Chapter 4 The Name That Broke Everything.
Chapter Four
The Name That Broke Everything
I stayed on my knees on Maren's floor for a long time after she said it.
Outside the alarm bells were still going. I could hear wolves fighting, men shouting, the wet sounds of a battle that was not over yet. The whole world had shrinked down to the name still ringing in my ears and the old woman breathing shallowly in my arms.
My father's name.
Alpha Damon Blackwood.
My father was the one feeding the curse.
I pulled back and looked at Maren's face. She was watching me with those pale eyes and I could see the apology in them, the grief, the weight of knowing something this long and carrying it alone.
"You are sure," I said. It was not a question. I knew she was sure. Maren doesn't say things she was not sure of.
"I have been sure for two years," she said quietly. "I needed proof that would hold against an Alpha's word. I was still gathering it."
"Two years?." "You knew for two years and you said nothing."
"I said nothing because I had no proof and because accusing the Alpha of the Ironblood Pack of feeding a dark curse without proof would have gotten me killed and helped no one." Her grip tightened on my hand. "I am telling you now because I may not get another chance."
I looked down at her. The right side of her face was bruised, a deep ugly purple that was already swelling. Whoever had come for her had not used a wolf. They had used their hands. Human hands precisely.
Someone who knew where to hit to incapacitate without killing.
I helped Maren onto the low cot against the wall and covered her with the blanket from the chest at the foot of it. She did not move. That told me how badly she was hurt.
"Stay here," I said. "Lock the door after me. Do not open it for anyone until I come back."
"Zara." Her voice stopped me at the door. "I know what you are thinking. Do not go to him alone. Please don't. Not when he has the Ashgrave wolves as cover."
I turned to look at her.
"You think he sent them," I said. "You think tonight was his doing."
"I think the timing is not a coincidence. I think the attack happened the moment I was about to tell you the truth. And I think if you walk up to your father tonight and let him see in your face that you know, you will not see morning he will kill you before sunset."
I freezed was my father that heartless. This is a complete different side of him no one knows about not even his own children.
He is My father. The man who had taught me to hold my head up. The man who had sat beside me at the river this morning and told me about Kael with grief in his eyes.
Had any of it been real? Or had all of it been management? Keeping me close, keeping me calm, making sure I never looked in the right direction?
I thought about the elders meeting. The decision coming so fast. Kael named acting heir by end of the month.
If the curse was deliberate and my father was the one directing it, then weakening the pack served a purpose. Because A pack in crisis needs a strong heir. And strong heir ment the prophecy discredited. A discredited prophecy needed me to fail.
Last night's ritual.
My failed shift.
Had that been managed too?
I pressed my palm flat against the door and breathed.
By the time I stepped back outside the fighting had slowed.
The Ashgrave wolves were pulling back. There were not running just pulling back, which was a different thing entirely. Controlled withdrawal. They went back toward the eastern fence. and our warriors did not pursue them past the border because pursuing a retreating enemy into unknown territory at night was how you lost more people than the battle had taken.
The square was a mess. Broken fencing. Blood on the ground. Four of our warriors down, two of them badly injured that they were being carried. I scanned faces as I moved through the square scanning it then breathed relieve when I saw the ones I needed to see still standing.
Then I saw my father.
He was back in human form, standing near the eastern fence with Elder Rowan and two senior warriors. He was listening to a report, nodding, his face carrying the controlled expression he wore whenever he was in Alpha mode. Calm and Authoritative.
I watched him from across the square and tried to compare the man I was looking at with what Maren had told me.
I could not do it. The grief was still too fresh and the anger underneath it was too hot and if I went to him now Maren was right, he would see it all over my face.
So I did the hardest thing I have ever done.
I walked toward him like nothing had changed.
"Zara." He turned when he heard my footsteps and his eyes moved over me quickly, the way a parent's eyes do when they are checking for damage. They stopped on my shoulder. On the claw marks. "You went out there."
"Someone had to pull the injured ones clear," I said. "Your warriors were busy fighting."
"You could have been killed," he said.
"But I was not." I held his gaze. "Is the perimeter secure?"
"For now." He looked back toward the fence. "They will not come back tonight. They got what they came for."
My blood went cold.
"What did they come for?" I asked carefully. "We held them off They did not take anything."
My father was quiet for just a half second too long.
"Territory pressure," he said finally. "They are testing our borders. Seeing where we are weak."
I nodded like I believed him.
Inside I was calculating every word and Every pause
I excused myself and walked back toward the village and kept my breathing even my steps steady I did not run until I was completely out of his sight.
I needed proof. Maren had spent two years looking for it.
I needed to find it faster than that.
And there was only one place in this pack where my father's secrets would be written down.
His office. In his private records. The locked room at the back of the Alpha's quarters that not even Kael had ever been allowed inside.
I had a key.
He had given it to me on my sixteenth birthday and told me it wa
s for emergencies.
I was fairly certain this counted as one.
