CHAPTER 13
The Black Moment
The body was found at dawn, a mile inside the treaty line on the hunters' side, torn in a way that every instinct in Wren's borrowed hunter's blood recognized before anyone told her whose it was.
It was one of Garrett Doyle's own — a young tracker named Silas Kemp, barely twenty-two, who had never in his life set a foot wrong with the pack that anyone knew of.
The wound pattern was wolf. Clean, deliberate, textbook, the kind of kill no wild animal bothered making and no shifter with sense would ever leave uncovered on the wrong side of a thirty-year truce.
Wren knew, with a certainty that made her sick to her stomach, that it wasn't Kade's pack.
She recognized the cold clinging faintly to the scene the way she'd recognized it at the churchyard, at the sugar shack — old, patient, delighted with itself in a way that had nothing to do with hunger for meat and everything to do with hunger for exactly this: chaos, blame, a truce with a knife finally in its back.
Nobody else could see that. Nobody else was looking for anything except a reason they'd already decided on, and Wren, standing at the edge of the scene before the hunters' council chased her off it, understood with a sinking, helpless clarity that thirty years of careful peace could unravel in the space of a single morning, over a death neither side had actually caused, because both sides had spent three decades primed and ready to believe the very worst of each other at the first opportunity.
By noon, the hunters' council had called for a response the pack's council could not afford to ignore, and by evening, Agatha Vane stood on Kade's own porch with a demand dressed up as a request. "You will end it," she said, "publicly, where both sides can see it ended, or I will not be able to stop this from becoming a war neither of us survives.
I am sorry, Kade. I mean that. But you are not the only one this pack answers to, and neither is she. "
Wren heard about the demand secondhand, from Rourke, who drove down to warn her before Kade could bring himself to, his expression apologetic in a way that told her, before he'd said a single word, that whatever was coming was going to be worse than anything the last two weeks had already put her through.
"He doesn't want to do this," Rourke said, standing awkwardly on her porch, clearly uncomfortable being the messenger for something that wasn't his to deliver.
"I want you to hear that from someone besides him, because I think you're going to have a hard time believing him when he says it himself tonight. "
"Why are you telling me this, Rourke?" "Because I buried Elena too," he said simply, "and I'm not eager to watch him lose the second chance he swore he'd never get, over a decision his council is forcing on him faster than either of you deserve."
? ? ?
He came to Wren's door that night looking like a man walking to his own execution, and some cowardly, hopeful part of her wanted to believe, right up until he opened his mouth, that he'd come to tell her they'd fight this together.
"I have to step back," he said instead. "In public. Where the hunters' council can see it and believe it. It's the only thing that buys us time to find what actually killed that boy before both sides tear each other apart looking for someone smaller to blame."
"Step back," she repeated.
"Not end it. Never end it. But I need you to trust that this is strategy, not—"
"That's exactly what my father used to say," she said, and watched something in his face crack at the comparison, because he understood, better than anyone, exactly how deep that particular wound ran.
"That the necessary thing and the right thing just happened to look the same from a distance.
He was wrong every single time, Kade. I need you to understand why it terrifies me to hear you say it now. "
"I don't have a better answer." His voice was rough, wrecked, entirely without the leashed control she'd first met at the boundary stone.
"If I don't do this, Agatha loses control of a council that will march on hunter land by the end of the week, and if that happens, there is no strategy left, Wren, there's just a war, and you and I standing on opposite sides of it whether we choose to or not. "
"So choose me anyway."
"I am choosing you," he said. "I'm choosing a version of you that's still alive in six months."
She wanted, badly, to believe that. Some part of her did believe it, even through the anger, even through the old, worn grooves of family betrayal her whole body seemed built to recognize and flinch from.
But belief and bearing it were not the same thing, and standing in her father's doorway watching Kade Thornwood choose his pack's survival over hers in front of the entire valley was a wound she was not at all certain, in that moment, either of them would survive.
"You know what the worst part is," she said quietly.
"I believe you. I believe every word of it's true, and I still can't stand here and watch you do it, because I spent my whole childhood watching my father make exactly this kind of necessary choice, over and over, and it never once actually saved anything. It just cost him everything slower."
"Then go," she said, and shut the door before either of them had to watch the other one break.