THE COSTLY MISTAKE

What knife Was For

Roman’s list of names took two days to compile and eliminated almost no one, which told its own uncomfortable story about how few people in Ashford territory had ever needed to explain their movements to anyone.

I wasn’t thinking about the list on the third night. I was thinking about the ride back from the streambank, about the way he’d said I’ve learned, the hard way, exactly how much damage someone I trusted can do, and about how long I’d carried the specific, private conviction that the damage he meant was mine.

I found him on the east wall after the household had gone quiet, staring out at a stretch of dark tree line the way he used to stand at the edge of things when he needed to think without an audience. I almost turned back twice before I made myself climb the last of the stairs.

“Couldn’t sleep either,” he said, without turning, like he’d known my footsteps before I’d said a word.

“No.”

“The list isn’t narrowing anything. Half the household has legitimate reason to walk that stretch of border once a season or more.” He exhaled, something tired in it that had nothing to do with the sickness. “I keep coming back to the same problem. I don’t know who to trust enough to help me look harder.”

I stood beside him at the wall, close enough to feel the specific quiet gravity of him that five years hadn’t dulled at all, and made myself say the thing I’d been avoiding since the sickroom.

“Roman. I need to tell you what actually happened five years ago.”

He went very still. “I don’t need the explanation, Isla. I’ve had five years to make my peace with what you told me that night.”

“You haven’t, though. I can see it in the way you still can’t say my sister’s name in front of me.” My voice shook more than I wanted it to. “I need you to hear this, not because I think it fixes anything, but because you deserve to know the truth even if it doesn’t change how you feel about me.”

Something in his posture shifted, bracing.

“The night before the ceremony,” I said, forcing the words out steady, “a man came to my room. He had a knife, and he had Mira, and he told me exactly what I was going to say to you the next day, word for word, or he’d cut her throat in front of me before he left.” My hands had started shaking again, the memory as sharp five years later as it had been that night. “I didn’t have a choice, Roman. I stood in front of your entire pack and broke a bond I would have given anything to keep, because the alternative was watching my sister die.”

He turned to face me fully now, something raw and disbelieving moving across his expression. “Why didn’t you come to me? Tell me, let me protect both of you—”

“He told me if I said one word to anyone, especially you, she’d be dead before I finished the sentence. I believed him. I had every reason to believe him.” My throat closed around the next part, the part I’d never said out loud to anyone. “I did what he told me. I broke your heart in front of your whole pack to keep her alive. And three weeks later, she was gone anyway. No body, no explanation, nothing. I spent five years believing I’d destroyed everything and saved nothing.”

The silence between us stretched long enough that I thought, for one terrible moment, he might not believe me at all — that five years of certainty about my betrayal might be too deeply set to move, even now.

Then he reached for me, slowly, like a man approaching something he was afraid might not be real, and pulled me against him with a force that had nothing careful left in it.

“Isla.” My name came out of him broken, five years of fury dissolving into something far worse. “I nearly hated you for five years. I built an entire version of myself around never being that vulnerable to anyone again, and the whole time—”

“I know.”

“Who,” he said, pulling back just enough to look at me, something lethal settling into his expression, “held the knife.”

“I never saw his face clearly. It was dark, he kept his hood up, and I was too afraid to look at anything except Mira.” I shook my head, frustration and old grief tangling together. “I’ve spent five years trying to remember something useful and coming up with nothing. Just his voice. Low. Controlled. Like giving orders was something he did often.”

Something shifted behind Roman’s eyes — a thought forming, cold and unwelcome, that he didn’t say out loud yet.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing. Not yet.” His jaw tightened, some private calculation working itself out behind his expression. “I need to think about something before I say it, because if I’m right, it changes everything about who I can trust in this territory, and I’d rather be certain before I act on it.”

He didn’t tell me what he suspected that night. He held onto me at that wall a long while instead, both of us finally standing in something honest after five years of carrying separate, incomplete versions of the same wound, and for the first time since I’d pulled back my hood in that sickroom, I let myself believe we might actually survive whatever came next.

I didn’t yet know how close that suspicion of his was about to bring us to losing everything all over again.