THE WRONG BRIDE

CHAPTER SIX: The Shape of the Trap

Marren didn't sleep again that night. She sat by the window in Kaelen's rooms — hers, apparently, now, though neither of them had said so out loud — and turned over every version of the last three weeks she could construct, trying to find the one where her sister was a coward and not a casualty.

She couldn't build it. Not anymore. Not with the pieces Kaelen had handed her.

Selene hadn't just run. Selene had run with enough precision to clear a guarded temple compound undetected, in a wedding dress, without a single member of the household staff raising an alarm until it was too late to stop the ceremony — which meant either Selene was far more capable than twenty-three years of being underestimated had ever suggested, or someone had planned her exit for her down to the minute.

Marren thought of the shaking hands at the mirror. The bone-white face. She'd read it as fear of the marriage.

She was starting to think it had been fear of something else entirely.

"You've been sitting there since I left," Kaelen said, appearing in the doorway near dawn with two cups of something dark and bitter-smelling, setting one on the table beside her without being asked. It was, she realized, the first thing he'd ever offered her without her requesting it first.

"I keep thinking about her face," Marren said. "The morning of the wedding. I thought she was terrified of you."

"And now?"

"Now I think she was terrified of whoever was waiting for her over that wall." Marren wrapped both hands around the cup, more for the steadiness of holding something than the warmth. "If someone's been hunting an Emberline heir for a generation, and they realized late that they'd been watching the wrong twin—"

"They'd need a way to remove the real target from the equation before the mistake became obvious," Kaelen finished. "And the fastest way to do that is to make it look like a betrayal no one would think twice about believing, because your family had already spent twenty-three years training everyone around you, including you, to believe the quiet twin was the harmless one."

It should have felt like an insult. Instead it felt, horribly, like being understood by someone for the first time in her life — the shape of her own family's neglect laid out plainly by a stranger who'd had no reason to notice it except that noticing things, apparently, was the one skill they actually had in common.

"So what do we do?" she asked. "If she's not the traitor. If she's a hostage."

"We find out who's holding her," Kaelen said. "And we find out who on my council has been feeding patrol routes to Drennan wolves hunting a bloodline my own father apparently knew about and never told me." His jaw tightened, the specific tightness she now recognized as the shape his anger took when it had nowhere safe to go. "There are seven men on that council. I trust perhaps two of them with my life. I trusted all seven with my father's secrets, which I'm beginning to suspect was a mistake three years in the making."

Marren looked at him — really looked, past the cold reputation and the closed-off jaw and the three weeks of near-total silence — and saw, for the first time, not the war-alpha the packlands feared, but a man who'd just discovered his entire life had been built on a foundation someone else laid without his knowledge, same as hers.

"I'm not the spare anymore," she said, half to herself, testing the words the way she'd tested the shift the night before — uncertain if her body would hold the shape of them.

"You were never the spare," Kaelen said, and for the first time since the altar, something that might have been the beginning of a smile moved at the corner of his mouth, gone almost before she could be sure she'd seen it. "You were the reason there was a wedding at all. Everyone else in that temple was the substitute for the plan they actually had."

Outside, the sky over the black cliffs was starting to gray toward morning, and somewhere beyond the border they couldn't see from this window, Marren's sister was still missing, still — she let herself believe it now — still possibly innocent, still possibly waiting to be found.

Marren set down the cup, silver-pale mark warm under her collarbone like something finally, after twenty-three years, waking up.

"Then I suppose," she said, "we'd better find out what the actual plan was."