An Unexpected Ally
912 Words
"You shouldn't be in here."
Isolde Marsh stood in the doorway, arms crossed, dark eyes moving between Kade and me with an expression that was not the fury I braced for. It was something closer to exhaustion.
"Neither should you," Kade said carefully, stepping slightly in front of me, a small motion I noticed even though I doubted he realized he had done it.
Isolde's mouth twisted into something bitter. "I followed you because my job tonight was to follow you. Your father asked me to watch you both and report anything worth reporting." She let that sit in the air a moment, watching us absorb it. "I've been reporting on you for months, Kade. Long before Selene Ashworth ever arrived at this academy."
The room went very quiet.
"Why," Kade asked, his voice low and dangerous in a way I had never heard directed at anyone but me, in another life, on our worst nights.
"Because he told me if I proved myself loyal, he would finally recognize our bond publicly." Isolde's arms tightened around herself. "I've spent two years waiting for a boy who has never once looked at me the way he looked at her tonight, hoping loyalty would be enough to earn something that should have come naturally the moment we met."
Something in her voice cracked, just slightly, and for the first time I saw past the sharp edges Isolde always wore like armor. I saw a girl who had been promised a bond by fate and then handed nothing but silence in return, used as a tool by a man who cared only what her loyalty could earn him.
I understood that particular kind of loneliness better than anyone in that room.
"I'm not here to expose you," Isolde said, her gaze sliding to the ancient book still open on the table between us. "I'm here because I read that notebook myself last week, before it went missing from Alpha Damon's things. I know what he wants from your bloodline, Selene. I've known for days."
"And you didn't tell anyone," I said carefully.
"Who would I tell? Kade, who already sees me as an obligation rather than a mate? My own pack, who would strip whatever standing I have left the moment they learned I'd been used as Damon Wolfe's errand girl?" She laughed, short and humorless. "I've spent two years trying to earn a place in a story that was never going to include me. Watching you two together tonight, I finally understood something I should have accepted a long time ago."
"What's that," Kade asked quietly.
"That the bond the moon goddess gives us is a beginning, not a guarantee," Isolde said. "You have to choose it too. And you never have. Not once."
The words landed harder than I expected, not because they surprised me, but because they were exactly the kind of honest, painful truth the Isolde from my first life never once allowed herself to say out loud. That Isolde had let her hurt curdle into something violent instead, had let two years of silence rot into hatred sharp enough to end my life.
This Isolde, standing in a dusty archive room at midnight, looked instead like someone standing at the edge of a choice.
"If you're not here to report us," I said slowly, "then why are you here?"
Isolde met my eyes directly for the first time since she walked in. "Because I think Damon Wolfe is far more dangerous than either of you understand, and I think you're going to need someone on the inside who knows exactly how he thinks, if you have any hope of surviving whatever he's planning for that wedding."
I studied her, searching for the trap, the trick, the version of this offer that ended with a hand around my throat.
I found none. Only a girl as trapped by fate as I once was, offering the one thing that might change everything.
"Why should we trust you," Kade asked, though something in his tone had already softened.
"You shouldn't," Isolde said simply. "Not yet. Trust me when I prove it." She stepped further into the room, lowering her voice to barely above a whisper. "Your father isn't planning a wedding ceremony, Kade. I overheard him on the phone two nights ago, talking to someone about a binding ritual, something tied to the full moon and old blood magic. He didn't say Selene's name once. He kept calling her the vessel."
The word hit me like a physical blow.
The vessel.
Not a bride. Not a Luna. A vessel, something to be used and emptied, exactly the way I had felt in my first marriage without ever understanding why.
"A binding ritual could kill her," Kade said, his voice suddenly sharp with fear, turning to face me fully. "If he's planning to extract whatever power lives in your bloodline during the ceremony itself, Selene, you might not survive the wedding at all."
I thought of my first death, the cold hands around my throat, the wedding dress soaked in moonlight.
Perhaps I had never been meant to survive either version of that night.
Isolde's expression hardened into something resolute. "Then we have three days to find a way to stop it," she said.
"Because I refuse to be the reason another girl dies for that man's ambition."
Somewhere outside, a bell began to ring, sharp and urgent, echoing across the sleeping academy grounds.
- Writer
