The Alpha's Forbidden Pact

CHAPTER 26: SAY IT ISN’T TRUE

I went straight to the kitchen.

Kade and Theo were both there. Kade stood at the counter with a half-finished cup of coffee. Theo sat at the table reviewing something on a tablet. They looked up when I walked in. Whatever they saw on my face made both of them go still.

“Ivy?” Theo said.

I closed the door behind me and took the second paper Cassius had given me out of my pocket. I set it on the table between them without sitting down.

“Tell me this is a lie.”

Kade picked it up first. His eyes moved over the page. The color drained from his face so fast that Theo stood up and moved closer.

“Where did you get this?” Kade asked. His voice had gone flat.

“Cassius Drake. He said Magnus Thorne ordered the coup. He said Edmund’s father is the one who had my parents killed. Tell me he is lying.”

Theo reached for the paper. Kade did not hand it over right away. He kept staring at the words like they might rearrange themselves into something less ugly if he gave them time.

“Ivy, listen to me,” Theo said carefully. “Drake is a rogue. He has every reason to turn you against the Council and against us. This could be manufactured. It would not be the first time someone tried to use you to start a fight they could not win on their own.”

“Could be,” I said. “But you are not saying it is false.”

Kade finally looked up. His expression was stripped of the usual control.

“We do not know for certain,” he said.

“That is not the same as saying it is not true.”

“Ivy”

“Say it is not true.” My voice came out harder than I expected. “Look at me and tell me the man they want me to marry is not the son of the person who ordered my parents’ deaths. Say the words.”

Neither of them spoke.

The silence in the kitchen became its own answer. The refrigerator hummed. A floorboard creaked somewhere near the front of the house. Neither sound was loud enough to fill the space that had opened between us.

Theo dragged a hand down his face and let out a slow breath. “We have heard rumors. Fragments. Things that never held up as solid proof when we tried to follow them. Damaris has always shut those conversations down before they went too far.”

“Why?”

“Because if it was true,” Kade said, “and if it got back to the wrong people that we were looking into, the protection around you would have collapsed years ago. The pact would not have been enough. Nothing we had would have been enough.”

I stared at both of them. The careful structure of the house, the rules, the distances, the way they had always redirected certain questions about the past, all of it rearranged itself in real time.

“How long have you suspected?” I asked.

Kade’s jaw tightened. He set the paper down on the table like it had weight. “Long enough.”

“And you still stood there while Damaris talked about Edmund Thorne like he was an acceptable future for me.”

“We stood there because the alternative was putting a target on you that we could not block,” Kade said. “You think we liked it? You think any of us wanted to walk you toward a marriage tied to that name? We chose the version of the truth that kept you breathing. That is what we did.”

“You chose silence.”

“We chose your life over a fight we were not ready to win.”

The kitchen door opened before I could answer.

Damaris walked in.

He took in the three of us, the paper on the table, and the look on my face in a single glance. Whatever he saw stopped him in the doorway. For a moment no one moved. The air in the room seemed to thin.

I watched his expression carefully.

He did not ask what the paper said. He did not ask where it came from. He did not demand an explanation for why Cassius Drake’s information was sitting on his kitchen table. He only looked at the paper, then at me, and the color that left his face told me everything before he opened his mouth.

He already knew.

The confirmation landed harder than Cassius’s words had. It landed harder than Kade’s half-admissions. It sat in the center of the kitchen with no one left to push it back into the dark.

Damaris stood in the doorway of his own house, silent, and the truth I had carried home settled between all of us with nothing left to soften it.