CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Brother in the Dark
SERAPHINE
Elias found me in the palace garden beneath a dead rose trellis.
I knew him by the whistle.
Three notes, low and falling.
The signal we had used as children when one of us was hiding from our father after breaking something expensive.
My body forgot how to breathe.
I turned.
A hooded figure stood beyond the hedge.
“Elias?”
He lifted his head.
Twelve years disappeared badly.
My brother had been eighteen when Ashen Vale burned. Tall and reckless, with our mother’s amber eyes and a scar on his chin from falling out of a pear tree. The man in front of me was thirty, leaner than memory, with a deeper scar running from jaw to collar.
But it was him.
“Sparrow,” he said.
Only Elias had ever called me that.
I crossed the distance and hit him.
My fist caught his shoulder because I changed my mind at the last second.
Then I threw my arms around him so hard he staggered.
He held me.
For a moment, I was fifteen again and not alone.
Then anger returned.
I shoved him away.
“You were alive.”
“Yes.”
“You let me think you were dead.”
“I had to.”
“For twelve years?”
His face tightened. “I was taken the night of the purge. Rorik sold prisoners east. I escaped after three years. By then you had vanished into the border clans, and royal spies were searching for Moonmarked survivors.”
“You could have found me.”
“I did.”
That stopped me.
“I watched you for years, Sera.”
“You watched.”
“If they found me, they would follow me to you.”
“Who?”
“The crown.”
My chest tightened.
“Lucian did not order the recent attacks.”
Elias stared.
“What?”
“I’ve seen the forged commands. Someone inside the palace is using his seal.”
He laughed once. “He has you defending him already.”
“I’m not defending him.”
“You smell like him.”
My hand went to my collar.
The mate mark hidden beneath it felt suddenly obvious.
Elias’s eyes narrowed.
“No.”
“Elias—”
“No.” He grabbed my shoulders. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
I pulled away. “Fate chose badly.”
His face became something I did not recognize.
“The Lycan King.”
“I didn’t ask for it.”
“Neither did our father when Veyr soldiers put arrows in his back.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
The question sounded too much like mine in the portrait gallery.
I hated that.
Elias paced once beneath the bare trellis.
“I came to get you out.”
“I’m staying.”
He turned on me. “Why?”
“Because the law against us is a lie. Because someone is making wolves feral. Because Blackwater was attacked to start a war.”
“A war is already here.”
“No. Not yet.”
His expression hardened.
That was when I understood.
“You’re the Raven.”
The rebel commander who had united scattered border cells over the last two years. Royal intelligence blamed him for raids, prison breaks, and the destruction of tax convoys.
He did not deny it.
“Elias.”
“The crown murdered our family.”
“Lucian’s father did.”
“A Veyr sits on the throne.”
“That does not make him the same man.”
My brother stared at me.
I heard the betrayal in my own words.
Maybe he did too.
“You came here to kill him,” Elias said.
“Yes.”
“And now?”
I had no answer I trusted.
He stepped closer.
“Tomorrow night, the western gate will be undermanned during the memorial vigil. Open it.”
Cold slid down my spine.
“For what?”
“So our people can enter without bloodshed.”
“Armed rebels entering a royal palace is your definition of without bloodshed?”
“We take the council. Force abdication. End the Edict.”
“And if Lucian resists?”
Elias’s silence answered.
“No.”
“Sera.”
“No.”
His jaw clenched. “You would choose him over your own blood?”
“I’m choosing not to turn the palace into another Ashen Vale.”
“He has changed you.”
“Maybe surviving changed me.”
That hurt him.
I saw it.
I regretted it and meant it anyway.
Footsteps sounded beyond the hedge.
Elias pulled up his hood.
“Think about it.”
“There’s nothing to think about.”
“There always is.”
He vanished between the trees just before Darius rounded the path.
He looked at me, then at the dark hedge.
“Company?”
“A rabbit.”
“Large rabbit.”
“Very political.”
His gaze stayed on me a second too long.
I smiled.
He did not.
That night, I stood outside Lucian’s map room with my hand on the door.
I should tell him.
My brother was alive.
The Raven was inside the capital.
He planned to open a second front in a war someone else was already trying to start.
I lifted my hand to knock.
Then I remembered Elias holding me beneath the rose trellis.
My last family.
I walked away.
The bond burned with the shape of the lie.