Marked in Silver

Chapter 3

I didn't open the file in that room. My hands weren't steady enough, and Theo said the wing had cameras that reset on a twenty minute loop, and we'd already used twelve of them standing still.

I waited until midnight, alone, sitting on the floor of the guest quarters with my back against the door like a kid hiding from a storm.

The first page was routine. Cause of death, location, time. The kind of clinical language that makes a person's whole life sound like a shipping label.

The second page was not routine.

Incident reclassified from rogue territorial attack to internal resolution by order of S. Draven. File sealed per council discretion, effective immediately.

Internal resolution.

That wasn't a phrase you used for an accident. That was a phrase you used when the pack killed one of its own and needed a softer word for it.

I sat there a long time with the file in my lap, not crying, because crying was a thing I'd trained myself out of somewhere in year two of becoming Raine Ashcombe. Instead I just breathed, slow and even, the way Theo taught me, until the shaking in my hands stopped being about grief and started being about something colder and more useful.

My father didn't die defending the border.

Someone in this pack killed him and Selene Draven buried it under a word.

The border sweep started at dawn, four of us moving through the eastern treeline in wolf form except for me, since I'd told the council my shift was still stabilizing after an old injury another lie, though this one had a shape to it that felt almost true. I hadn't shifted in five years. Not since the spell went in. Theo said it might not even work anymore, layered under witch magic the way it was, and some nights I lay awake wondering if the wolf inside me was still there at all, or if I'd traded her away along with my name.

Kade ran point in wolf form, a huge dark shape moving through the underbrush like he'd been built for exactly this. I followed on foot, tracking marks in the dirt, and it was almost peaceful, for a while the quiet, the cold air, the simple job of finding footprints that didn't belong.

The claw marks got stranger the deeper we went. Too deep in some places, barely scratching the bark in others, like whoever made them had been in a hurry or hadn't fully understood how a real wolf attacks. I crouched by one gouge mark and ran my thumb along the edge. Clean. Almost surgical. My father used to say real fights left messy wounds, because nothing about survival is neat.

These are staged, I murmured to myself, and one of the other enforcers, a broad shouldered man named Dale, glanced over.

Staged how?

Too even, I said, showing him. A rogue defending territory doesn't measure his own claw marks.

Dale frowned at the tree like it had personally insulted him, then jogged ahead to flag it for the others, and I straightened up just as Kade's wolf came trotting back through the brush toward me, ears pricked, alert in a way that had nothing to do with the trail.

Then his wolf stopped dead in a clearing and turned to look at me.

Not toward the trail. At me.

I froze. A wolf's stare is a language, and this one wasn't reading like suspicion or alertness. It was reading like recognition, like something in the animal part of him had just connected two dots his human mind kept refusing to draw.

He shifted back fast, breathing hard, human again and half-dressed in the spare clothes tied at his ankle in wolf form. His eyes were wild in a way I hadn't seen since he was seventeen and terrified of a bond he didn't understand yet.

Say something else, he said.

What?

That thing you said yesterday. In the meeting. Say it again.

My heart was slamming so hard I was sure he could hear it. Kade, I don't remember

Always have been. His voice dropped low, almost pleading. You said it exactly like

He stopped himself. Shook his head like a man trying to physically throw off a thought. Forget it. Forget I said anything.

But he didn't move. And neither did I. We stood there in that clearing with five years and one buried lie between us, close enough that I could count the small scar above his eyebrow I used to trace with my thumb when we were kids sneaking off from pack gatherings, and for one terrible, beautiful second, I wanted so badly to tell him everything that the words sat right behind my teeth.

I swallowed them instead.

We should keep moving, I said. Before the others double back.

Something in his face closed, like a door pulled shut on purpose. Right, he said. Yeah.

He shifted again before I could see whatever expression came after that, and I stood alone in the clearing for one more second, hating myself for how much I wanted to call him back.

We didn't speak again until the sweep ended near dusk. I fell into step behind the others on the walk back, glad for the noise of four tired enforcers trading complaints about blistered feet and empty trails, glad for anything that wasn't silence between me and the alpha who kept glancing sideways at me like I was a word stuck on the tip of his tongue.

Dale caught up beside me near the gate, grinning despite the long day. You've got a good eye for tracking, Ashcombe. Most new hires miss half of what you called out today.

Good training, I said, which was true enough it didn't feel like lying.

Guild must not pay you what you're worth. He shouldered his pack higher and nodded toward the longhouse. Stick around a season, the alpha usually offers permanent contracts to enforcers who impress him.

I watched Kade's back disappear through the longhouse doors ahead of us, spine straight, shoulders set like a man carrying something heavier than a patrol report, and I wondered how many seasons I actually had before either the spell cracked or Selene decided my welcome had run out.

We'll see, I notified Dale, and meant it as far less of an answer than it sounded.