Rebirth Of The Lost Heiress

Chapter 7

Brielle

The woods at the edge of our territory had an unspoken rule that every pack member understood: you didn't go in after dark.

Nobody wrote it down. Nobody sat you down as a kid and told you. It was just one of those things you knew without knowing when it happened, the same way you learned not to talk too loud in the Alpha's house or make eye contact with a wolf that hadn't been introduced to you yet. You just knew. The woods after dark were not for people.

I had never been bothered by it.

My master had told me once, years ago, that the feeling people got at that tree line—when they would feel watched and exposed, like they were standing on the edge of something—was real.

He said the woods were a crossing point, some kind of in-between place where what most people could see and what most people couldn't, got close enough together to bleed into each other. He said that was why wolves felt it strongest. Their instincts were too sharp. They picked up too much of what was actually there.

I’d asked him if that meant it was dangerous.

He had said, "Most things that are worth anything are."

***

I went out the window just past midnight.

Dad had come home late from a pack meeting and gone straight to bed, too tired to eat. Mom had been asleep since ten. I pressed my ear to Liam's door for a moment before I left, and heard him snoring slowly, one arm probably around that stuffed wolf he refused to admit he still slept with.

That was good. Nobody would follow me.

I moved through the trees without a light because I didn't need one. The path lived in my feet more than in my head, like a half-memory I’d gotten used to before I had ever thought to pay attention to it.

The first time I had walked it, I was fifteen, furious about something I couldn't even remember now, stamping out here to be alone. My master had been sitting on a rock like he had been there for hours. He handed me his water jar without asking a single question.

After a long silence, he had said, "Crying is fine. Crying while you can still throw a punch is better."

I thought he was making a joke. He absolutely was not.

I missed him with an ache that still surprised me, catching me off guard sometimes. And it wasn’t a soft feeling. No, it was the sharp kind, and it came from knowing exactly what someone was and how rare that was.

I was about ten minutes in when a branch snapped behind me. I spun, dropped low, with my hands up and my weight on the balls of my feet, getting ready for whatever was coming.

The figure came out of the dark slowly, hands hanging loosely at his sides, moving like he was making it very clear that he wasn’t a threat. He was tall. His hair had more grey in it than I remembered, and the lines in his face were deeper. But his eyes were exactly the same; sharp and intense, missing nothing.

He looked at my fighting stance and gave a short nod of approval.

"Good reaction time," he said.

I let the air out of my chest slowly. "Master."

"You look better than last time." He sat down on a fallen log with the ease of someone settling in for a long chat. "Now you’re less likely to make a decision that gets you killed."

"You've been watching me," I said.

"Watching. Not interfering." He folded his arms. "This is your fight, Brielle. You need to do this yourself, so I'm not going to run it for you. But—" He tilted his head. "You already know more than I expected.”

I walked closer and crouched down in front of him, forearms on my knees. "I found the journal. My biological mother's."

His expression changed—barely, just a small movement in his eyes. But it wasn’t surprise. It was something closer to recognition, like he had been waiting for me to reach that point.

"And?" he said.

"She wrote the name Blackthorne in her last entry."

The word sat between us in the dark for a moment. I could hear the trees moving very gently in the light wind.

"I know," he said quietly.

I stared at him. "You knew. You've known this whole time what I actually am, and you never said anything."

"I knew what you might be," he said, and his voice was steady, not defensive. "That's different from knowing. And you weren't ready to hear it before." He met my eyes directly. "Are you ready to hear it now?"

I opened my mouth to say yes. To say that I was ready, that I needed to know everything, that every single answer he had ever kept from me needed to come out tonight because I was running out of time and I couldn't afford blind spots anymore—

Then suddenly, he turned his head sharply. In one motion his whole body changed, and now the relaxed ease was gone, replaced by alertness. He was on his feet before I could react.

"Master." I stood too. "What—"

"There are people moving toward you," he said, his voice sounding low and very careful. He was still looking past me, into the darkness between the trees behind me. "One of them is dangerous in a way you don't fully understand yet." He paused, and then he looked at me directly. "But he’s not your enemy. When you meet him—and you will, soon—remember that no matter what he looks like or whatever you think when you first see him. He’s not your enemy."

"Who?" I stepped toward him. "Tell me who—"

A long, deep sound split the night, interrupting me. It was coming from somewhere deep in the trees—not quite a wolf's howl, but close enough to make every single hair on my neck rise.

My master looked at me one last time. "Stay close to home," he said.

And then he walked into the darkness between the trees and disappeared completely without a single sound, like the night had just swallowed him whole.

I stood alone, heart beating fast, that sound still in the air around me.