The Warden Wore No Mark

CHAPTER THREE

Selene POV

Kane didn't let it go.

I should have known he wouldn't. The man I married never let anything go once he decided it mattered, that had been true of pack law, of border disputes, of me, once, a long time ago, before he decided something else mattered more.

He found me an hour later in the room they'd given me for the length of my stay, standing at the window with my hand pressed flat against the small of my back, watching the training yard go gold under the last of the sun.

"You said you'd tell me." He didn't come all the way in. He stood in the doorway like he wasn't sure he'd earned the floor space past it. "When you were sure."

"I'm not sure who did it."

"That's not what I'm asking about."

I turned. His jaw was tight in a way I recognized, not anger. The particular tension of a man bracing for something he already suspects will hurt.

"Tell me what it did to you," he said. "Whatever they did. I want to hear it from you before I hear it from a Council report."

I could have refused. Two years ago, refusing him anything felt impossible, some old instinct trained into me by years of being the wife who didn't argue. It wasn't impossible anymore. It was just a choice, and I chose to answer him anyway, because some stubborn, unhealed part of me still wanted him to know exactly what those five years had cost.

"A suppression working," I said. "Old. Blood-based. The kind that doesn't announce itself, it just makes your body quietly fail at one specific thing, over and over, so slowly you start believing the failure is yours."

His hands, at his sides, curled and released.

"For how long."

"The healer said layered. Reinforced more than once across five years." I kept my voice steady, the way I'd practiced saying much harder things to much colder rooms full of Council elders. "It wasn't cast once and forgotten, Kane. Somebody checked on it."

He was quiet for a long moment.

"I stood in front of the whole pack," he said finally, voice low, "and told everyone the bond had failed with you. I said it like I knew. Like I'd tested it and it came back broken." His jaw worked. "I never once asked a healer to look deeper. I just believed what was easiest to believe."

"You believed what your mother told you was easiest to believe," I said, and watched something flicker hard and fast behind his eyes at that. Not denial. Recognition, and beneath it, resistance to the recognition.

"My mother wanted an heir for this pack. That's not a crime, Selene."

"No." I held his gaze. "Cursing your son's wife for five years to make sure she never gave him one is."

"You don't know it was her."

"I know someone with old blood-magic and constant access to me did it," I said. "I know I have a very short list of people who fit that description, and I know your mother's name is on it whether either of us likes it."

He didn't argue that. He also didn't agree. He stood there with his jaw working, torn between a woman he'd trusted his whole life and a truth he was terrified to finish believing, and for one strange second, I felt sorry for him.

I didn't say that. I'd stopped being sorry for this family out loud a long time ago.

"I need proof before I accuse my own mother of something like this," he said finally.

"I know." My voice softened, despite myself. "I'm not asking you to accuse anyone yet, Kane. I'm asking you to stop protecting her out of habit before we even know what we're protecting her from."

Something in his face cracked, just slightly, at that. He looked, for one unguarded second, less like an Alpha and more like a man who hadn't slept properly in two years.

"I keep looking at you," he said quietly, "and doing the math on everything I got wrong."

"Don't." I said it fast, before the softness in his voice could reach whatever part of me still hadn't finished healing. "We don't get to have that conversation yet. Not until I know who did this to me, and not until you decide whether you actually want the truth or just want to feel better about losing me."

He looked like I'd struck him. Maybe I had. I let it stand, because it was true, and because the alternative, letting five years of old feeling climb back into the room between us before either of us had earned it, felt more dangerous than anything Elena could throw at me.

A sharp knock cut through the silence.

Priya stood in the doorway, out of breath, one hand pressed to her chest, the boy nowhere in sight.

"Selene." Her eyes flicked to Kane, then back to me, urgent in a way that didn't match her usual careful calm. "I need to talk to you. Alone. Now, before…"

She stopped herself.

"Before what?" I asked.

Priya's eyes went to the hallway behind her, checking it, the way a person checks a room they don't trust.

"Before Elena finds out I came to find you first."

Kane straightened. "Priya, what is this about?"

"Not you." Priya's voice cracked on it, apology and fear tangled together. "I'm sorry, Kane. This one isn't about you."

She looked back at me, and whatever was sitting behind her eyes made the fine hairs on my arms rise before I understood why.

"Five minutes," she said. "Please. Before she gets to you first and decides what version of this you're allowed to hear."

I didn't know what she meant. I only knew, watching her face, that whatever she'd come to tell me was going to change something I didn't yet have the shape of, and that somewhere in this house, Elena already knew Priya had come looking for me, and was deciding, right now, how much time we had left before she stopped it.