The Alpha's Forbidden Pact

CHAPTER 27: EIGHTEEN YEARS

Damaris closed the kitchen door behind him.

Kade and Theo stayed where they were. Neither of them tried to speak. The paper still lay on the table between us, but no one reached for it again.

I looked at Damaris and waited.

He rested both hands on the back of a chair like he needed the support. When he finally spoke, his voice was quieter than I had ever heard in this house.

“I knew,” he said.

The two words settled over the room with nothing to soften them.

“I have known since the week after the coup. Not the full shape of it at first. Only enough to understand that the official story was clean, and the real one was not. Magnus Thorne gave the order. He wanted the Sinclair line removed, so the old alliances could be rewritten under his control. Your parents were the obstacle. You were supposed to die with them.”

My hands had gone cold. I kept them flat against my thighs so no one would see them shake.

“Why keep it from me?”

“Because the moment you knew, you would have wanted blood. And the moment you moved toward blood, every protection we had built around you would have become a target. The pact would not have held against a direct Council purge. Neither would this house. Neither would the five of us.”

He pulled the chair out and sat like the weight of the years had finally caught up to him one afternoon.

“The night it happened, I was already moving you,” he said. “Your mother had sent word hours earlier that something was wrong. She did not give details. She only said the route we had planned was no longer safe. I got you out along a secondary path before the final sweep reached the main house. By the time I went back, it was finished. Your parents were gone. Vincent Vance was gone. The people who had done it were already cleaning the scene to look like a rival pack attack.”

I thought of the photograph in Julian’s file. My mother’s face. The man standing beside her looked like Julian.

“You saw them,” I said.

“I saw enough,” Damaris stared at the table. “After that, the only thing left was to keep you alive long enough to claim what was yours on your own terms. The pact was part of that. The rules were part of that. The silence was part of that. Every time you asked about the night they died, I gave you the version that would not send you walking straight into Magnus Thorne’s hands.”

“You let me believe Edmund was just another political arrangement.”

“I let you believe what I needed you to believe to keep you breathing.” His eyes lifted to mine. “I am not asking you to forgive it. I am telling you why it was done.”

Kade shifted near the counter but did not speak. Theo had gone very still.

“Eighteen years,” I said. “You carried that name for eighteen years and said nothing.”

“Yes.”

“While you talked about mating laws and Council protection and the need to settle my future with the son of the man who ordered my parents’ deaths.”

Damaris did not look away. “Yes.”

The honesty in a single word was worse than a longer defense would have been.

I felt the kitchen tilt around me. Every careful conversation about the Reclaiming Moon, every time he had spoken Edmund’s name with that flat practical tone, every instance he had shut down questions about the past, all of it stacked into one clear picture. He had known. He had chosen the silence. And he had done it while looking me in the eye and calling it protection.

“Who else knows?” I asked.

“Kade knows enough to have suspected. Theo knows fragments. The others know less. I kept the full truth as contained as I could.”

“Contained.” The word tasted bitter. “You contained the fact that the man who destroyed my family is the same man whose bloodline the Council wants to bind me to.”

“I contained the fact so you would still be alive to hate me for it.”

Silence filled the kitchen again. No one tried to fill it.

Damaris rested his forearms on the table and looked at his hands. When he spoke again, the formality was gone. Only the raw edge remained.

“I have watched you grow up under a set of rules I designed to keep you safe from him. I have watched you push against every one of those rules. And I know, every single day, that the man who ordered your parents’ deaths was still sitting in a Council seat, waiting for the moment the last Sinclair heir became useful enough to claim. I said nothing because the alternative was risking you before we had any way to protect you from the fallout. That is the truth. It is not clean. It is not noble. That is what I did.”

I stared at him across the table.

The man who had raised me, who had built the walls, who had almost crossed the last line with me in the hallway only days earlier, had also spent eighteen years knowing the name of the person who had taken everything from me.

And he had never said it out loud until the truth was already sitting on the table between us, impossible to put back.