Rejected by My Alpha, Claimed by His Enemy

CHAPTER 9: THE HANDWRITING

"That's my mother's name."

Selene didn't move. Didn't drop the paper, didn't hide it, just stood there in the candlelight with it pinched between two fingers like she'd forgotten she was holding it.

"Ariella—"

"Don't." I stepped in and shut the door behind me, quiet, because some animal part of my brain didn't want anyone else hearing this yet. My heart was doing something ugly and fast, and I hated that she could probably hear it. Wolves hear everything. "Whose handwriting is that."

"Mine."

"I can see that. Why is my mother's name written in your handwriting in the middle of the night in a room you weren't supposed to be in?"

She set the paper down slow, both hands flat on the desk after, like she needed the wood to hold her up. "I couldn't sleep either. Come to think of it, nobody sleeps anymore in this pack." A joke. Bad timing. It landed nowhere. "I was going through Fenrir's archive boxes. Trying to find anything on the Ravenshade mark. I wasn't looking for your mother."

"But you found her."

"I found a name. Mira Wolfe. Cross-referenced in a ledger from twenty-three years ago." Selene's jaw worked. "I wrote it down because I didn't want to lose the page number. That's it. That's the whole story."

I didn't believe her. I wanted to. My chest hurt with how much I wanted to, and that scared me more than the not-believing did. I stood there running through everything I knew about her — the calm hands with the dead woman, the dead brother, the careful, controlled voice she used for everything — and none of it told me what I actually needed to know.

"Show me the ledger."

"I don't have it. It's still in the archive room."

"Then we're going."

The archive room smelled like old paper and mouse droppings, one candle between us, and my hands were doing that thing again where they wouldn't sit still. Selene pulled a box down off a shelf, opened it careful, like it might bite, and thumbed through pages gone soft and brittle with age until she found the one.

There it was. My mother's name. Mira Wolfe. Next to it, a string of numbers I didn't understand and a single word in faded ink.

Sealed.

"What does that mean," I said. "Sealed."

"I don't know."

"You don't know a lot of things tonight."

Selene looked up at me, and there was something tired in her face that wasn't guilt exactly, but wasn't innocence either. Somewhere uncomfortably in between. "I know you're scared. I know that makes you look for someone to be angry at. I get it. I've been there." Her voice went flatter. "But I didn't do this to you, Ariella. Whatever this is."

"That's what someone would say either way."

"Yes," she said. "It is."

Neither of us moved for a second. The candle guttered, threw shadows up the walls that made the whole room feel smaller than it was. Somewhere outside, an owl made a sound I didn't like, and I flinched at it, which felt embarrassing even with nobody but Selene there to see it.

"There's more in this box," she said, quieter now, sliding it toward me instead of away. "I hadn't gotten through all of it yet. You're welcome to keep looking. I'll leave, if that makes this easier."

"Why would you do that."

"Because I'd want the same, in your position." She stood, careful, hands visible the whole time like she was trying to prove something without saying it outright. "I'll be right outside."

She left. I sat alone with the box and the candle and my mother's name in faded ink, and didn't find anything else that made sense before the wax burned down too low to read by.

"I want to believe you," I said, finally, when she came back in.

"I know." She closed the ledger, gentle, like it deserved that much care even now. "I'm not going to convince you tonight. I don't think anything I say is going to land right while you're standing in a room full of papers about your dead mother at three in the morning. So go. Sleep, if you can manage it. We'll sort out whether you trust me some other day, when I'm not the only suspect standing in front of you."

I left. Didn't say anything else. Couldn't.

Draven caught me in the hallway before I made it back to my room, which meant either he'd been awake, or someone had already told him where I was. Given the pack, probably both.

"Selene," he said. Not a question.

"How do you already know that."

"Because Talia saw you leave the study looking like you'd seen a ghost, and Talia doesn't keep things to herself for longer than about four minutes." He studied my face. "What happened."

