The Warden Wore No Mark

CHAPTER TWO

SERENE POV.

The east study hadn't changed.

Same dark wood desk. Same window looking out over the training yard where I used to watch Kane run pack drills before dawn, back when watching him was still allowed to be simple.

I used to stand behind that desk, not sit at it. I used to bring him tea he forgot to thank me for out loud, and live off the small crooked smile he gave me instead, the one he only wore when nobody else was in the room.

Now I sat across from him like a stranger. Because I was one.

Kane closed the door and didn't sit down right away. He stood with his back to it, arms crossed, like he needed the wood behind him to stay upright.

"Well?" His jaw was tight. "You said you'd tell me the truth. So tell me."

I set my case file on the desk, unopened. Not yet. I wanted to watch his face for this part, before evidence got involved and turned it into something clinical.

"She's yours," I said.

The room went very still.

"That's not possible." His voice had gone quiet in a way I remembered not calm, just controlled, the kind of controlled that costs a person everything to hold onto. "We didn't…Selene, I would have known."

"The night before the ceremony." I kept my eyes on his. "You remember it."

I watched him do the math. I watched it land somewhere behind his eyes, counting backward through months the way he'd counted forward through my stomach on the front steps twenty minutes ago.

His hands, braced against the door, curled into fists.

"You never told me."

"You rejected me four days later, Kane." I kept my voice level, because if I let it hold any weight at all, it would break, and I had promised myself years ago I would never let this man watch me break twice. "By the time I understood what I was carrying, you already had a new wife. What exactly did you want me to do write you a letter?"

"You could have come back."

"To what?" That one came out sharper than I meant it to. "You didn't reject me because the bond failed, Kane. You told two hundred people I couldn't give you what a Luna is supposed to give. You said it like a fact you'd already tested and proven. I spent five years believing that fact about my own body."

He flinched. I watched it happen and hated that some old, tired part of me still hurt for him.

"That's not what I…"

"There's more," I said, before he could finish defending a version of that night I didn't have room to hear yet. "And you're not going to like it."

His eyes went to the file on the desk. Then back to me.

"Tell me."

I almost did. I had the words ready, the same clinical sentence I'd rehearsed on the drive here, there's a suppression curse on my medical record, five years old, reinforced more than once.

But something in the way he was looking at me stopped me. Not distrust. The opposite. He was looking at me like he actually wanted to hear it, all of it, no matter what it cost him.

That look scared me more than anger would have.

Two years ago I would have handed him the whole truth just to see that look stay on his face a little longer. I wasn't going to do that anymore. Not until I understood exactly what I was handing him it to.

"The grievance the Council sent me to investigate," I said instead, slower now, testing each word before I let it out, "isn't about pack finances, or territory disputes, or anything you're expecting. It's about forbidden magic. Used inside this house. Against a pack member."

His face changed. "Against who?"

I let the silence sit for a second longer than was comfortable.

"Me."

Kane went very still.

"For how long?"

"Five years." I watched that land, watched him work backward through every appointment I'd cried through alone, every year he'd come home smelling like disappointment he tried to hide from me and mostly failed. "The whole marriage, Kane. Someone made sure I never carried a child. And then, nine months before you rejected me, whatever they did started to weaken."

His breathing had gone uneven.

"Who." Not a question this time. A demand, low and rough, aimed at nobody yet, because he didn't have anybody to aim it at.

I could have told him then. I had a name half-formed in my chest, built out of two years of Council files and one look Elena had given my stomach on the front steps that lasted a half-second too long.

I didn't say it. Not yet. Because the last time I handed this family the truth without proof, it cost me five years of my life and a marriage I still, God help me, hadn't finished grieving.

"I don't have a confirmed name," I said, which was true, and also not the whole truth, and I let him hear the difference. "I have a signature the Council traced to someone with old blood-magic and full access to me. I have a lot of suspicion. I don't have enough yet to say it out loud and be sure I'm right."

"Selene." He crossed the room, stopped himself a foot from the desk, close enough that I could smell the same cedar and woodsmoke I used to fall asleep against. "If someone in my own pack did this to you, I need to know."

"You will." I made myself hold still, made myself not lean the last foot toward him the way some old, stupid instinct in my body still wanted to. "When I'm sure."

Something shifted in his face frustration, and under it, something rawer.

"You don't trust me."

"I trusted you for five years," I said quietly. "I'm allowed to be careful with what's left."

He looked like that landed somewhere it hadn't been meant to land quite that hard. For a second, neither of us said anything, and the space between us felt exactly like it used to feel right before he'd reach over and tuck a piece of hair behind my ear without either of us commenting on it.

He didn't reach for me now. I didn't want him to. I told myself that twice, which was one time too many to be convincing.

A knock broke it.

Kane's mother stepped in without waiting for an answer, the way she always had, a cup of tea balanced in one hand like she'd simply been passing.

"I heard voices," Elena said, eyes moving from Kane to me to the closed file on the desk. "Everything alright in here?"

I watched her gaze catch on the case file for exactly half a second too long.

"Everything's fine, Mother," Kane said, not looking away from me. "We were just finishing."

Elena's eyes came back to mine, and for one unguarded moment before she remembered to arrange her face into concern, I saw something underneath it.

Not curiosity.

Calculation.

"Well," she said, smooth again, "I'll leave you to it."

She left the door open a c***k behind her. I noticed. I filed it away.

And I understood, watching her retreat down the hallway a little too carefully unhurried, that whatever I was about to uncover in this house, I was going to have to be faster than her to survive finding it.