful nervous huff of a sound, and Draven pulled back with his eyebrows up like he genuinely didn't know if that was good or catastrophic.

"That's not the reaction I was hoping for," he said.

"I'm not laughing at you. I'm laughing because three people tried to murder me at dawn and I'm standing in a hallway kissing my rescuer s***h rival s***h whatever you are at midnight, and my life has officially stopped making sense in a linear order." I pressed the heel of my hand against one eye. "I think I'm a little unhinged right now."

"A little," he agreed, and there was warmth in it, not mockery. "Go to sleep, Ariella. We'll figure out what this is tomorrow. Or the day after. There's no rush."

"There's kind of a rush. Ancient death cult, remember?"

"There's no rush on this," he clarified, and something about the specificity of that landed harder than I expected.

I went to bed. I did not sleep well. I lay there running my tongue over my bottom lip like a teenager and hating myself a little for it, given everything else going on, and eventually gave up and just let myself feel whatever I was feeling without labeling it.

Morning brought Selene with a face like a closed door.

"We need to talk," she said, "about the woman who came over the wall."

Something in my stomach dropped before she even finished the sentence. "Is she awake?"

"She's dead."

The word landed flat and ugly. "What? How—"

"That's the problem." Selene's jaw was tight. "No wound reopened. No infection. Her heart just stopped sometime before dawn, and I've patched up worse injuries than hers plenty of times without losing the patient. I don't think this was natural."

Draven was already moving, already barking for guards to secure the healing quarters properly this time, and I trailed after him with my heart doing something unpleasant and fast in my chest. We found her exactly where she'd been left, except now there was a mark on her throat I hadn't noticed before — small, precise, almost surgical. Not a bite. Not a claw.

"Someone got to her," Draven said quietly. "Inside my walls."

"That's not possible," Selene said, and then, quieter, like she hated saying it: "It shouldn't be possible."

I looked at the mark on the dead woman's throat, at the careful, deliberate precision of it, and felt something cold slide down my spine that had nothing to do with grief. Whoever did this hadn't been sloppy. Hadn't been in a hurry. They'd walked into a guarded, warded pack compound, found exactly what they wanted, and left without anyone noticing until it was already finished.

"Who had access to this room?" I asked.

Selene's eyes flicked toward me, then away, and something in that half-second of hesitation made my stomach clench harder than the dead woman's throat had.

"Selene," Draven said, low and dangerous. "Who."

"Pack healers. Myself." She swallowed. "And whoever brought her food and water on rotation. Which included Talia."

The training yard. The bruised wrist. The girl who'd asked me to teach her how to fight properly, who'd looked at me like I was just a wolf who knew something useful instead of a walking prophecy.

"No," I said, before I'd fully decided to say anything. "Not Talia."

"I'm not accusing her," Selene said sharply. "I'm answering the question you asked."

But even as she said it, I noticed the way her eyes wouldn't quite settle anywhere, the way her hands had curled slightly at her sides, and some old, ugly instinct — the same one that had clocked Fenrir's fear in the pack hall before I understood what it meant — started whispering that Selene knew something she wasn't saying yet.

"There's something else," Fenrir said. He'd been quiet this whole time, standing near the door, and when I turned to him his face had gone the particular gray color of a man about to say something he really doesn't want to.

"What."

"The mark on her throat." He crouched down slowly, careful, studying it without touching. "I've seen it before. Not on a Ravenshade victim. On a Blackwood one — a scout who died six years ago, right before I came into my Alpha title. My father called it an accident. Wolves die on patrol, he said. It happens."

"You don't think it was an accident," I said.

"I think," Fenrir said, standing back up, meeting my eyes with something raw and afraid underneath the words, "that whoever's hunting you has been inside pack walls before. Long before any of us knew to be looking for them."

Selene made a small sound — not quite a gasp, more like something caught and swallowed halfway. When I looked at her, her face had gone pale in a way that had nothing to do with the dead woman on the table between us.

"Selene," Draven said again, quieter now, and somehow that was worse than the sharp version. "What aren't you telling me."

Her hands were shaking. I noticed that before anything else — Selene, who'd calmly patched a half-dead stranger's wounds without flinching, who'd stood beside me at a hostile border without a hair out of place, now visibly, unmistakably trembling.

"That scout," she said, so quietly I almost lost it. "The one from six years ago. I knew him." A pause, ragged and long. "He was my brother."

The room went very still.

"Selene," Draven said, and there was something breaking open in his voice now, some old certainty finally cracking. "Why didn't you ever tell me that."

"Because I didn't know it mattered," she said, and her eyes finally lifted to meet mine, wet and furious and terrified all at once. "Not until right now. Not until I understood that the mark on my brother's throat and the mark on hers are the same, and that means whoever's hunting Ariella has been watching this pack — watching me — for six years without a single one of us noticing."

She looked down at her own hands like she'd never seen them before.

"Which means," she said, "I don't actually know how long they've had someone inside these walls. Or who it is. Or whether it's still someone standing in this room right now."