CHAPTER 6
1104 Words
Sable arrived on the fourth day.
I heard her before I saw her. Her vehicle on the drive, the particular sound of someone who traveled with more luggage than necessary, the way the packhouse shifted in that specific way it shifts when someone enters who expects to be noticed.
I was in the corridor when she came through the main entrance.
She was beautiful. I had no frame of reference for beautiful except what I had been building since my eyes opened, but I understood it when I saw her. Tall, golden-toned, with the practiced ease of someone who had grown up in rooms that arranged themselves around her arrival.
She saw me at the same moment.
We looked at each other.
In eighteen years I had heard Sable's voice almost daily. I knew every register of it. The one she used with her father when she wanted something. The one she used with pack members she considered below her. The one she used with me, which was a specific tone reserved for things that were present but not quite real.
Looking at her face now, I understood something I had only partially assembled from sound alone. She was not entirely comfortable in her own performance. There were moments, very brief, when the ease slipped and something underneath it showed. Something that looked like it had not been given very much room.
"Cece," she said.
"Sable," I said.
She looked at my eyes. I watched her process what she was seeing.
"You can see," she said.
"Yes."
She absorbed this. Her face did several things in quick succession, none of which she fully controlled.
"My father says you were taken illegally," she said finally.
"Your father is wrong," I said. "I submitted a formal transfer request on my eighteenth birthday. In my own name."
"He says Alpha Kallu coerced you."
"Does he," I said.
She looked at me for another moment. She was trying to find the version of me she knew from Dunmore and I was not cooperating with the search.
"Why are you here, Sable?" I said.
She looked briefly startled that I had asked directly.
"To speak with Alpha Kallu," she said. "My father has concerns about the political…"
"Why are you here," I said again. Not the official reason. The actual one.
Something shifted in her face.
She looked around the corridor, which was empty except for us.
"I needed to see it for myself," she said. Quieter. "I needed to see if it was real."
"Which part?"
"All of it." She looked at my eyes again. "Your father left you in a forest. Ours kept you in a basement and put you on a stage." She said it plainly, which surprised me. "And you ended up here." She looked around at Ashenmoor's corridor, at the solidity and scale of it. "I needed to see if that was actually true."
I looked at her.
"It is true," I said.
She nodded slowly.
She was not here for her father's politics. She was here because the story of what had happened to me had cracked something in her understanding of how the world was ordered, and she had come to look at the c***k directly.
I did not trust her. Eighteen years of what I had heard from her did not dissolve in a corridor conversation. But I understood her better than I had before I could see her face, which was the specific gift and complication of sight.
"You can speak to Kallu," I said. "Renn will arrange it." I paused. "Whatever your father has asked you to do here, Sable, do not do it. Not because it will fail. Because you will have to live with having done it."
She looked at me.
"You have always spoken to me this way," she said. "Like you could see me."
"I could always hear you," I said. "Sight is just confirmation."
I walked past her and continued down the corridor.
Behind me I heard her exhale slowly.
That evening, Kallu told me that Grendon had filed his formal challenge with the northern council and that the timeline for a response required Ashenmoor to appear at a council review within thirty days.
Thirty days.
I sat with that.
"What does that involve?" I asked.
"You would need to present yourself to the northern council and affirm your transfer request in person," he said. "With documentation. With witnesses."
"Edda would testify," I said immediately.
"Yes," he said. "And Elder Cass from the territory records office has already been in contact. She has documentation she wants to bring forward."
I looked at him. "You have been building this."
"Since before you arrived," he said. "I knew Grendon would challenge. I wanted the documentation prepared."
"How did you know he would challenge if you didn't know I existed until the festival?"
He was quiet for a moment.
"I knew someone in Dunmore had been improperly registered in the pack records," he said. "I had been trying to identify who for some time." He held my gaze. "I did not know it was you specifically. But when I saw you on that floor I understood it immediately."
I stared at him.
"You have been looking," I said. Not for me specifically. But in the direction of me.
"Yes," he said.
I turned that over carefully.
"Why?" I said.
He was quiet for another moment. This was how he answered important questions. He made room for them first.
"Because eighteen years ago a child was improperly entered into Dunmore Pack's records with no guardian documentation and no origin record," he said. "And the person who should have ensured that was corrected failed to do so. And I found out about that failure three years ago and I have been correcting it since."
I looked at him.
"Who was supposed to ensure it was corrected?" I said.
He held my gaze.
"The southern regional Alpha," he said. "My father."
The room went very still.
I looked at him across the space between us and understood that what he had just told me was not something he had told anyone else.
I also understood that whatever was coming in the next thirty days was going to be harder than either of us had named yet.
And that I was going to face it with my eyes open.
For the first time in my life, fully literally.
What neither of us said in that room was the thing that mattered most.
Kallu's father had known about me.
Which meant someone had told him.
And that person was still inside Ashenmoor.
- Writer
