The Alpha's Silent Debt

Chapter 3

Kane

I had not planned on leaving Calder territory with anything other than gold and a signature. I certainly had not planned on leaving with a girl whose scent had settled somewhere under my ribs and refused to move, or the growing, uncomfortable certainty that Aldric, my wolf, had gone unusually quiet the moment I laid eyes on her, the way he only ever did around something he considered worth protecting.

"You're doing that thing," Rhys said from beside me in the car, watching my face with the kind of amusement that made me want to throw him out of a moving vehicle.

"What thing."

"The thing where you're thinking so loudly I can practically hear it." He glanced toward the pack house behind us, where Wren had disappeared up the stairs twenty minutes ago and still had not returned. "You do know that offering to forgive an entire war debt in exchange for one servant girl is going to raise questions at the council."

"Let them ask." I kept my eyes on the front door. "Something is wrong in that house, Rhys. You felt it the same as I did."

"I felt a lot of things in that house," he admitted, his humor fading. "Fear, mostly. That whole staff moved like they were bracing for something every second we stood there."

Wren appeared at the top of the steps a moment later, a small bag clutched to her chest, her face pale and her eyes darting back toward the house like she expected someone to drag her back inside at any moment. Beckett, waiting by the car, straightened immediately, stepping forward to open the door for her with a gentleness I rarely saw from him around strangers.

She flinched at the sound of the door.

I filed that away, the way I filed away everything about her that told a story her uncle had clearly never wanted told.

The ride back to Ironwood took four hours, and she spent most of it pressed as small as possible against the far door, her hands white knuckled around the strap of her bag, answering questions with as few words as she could manage. It was not until we were an hour from the border that I noticed the dark stain spreading slowly across the side of her dress.

"You're bleeding," I said.

She startled so hard she nearly hit her head on the window. "It's nothing. It happens. I forget it's there."

"Forget," I repeated, my temper rising fast enough that Aldric snarled low in the back of my mind. "How does someone forget they are bleeding?"

She didn't answer, which was answer enough.

By the time we reached Ironwood, I had already decided she was going straight to Sable, whether she wanted to or not. My sister took one look at Wren's face and the way she held her side and did not bother asking permission before steering her into the exam room.

What we found beneath her dress made my vision go red at the edges. Old scars layered over newer ones, bruises in every stage of healing, a wound along her ribs that had clearly been reopened more than once and never properly treated.

"How long has this collar been on her?" Sable asked, her fingers hovering carefully over the iron band around Wren's throat, not touching it yet.

"Since I was seven," Wren said quietly, staring at a fixed point on the wall. "After my parents died."

Sable's eyes met mine over Wren's head, and I saw my own fury mirrored back at me.

"This isn't standard binding iron," Sable said slowly, tracing the etched symbols without making contact. "This is warded. Old warding, the kind that doesn't just suppress a shift, it ties itself to the wearer's life force. If we cut this off without unraveling the ward first, it could kill her."

The room went very still.

"Someone did this to a seven year old child," I said, each word coming out low and controlled only because I refused to let Aldric anywhere near the surface in front of Wren, "and then let her walk around for fourteen years without telling her that removing it could kill her."

"I didn't know," Wren whispered. "No one ever explained anything. I just knew I wasn't allowed to ask."

Sable's expression softened as she looked at her. "We're going to figure out how to remove this safely. I promise you that. But it's going to take time, and it's going to take finding whoever crafted the ward in the first place, because whoever made it will know how to unmake it."

"My uncle," Wren said, so quietly I almost missed it. "He would know. Or he would know who to ask."

I thought of Roran's face in that hall, the careful way he had watched Wren, the sharp edge of fear beneath his composure whenever her parents' deaths came up. A man protecting a debt did not react that way. A man protecting a lie did.

"Wren." I crouched slightly so I was at her eye level, the way I had learned already made her flinch less. "What do you remember about the night your parents died?"

Her grey storm colored eyes flickered with something like pain, something buried so deep it had calcified into scar tissue over the years.

"Fire," she said slowly. "Screaming. Someone carrying me out through the back garden before the fighting even reached the house." Her brow furrowed, like she was reaching for something just out of grasp. "I remember thinking it was strange. That whoever carried me out knew exactly which door wouldn't be guarded."

My blood ran cold.

"Wren," I said carefully, "if the fighting hadn't reached the house yet, how did anyone know to carry you out before it did?"

She looked up at me, and I watched the exact moment the question landed, the exact moment fourteen years of accepted truth cracked directly down the middle.

"I don't know," she whispered. "I never thought about it before. I was always told I caused it. I never once asked who saved me."

Sable's hand had gone still against the edge of the exam table. Somewhere behind me, I heard the door open, and Rhys's voice, tight with urgency.

"Kane. You need to see this." He held up a folded piece of parchment, old and yellowed, sealed with a crest I recognized instantly as belonging to Wren's parents. "One of the men found it stitched into the lining of her bag. It's addressed to her. It's dated the night of the massacre."

I turned to look at Wren, whose face had gone bone white at the sight of the seal.

"That's not possible," she breathed. "I've had this bag my whole life. My uncle searched it a hundred times."

"Not well enough, apparently." Rhys held the letter out toward her, his expression grim. "You should probably sit down before you read this."