I told him. All of it, in the ugly, unpolished order it had actually happened, not the neat version, because I didn't have the energy left to make it sound better than it was. He listened without interrupting, which I appreciated more than I expected to, arms crossed, jaw doing that tight thing it did when he was working hard not to react.

"You think she's lying," he said, when I finished.

"I don't know what I think. That's the problem." I pressed the heel of my hand against one eye, hard enough to see spots. "Everyone in this pack has a reason to have known my mother's name, or a dead brother, or a secret they didn't mention until it mattered. I can't tell anymore who's actually hiding something and who's just — human. Wolf. Whatever. Flawed and quiet about it, the normal amount."

"That's a fair thing to not know."

"It's not comforting."

"I didn't say it was comforting." Something in his voice had an edge to it, tired and a little rough. "I said it was fair."

I studied him a second, the shadows under his eyes, the way his hands stayed loose at his sides instead of reaching for me even though I could tell some part of him wanted to. "You look like you haven't slept since the horn."

"I haven't."

"Why not."

"Guess," he said, and didn't elaborate, which somehow told me everything anyway.

We stood there. Too close again, the way we kept ending up too close without deciding to, and some stupid stubborn part of me noticed it even now, even exhausted, even scared half out of my mind about my dead mother and a Beta I couldn't read anymore.

"I keep waiting for you to lie to me too," I said, before I could stop myself.

Something flickered across his face. Hurt, maybe. Fast, and gone. "Have I yet?"

"No."

"Then maybe don't wait for it. Or wait for it if you need to, I can't tell you how to survive this week. Just don't punish me in advance for something I haven't done."

That landed somewhere sharp. I didn't have a response for it, so I didn't give one, and he didn't push, and we stood there another few seconds not saying anything, which had apparently become our whole relationship at this point.

"For what it's worth," he said, quieter, "I don't think you're wrong to be careful. I'd be worried about you if you weren't."

"That's not romantic."

"Wasn't trying to be." A pause. "Little bit."

That almost got a laugh out of me. Almost. It came out more like an exhale with intent behind it.

He reached out. Just his fingers, brushing mine, barely anything at all, and I let him, and neither of us called it anything.

I actually slept a little, finally, worn down enough that my body overrode whatever my brain wanted to keep doing. Bad sleep. The kind where you wake up more tired than before, jaw sore from clenching it all night, and for one soft, stupid second I forgot why. Then I remembered, all at once, the way you remember a bruise by pressing on it.

Woke to shouting.

Not horn-blast shouting. Different. Closer. Coming from inside the compound itself.

I was out the door before I'd fully processed being awake, bare feet on cold stone, following the noise toward the healing quarters again, because apparently that room was cursed now, apparently everything terrible in my life happened within thirty feet of that specific doorway.

Talia was on the ground. Selene crouched over her, hands pressed to a wound at her side that was bleeding too fast, too dark, and Draven was already shouting for the pack healer, and for one horrible second I couldn't tell if Selene was helping her or if I'd walked in on something else entirely.

"What happened," I said, too loud, my voice cracking on it.

"I don't know." Selene's hands were shaking, slick red already. "I found her like this. Just now. I didn't—" She stopped. Looked up at me, and there was real fear in her face this time, unmistakable, the kind you can't fake convincingly even if you're good at faking things. "Ariella, I swear to you, I just found her like this."

I dropped to my knees on Talia's other side, not caring about the blood soaking through the fabric at my knees, not caring about anything except the terrible shallow rise and fall of her chest. Someone had done this to a girl who apologized to grass for no reason and told me sometimes people just die without an explanation. Someone had done this to her because of me. I knew that with total, ugly certainty even before anyone said it out loud.

Talia's eyes were open. Barely. Fixed on me with something urgent underneath the pain, like she was trying to say something and didn't have the breath left to manage it.

I dropped down beside her. "Talia. Talia, look at me. What happened."

Her lips moved. No sound at first. I leaned closer, close enough to feel her breath, shallow and wet and wrong.

"Feather," she managed, barely a whisper. "Left a feather. Told me to tell you—"

Her eyes rolled back before she finished the sentence.