Chapter 3

The intelligence from the Frostthorn clan hadn't arrived yet. I couldn't simply sit and wait.

Over the next two days, while Caius was away from the castle, I slipped into his private council study and combed through everything I would need.

A wolf pack leader's study is always the most heavily guarded room in any stronghold. Caius had set a scent-detection ward on the door—any outsider who stepped inside, he would know immediately through the bond. But he had apparently never considered that the ward would be useless against me.

I was his Luna—in name, at least.

My scent was embedded in every stone of this castle. The ward couldn't read me as an enemy.

I had to make this man pay for everything he had done to me.

But what I needed most, right now, was anything I could find about Finn.

Finally, at the very bottom of the study's hidden room, in a concealed compartment beneath everything else, I found a photo album.

It was old—the leather cover worn white at the edges, the corners fraying. Not the kind of thing you'd expect a pack leader consumed by affairs of state to treasure. Yet it had been buried beneath every classified document in the room, hidden deeper than anything else.

I opened it.

The first page held a photograph of an infant—barely newborn, a wrinkled little face swaddled in a pale blue blanket. On the back, in pencil, in Caius's handwriting: Finn, age one.

Second page, age two. Third page, three. A boy growing up—from infant to toddler, from toddler to youth.

Finn at five, grinning astride a wooden horse. Finn at seven, dressed in a small suit, standing before a winter solstice pine. Finn at twelve, grown lean and tall, Caius's own younger face beginning to appear clearly in his features—that mountain-forest quality, those still, sharp eyes.

Distant relation? I laughed, cold and quiet.

Caius had said Finn was a distant relative's child, orphaned a few years back in an accident, taken in out of the clan chief's sense of responsibility.

Does a pack leader keep twenty years of photographs, page by page, in his private hidden room—for a distant relative's child?

Unless that child was something else entirely.

Just then, from the castle's watchtower outside, I heard the signal: two short, sharp howls—the Raven Pack's code announcing the Alpha's convoy returning to the stronghold.

The blood drained from my body.

Caius.

He was back. At least two hours early.

The desk was a mess from where I'd been searching.

I had to put it back—right now.

I pushed the drawer shut and moved the quill pen back to its place, frantically gathering the documents scattered on the floor—my stomach was enormous, and bending was its own ordeal. Sweat broke out across my forehead from the urgency.

That was when the album slid off the edge of the desk.

A yellowed sheet of paper slipped out from between its pages.

It fell at my feet, less than half a meter away.

I tried to bend for it. My belly pressed into my thighs; my fingers were still a full fist-width from the edge of the paper.

I gritted my teeth and reached a few centimeters further. My fingertips had just grazed the corner—

Footsteps in the corridor outside the study.

Heavy, deliberate, steady—Caius's particular rhythm. I had known that step for fifteen years; I could have identified it with my eyes closed.

Then the sound of the door handle turning.

My whole body went rigid. I held perfectly still, bent at the waist, not daring to let my breathing shift even slightly. As a wolf, I knew better than anyone the importance of scent—if my panic seeped into my breath, Caius would sense something wrong through the door before he even opened it.

I drove my heartbeat down by force.

The door handle stopped.

The door didn't open.

A voice from the far end of the corridor. "Alpha. An urgent dispatch from the port. Magnus says the situation is critical and requires your direct decision—it can't be delayed."

"Now?" A flicker of irritation in Caius's voice.

"Magnus says it can't wait, Alpha. The message-ravens have been back and forth twice already."

Silence. One second. Two.

The handle was released. A soft metallic click.

"Let's go."

Footsteps, retreating down the corridor, fading, disappearing around the corner at the far end.

My legs gave out entirely. I sank slowly to the floor, back against the desk, and let out a long, ragged breath.

The sheet of paper was at my right hand. I picked it up.

The handwriting was fine and neat—only one line, with a name signed at the bottom that I recognized.

Sera. Caius's foster sister.

"Goodbye, my love."

In Caius's telling, Sera had acted on impulse nineteen years ago—run off with some foreign wolf of unknown origin, and was never heard from again.

He had spoken of it with regret and resignation, and a quiet, unspoken sense of having been let down.

"She was young and foolish," he'd once said, his eyes going distant. "She followed someone she shouldn't have. And she was gone."

I had believed him. I had even felt sorry for her—felt sorry for him.

But a foster sister does not write her foster brother a line like that.

Sera. Caius. Finn.

The suspicion I had been refusing to name came surging up from the place where I'd buried it, and I couldn't push it back down.