The council chamber had gone quiet in that particular way it always did now when I lost track of a conversation mid-sentence, and I realized, looking up, that every elder at the table was watching me wait for words I didn’t have.
“I asked about the border patrol rotations,” Elder Voss said again, patient in a way that had started to feel more like pity than respect.
“The northern routes. You wanted to review them this week.”
“Right.” I found the papers in front of me, though I couldn’t have said when they’d arrived there.
“Send them to Marcus. He can handle the review.”
“Marcus handled the last three reviews.”
“Then he’s good at it.”
Voss didn’t push further, but I caught the look he exchanged with the elder beside him, brief and pointed, the kind of look that used to mean nothing to me five years ago and now meant everything.
They were talking about me when I wasn’t in the room.
They’d probably been talking about me for years, quietly enough that I hadn’t let myself notice until it had become impossible not to.
I used to be good at this.
I used to walk into council meetings with every detail already memorized, every decision already three steps ahead of the conversation.
Now I sat through them like a man underwater, present in body only, and everyone at that table knew it.
The meeting ended without me contributing anything else worth remembering.
I let the elders file out first, the way protocol demanded, and sat alone at the head of the table afterward longer than I needed to, staring at reports I wasn’t reading.
Astra found me there eventually.
She always seemed to know exactly when to appear, like she’d developed a sense for the moments I was most likely to be caught doing nothing.
“You missed the trade discussion entirely,” she said, not quite a question.
“I was there.”
“You were in the room. That’s different from being there.” She sat across from me, arranging herself the way she always did, like every gesture had been rehearsed in front of a mirror before it reached me.
“The elders are starting to talk, Darius. About whether you’re still fit to lead this pack.”
“Let them talk.”
“That’s easy for you to say. It’s not your position they’re questioning behind closed doors.” Something sharp crossed her face, there and gone. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
“I have a child to think about. I need this pack stable.”
I almost laughed at that, though nothing about it was funny.
Five years married to this woman, five years of a partnership that had never once felt like anything more than two people occupying the same rooms out of obligation, and she still talked about stability like it was something either of us had ever actually had.
“He’s fine,” I said instead, because it was easier than examining anything else in that sentence.
“The boy. He’s healthy. The pack has an heir. Isn’t that what mattered?”
Astra’s expression flickered again, faster this time, gone before I could read it properly.
“Of course that’s what matters.”
I watched her leave without offering anything further, and I sat there afterward turning over the particular hollowness that had defined this marriage since its first day.
We didn’t fight, not really.
We didn’t need to.
Fighting would have required caring enough to bother, and somewhere in the last five years I’d stopped being able to locate whatever version of myself might have cared about anything happening inside this house.
I went looking for the one thing that still felt like it mattered, the way I did most nights now, alone in my study with the door locked.
The file was old, worn soft at the edges from handling, papers I’d been collecting piece by piece for almost two years now without ever fully admitting to myself why.
Guard rotations from the night Maeve left.
Names of who’d been posted where.
A healer’s log I’d gotten my hands on through a favor I still felt guilty about calling in, documenting injuries treated that same week — injuries that didn’t match anything in the official record of what had happened that night.
I’d started this because something about the story had never sat right with me.
Maeve leaving under her own power, at sundown, unescorted — that was the account everyone repeated, the official version, clean and simple.
But I’d seen her on the ground before I turned away.
I’d seen her stumble when Astra’s guards walked her out afterward, favoring one side in a way that had nothing to do with heartbreak.
I’d told myself for months that I was imagining it.
That guilt was manufacturing details that hadn’t existed.
But guilt didn’t explain a healer’s log showing treatment for injuries inconsistent with a simple walk off pack land, treatment administered the same night, to a patient whose name had been carefully left blank.
I didn’t know yet what I was looking for, exactly.
I told myself I wanted the truth for its own sake, some abstract commitment to knowing what had actually happened under my own roof, in my own hall, to a woman I’d sworn to protect before I’d stood in front of the entire pack and thrown her away instead. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
But some nights, staring at that healer’s log until the words blurred, I let myself admit what I usually didn’t.
I wasn’t looking for the truth because I needed to know it.
I was looking because some part of me still needed to know whether I’d let something happen to her that I could have stopped, and whether that made me responsible for whatever came after — the rogue attack, the silence, the five years of not knowing if she was even alive until a Dreadmoon patrol had returned two of my own scouts with a message I still hadn’t fully let myself process.
*She is alive.
She is under Dreadmoon’s protection.*
I’d read that message so many times in the last five years that I could recite it without looking.
I still didn’t understand why it had settled into me the way it had — not relief exactly, though there was relief in it.
Something closer to a verdict.
Some confirmation that whatever I’d done that night, it hadn’t been enough to end her, even if it had been enough to end whatever I used to believe I was as a man, as an Alpha, as someone capable of protecting the people who trusted him.
I closed the file before I could fall any further into it and poured myself a drink I didn’t finish, staring instead at the window, at the dark tree line beyond Hellfang’s borders where Dreadmoon territory sat somewhere past sight, closer than it had any right to feel after five years of silence.
I wondered, not for the first time, what she looked like now.
Whether whatever power the rumors described — a mark that wasn’t supposed to exist, a wolf nobody in five years had managed to describe accurately despite half the border packs trading secondhand accounts of it — had changed her into someone I wouldn’t recognize if I saw her again.
I wondered if she still had the mark on her collar, the one she used to hide under high necklines, the one I used to trace with my thumb some nights before either of us fell asleep, telling her it didn’t matter, telling her nothing about her needed to be hidden from me.
I’d meant it, when I said it.
That was the part that still cost me the most, some nights.
Not that I’d lied to her.
That I hadn’t.
I’d meant every word of it, right up until the moment the elders had made it clear that meaning it wasn’t going to be enough to save either of us, and I’d chosen the pack instead, telling myself it was the only choice available, telling myself that for five years until the telling had worn thin enough that I couldn’t quite make myself believe it anymore.
Somewhere out past the window, past the borders I hadn’t crossed in five years, she was alive.
Powerful, apparently.
Protected by a family I’d never met and had no right to resent, though some ugly, dishonest part of me resented them anyway, for being the ones who’d stepped in where I’d failed.
I didn’t know yet what I intended to do with any of it — the guilt, the file, the questions I still hadn’t found the courage to ask out loud to anyone, including myself.
I only knew that some quiet, stubborn part of me had stopped being willing to let the official story stand unquestioned, and that whatever I eventually uncovered, I doubted it was going to leave the rest of my life the way I’d built it.
I finished the drink after all, and sat alone in the dark long after the house had gone silent around me, turning over a name I hadn’t let myself say out loud in five years, not even to the empty room.
*Maeve.*