The Beta's Fire

Chapter 6

For one endless second, nobody moved. The wind carried the smell of my father's blood up from the quarry floor, faint but unmistakable, and beside me I felt Cassian go rigid at the sight of Thorne's face, recognition and hatred flooding through him so fast I could feel it radiating off his skin like heat.

"You," Cassian said, voice barely above a whisper. "You were there. The night my pack burned. I saw your eyes in the firelight and I have spent eight years telling myself I imagined it."

Thorne's smile did not waver. "You did not imagine it, tracker. I remember your pack well. They fought harder than most. It's a shame none of that strength was the kind I needed."

"Let my father go," I called down, forcing steadiness into my voice I did not fully feel. "This is between you and me. He has nothing to do with whatever you think I am."

"On the contrary," Thorne said. "He has everything to do with it. He sealed your gift before you could even walk, hid it so well I have spent twenty-three years chasing whispers instead of certainty. He is the reason it has taken me this long to find you. I owe him a great deal of gratitude, and a great deal of pain, in roughly equal measure."

My father's head came up further, his eyes finding mine across the distance, and even chained and bleeding, even weeks weakened by whatever debt he'd paid at that warning stone, he shook his head at me, slow and deliberate. Don't, that motion said. Don't you dare.

I ignored him. I always had, when it mattered.

"Wren," Rhys said under his breath, close to my ear. "Whatever you're about to do, we're right beside you. Say the word."

"Same," Tobin murmured on my other side, no trace of a joke left in him now, just quiet, fierce certainty.

Cassian said nothing at all. He simply reached over and laced his fingers through mine, one final grounding point before whatever came next, his amber eyes locked on Thorne with a promise of violence I had never seen in him before.

I took a breath and stepped forward to the edge of the ridge, close enough that Thorne's gaze sharpened on me, hungry and satisfied all at once.

"There she is," he said softly. "I can feel it from here, you know. That thing sleeping inside you. It's been waking up for weeks, hasn't it? Ever since your father's ward finally started failing. Aches in places that make no sense. Dreams you don't understand. A pull, low in your chest, like something remembering what it was born to do."

He was right, and the fact that he was right terrified me more than anything else he could have said. I felt it now, standing on that ridge with my father's blood on the wind, that same low hum I'd first noticed in the archive room, except now it wasn't a flicker. It was a fire, banked and waiting, and it was rising toward the surface faster than I knew how to control.

"I'm not giving you anything," I said.

"You misunderstand," Thorne said, almost gently, almost kind, the way a teacher corrects a promising student. "I am not going to ask you to give it to me. I am going to take it, the same way I took it from every pack before yours, the same way I would have taken it from your father's mate if she had survived long enough for me to find her first."

The words landed like a physical blow. Beside me, I felt Cassian's hand tighten around mine, felt Rhys go utterly still, felt Tobin's breath catch.

"What did you just say," I said, very quietly, "about my father's mate?"

Thorne's smile widened, slow and terrible, savoring the confusion breaking across my face, the way my father's head had dropped, the way he would not meet my eyes.

"Oh," Thorne said. "He never told you. I suppose that explains a great deal." He reached out and rested one hand almost fondly on my father's shoulder, and my father flinched away from the touch with a sound of pure, raw grief that I had never once heard him make in twenty-three years of being his daughter. "Ask him sometime, little wolf, exactly whose gift he sealed inside you the night you were born, and exactly what happened to the woman it truly belonged to."

The fire inside my chest surged, hot and uncontrollable, and the last thing I saw before the world around me erupted into blinding white light was my father's mouth forming a single word across the widening distance between us, a word that broke something open in me far deeper than anything Thorne had said.

Mira.

That was not my mother's name.