HE REJECTED HIS WOLFLESS MATE, NOW SHE RULES THE PACK THAT COULD DESTROY HIM

CHAPTER 9 THE WOLF INSIDE THE SILENCE

The nightmares changed shape in the months following Wren’s arrival at Ashwood, shifting slowly from replays of the ceremony itself into something stranger, something that left her waking with her heart pounding over images she didn’t fully understand: a woman’s voice she didn’t recognize, singing something half-remembered in a language that felt older than any she’d heard spoken in Frost Hollow. Eyes, gold like the ones she sometimes glimpsed now in still water, watching her from somewhere just past the edge of every dream.

“You cried out again last night,” Tessa mentioned, over the morning meal, careful in the way she’d learned to be about Wren’s still-fragile sleep. “Different than before, though. You weren’t saying his name this time.”

“I don’t remember what I was saying.”

“You said ‘mother.’ More than once.” Tessa watched her carefully. “Did you know her well? Your mother?”

“She died when I was small. I barely remember her at all. My father never talked about her, not once in nineteen years, like she was a subject too dangerous to raise.” Wren turned the strange detail over, the dream and Tessa’s observation settling uneasily alongside a suspicion she hadn’t let herself fully voice yet. “Why would I be dreaming about her now, after all this time?”

“Grief does strange things to the mind. Opens doors you didn’t know were sealed.” Tessa’s voice was gentle. “Or maybe it’s not just grief. Maybe something in you is trying to tell you something your waking mind hasn’t caught up to yet.”

The dreams persisted through the following weeks, growing more vivid, more insistent, until Wren finally sought out Marta with a question she’d been almost afraid to ask.

“I keep dreaming about my mother. Someone I barely remember, who died when I was small. Singing, in the dreams, something I don’t understand the words to, but the melody feels like it should be familiar, like I’ve heard it before somewhere I can’t quite place.”

Marta went very still, the particular stillness of someone recognizing something significant. “What did she look like, in these dreams?”

“I can’t see her face clearly. Just her eyes. Gold, the way mine are starting to look sometimes, in the right light.”

“Gold eyes were the mark of the old Lycan lines, before most of them went into hiding or were hunted to extinction, a hundred years and more ago,” Marta said carefully. “Lullabies passed down in those bloodlines carried old protective magic, meant to soothe a young Lycan’s power before it was old enough to control on its own. If your mother sang you such a song as a child, before whatever binding your father arranged took hold, it’s possible some fragment of that memory survived buried in you all this time, waiting for the right conditions to surface.”

“You think my mother was Lycan.”

“I think it would explain a great many things your father never chose to explain himself,” Marta said, something careful and sympathetic in her weathered face. “I think, child, that you may be carrying more of her in you than you ever had the chance to know, and that these dreams might be the first pieces of a truth someone worked very hard to keep buried alongside her.”

Wren sat with that revelation long after Marta had returned to her healing duties, the shape of a mother she’d never truly known beginning, slowly and painfully, to take form in her mind: a woman who had sung her lullabies meant to soothe power she’d never been allowed to grow into, who had died, Wren now suspected, carrying secrets her own daughter would spend nineteen years paying the price for not knowing.

That night, for the first time, she tried to remember the melody from her dreams while fully awake, humming the fragments she could recall into the quiet dark of her shelter, and felt, faintly, something in her chest respond to the sound, warm and aching and entirely unfamiliar.

She didn’t tell anyone about the dream for several days, turning it over privately, unwilling to voice something so fragile and strange until she’d had time to sit with it fully on her own terms. But the melody persisted, returning to her in idle moments, while she worked, while she walked the camp’s perimeter in the quiet evening hours, until humming it under her breath became an unconscious habit she only noticed when Tessa finally asked what the tune was.

“I don’t know,” Wren admitted. “I’ve been humming it for days. I think I’m dreaming it, but I can’t place where it’s from.”

“Sing it properly. Maybe I’ll recognize it.”

Wren tried, self-conscious, the melody halting and uncertain in her own voice, but even in that imperfect rendering, something in the shape of it felt older than anything she’d ever heard within Frost Hollow’s borders, older and gentler, carrying a warmth she associated with nothing in her own conscious memory.

“I don’t recognize it either,” Tessa said slowly, “but it doesn’t sound like nothing, if that makes sense. It sounds like it’s trying to tell you something you haven’t caught up to yet.”

The following morning, she woke with the melody still humming faintly at the edge of her thoughts, and for the first time since the dreams began, the sound brought no fear with it at all, only a quiet, persistent curiosity about the woman who might have loved her enough to leave this fragment behind.

The melody returned to her that night in sleep, clearer than before, and Wren woke with tears she couldn’t quite explain, grief and comfort tangled so completely together that she couldn’t separate which feeling belonged to which half of the dream.

She woke the next morning with the melody still lingering faintly, and found herself humming it through her chores, the fragments of an unremembered lullaby becoming, slowly, something like companionship instead of mystery.

It felt, she realized with a start, like being held by someone she’d never gotten the chance to properly meet.