BENEATH THE SILVER MOON: THE ALPHA'S UNWILLING LUNA

Chapter Eleven: What Raze’s Father Knew

Kai called at nine, which was unusual enough that Sera answered before the second ring finished.

“You sound tired,” he said, before she could say anything.

“I’m fine.”

“You always say that right before something’s wrong.” A pause, and she could hear him shift, the small careful sounds of a body that had learned to move around its own pain. “The clinic called this morning. New scheduling for next month. They said someone from the estate approved an extension on my treatment plan. Longer course, better facility access.” Another pause. “Sera, did you do that?”

She thought of the contract clause she’d written the night before signing — regardless of outcome — and of Damien on the terrace, telling her separately from everything else. “Someone did,” she said. “It wasn’t only me.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the most honest one I’ve got right now.” She looked out at the ground, at the tree line where she’d sat with Maren two hours earlier.

“You used to tell me everything,” Kai said, quieter now, some of the teasing gone out of his voice. “When we were kids, before you decided you had to carry all of it by yourself. You told me when Dad’s business failed the first time. You told me when you got fired from the diner for arguing with a customer who wouldn’t stop touching your hair. When did you stop telling me things?”

Sera closed her eyes. “Around the time you got sick,” she said, honestly, because it was six in the morning, and she was too tired to build the careful version of the answer. “I didn’t want you spending whatever energy you had worrying about me instead of getting better.”

“That’s not fair,” Kai said. “You don’t get to decide what I worry about. That’s not something you get to control.”

“I know,” she said, and was a little surprised by how easily she said it, the way admitting a thing out loud sometimes cost less than she expected it to. “I’m working on it.”

“How are you feeling? Really.”

“Exhausted. Really annoyed that you’re keeping secrets from me in a house full of werewolves.” She could hear the smile in it, the old habit of making things lighter than they were so she wouldn’t have to carry them alone. “You’re doing something big, aren’t you.”

“I’m doing something necessary,” she said. “Get some sleep. I’ll call tomorrow.”

She hung up and sat with the phone in her lap for a moment, the weight of it heavier than it should have been, and then went to find Raze on the eastern perimeter the way she did most mornings now.

He was waiting before she reached him, which she’d stopped being surprised by.

“You spoke to Maren,” he said.

“How do you already know that?”

“I don’t. I guessed. You have the specific look of someone who got a yes she wasn’t fully expecting.” He fell into step beside her. “Good. We need her.”

“She mentioned your father,” Sera said. “I want to know more about what he knew. Not just the sentence he made you memorize. Everything.”

Raze was quiet for a stretch of the path. “He kept a log,” he said eventually. “Enforcers do — territorial notes, incident reports, nothing official. Personal record-keeping. When he died, the estate returned his effects to my mother. She never went through them. I did, years later, after she passed.” He exhaled. “Most of it is nothing. Patrol notes. Weather. But there’s a page from twenty-two years ago, dated three days before the woman he helped was moved, and it isn’t like the rest of the log.”

“What does it say?”

“It’s not written the way the rest of the entries are written. It’s careful. Coded, almost — like he knew someone might read it who shouldn’t.” Raze glanced at her. “There’s a location. Not a full address. A reference — a facility name, half of it, and a distance. Three hours, he wrote. Three hours from the estate, in a direction he didn’t specify because he was afraid to specify it.”

Sera’s chest went tight in the place that had nothing to do with breathing. “Three hours.”

“I’ve wondered my whole life what she was to him,” Raze said, before she could ask. “He wasn’t a sentimental man. Enforcers weren’t encouraged to be, not in his generation. But my mother told me once that some evenings, before he died, she’d find him standing at the edge of the eastern grounds looking toward the road, like he was waiting for someone he already knew wasn’t coming back.” He shook his head. “I don’t know if it was duty or something more than duty. I know it cost him whatever he had left to give, and I know he never once complained about the price.”

“There’s a facility that matches part of the name,” Raze said. “A private medical compound, technically unaffiliated with any registered pack, though the funding trail is harder to hide than whoever set it up thought it would be. I’ve been tracing it for four days without telling anyone, because if I was wrong, I didn’t want to hand you false hope, and if I was right, I wanted to be certain before I said it out loud.”

“Are you certain?”

“I’m certain enough that I think you should hear the rest sitting down,” Raze said, and for the first time since she’d met him, something in his controlled voice cracked slightly at the edges. “The facility has a resident registry. Restricted. I got a partial copy through a contact who owed my father a debt he never got to collect. There’s a name on it that’s been active for twenty-two years.”

Sera stopped walking. “Tell me.”

“Adaeze Vale,” Raze said quietly. “Admitted twenty-two years ago. Status: long-term residential. No discharge on record.”

The surrounding grounds were very quiet, the way rooms sometimes went right before something large happened in them.

“That’s my mother’s name,” Sera said.

“I know,” Raze said. “I looked it up after I found it, to be sure, before I told you.” He watched her carefully, the way you’d watch someone standing near an edge. “She’s alive, Sera. As of the last registry update, she’s alive.”

Sera realized she’d stopped breathing somewhere in the last ten seconds and made herself start again, slow, deliberate. Twenty-two years. A photograph tucked behind a mirror. A warning in two different hands. She should never have been brought here. All of it converging, finally, onto a name on a restricted registry three hours from where she was standing.

“I need to see her,” she said.

“I know,” Raze said. “But listen to me before you plan anything. The facility isn’t a hospital. It’s a holding site with a hospital’s paperwork. If Harker knows where she is — and he does, because he told you on that phone call that she could be released once the ceremony is done — then it’s guarded, and it’s guarded specifically against exactly this. Someone coming for her before he’s ready to let her go.”

“Then we plan carefully,” Sera said. “I’m not leaving her there one day longer than I have to. But I’m not walking into a guarded facility with nothing either.”

“No,” Raze agreed. “You’re not.” He looked toward the main house, toward the wing where Damien’s office windows caught the morning light. “Damien needed to know. Today. Not because you need his permission — because he has resources neither of us do, or because I think you’re done doing this alone.”

Sera looked at the facility name written on the slip of paper Raze handed her, twenty-two years of silence collapsed into a single line of restricted registry text, and thought about the promise she’d made herself in the dark on day three. Not me. Not like that.

She had meant it about herself. She was starting to understand it might have to include other people too.

“Today,” she said.