Chapter 6

Loken's POV

I stood there and watched the bonding robe burn, and I had absolutely no idea what to do with that.

Three years she had kept it folded in that cedar chest like it was sacred. She carried it out herself, dropped it into the embers, walked back inside. No tears. No speech. Just that, and then she was gone.

I stayed where I was. Something was moving around in my chest that I didn't want to look at too closely.

Then Elora came to stand beside me. She put her hand over my fist and said, quietly, that Selene and I had reached the end of something, and that she was here, and that she understood what I needed.

I grabbed her by the collar. Not hard enough to hurt. Hard enough to be clear. "Get your position straight. You are here to treat my condition. That is all you are. Don't reach for something you don't have the right to touch."

She stepped back. She didn't look frightened. She looked faintly amused, and that bothered me more than anything else she could have done.

I went upstairs.

Selene was at the window, her back to me, looking at the moon. I crossed the room and put my arms around her from behind, the way I used to, and I held on. I told her about the elder council pressure, the moonstone reserves, the solstice vote. I told her I was sorry about the garden. I told her I needed her steady, needed her with me, needed things to hold together.

She didn't pull away. She stood in my arms and let me talk, and when I was done she said she understood, and her voice was warm and even, and she wasn't shaking at all.

"We're going to be fine," I said. "You and me — we're still going to make this work. Right?"

"Of course," she said.

She turned around then and told me I needed sleep, that tomorrow would be a long day, and she walked me to the door with one hand on my arm. The door closed between us. I stood in the corridor for a moment, thinking that she had said exactly what I needed to hear, and that somehow that made me feel worse rather than better.

Breakfast the next morning was the four of us at the table, which was already more than I wanted to manage before the first cup of tea had cooled. Elora had brought Vira down, and Vira, apparently still working through yesterday's emotions, looked at me and said "Papa" before Elora's hand came up and tapped her mouth, quick and light, and Elora turned to Selene and said the child didn't know better.

Selene set her cup down. "Wild pups have rough manners. That's expected."

Elora's expression went flat for exactly one second before she pulled it back.

I rubbed my face and asked Elora, for the third time in as many days, when she could arrange an introduction to the Shadow Market's Lord. The moonstone situation was getting critical, and every channel I had tried was hitting a wall. Elora said the Shadow Lord had been in closed retreat and she was waiting for the right moment, and she said it with the particular patience of someone who wants you to understand they have a special relationship with an important person.

Selene looked up from her bowl. "What's the Shadow Lord's area of interest? I've heard different things."

Elora took that as an invitation and talked for a while about her connection to the Shadow Market, her understanding of how the Lord operated, the complexity of those negotiations, the fact that not everyone had the standing to make that approach. Then she looked at Selene and said it probably wasn't a world Selene would find relevant — someone who spent her time at a herb bench didn't exactly move in those circles, and there was no shame in that, not every she-wolf needed ambition.

"Selene." I set my cup down. "Luna position is hers. That's not a discussion."

Selene was already pushing back her chair. She stood, nodded once at no one in particular, and left the room without a word.

I watched her go. Then I turned and looked at Elora, and she dropped her eyes to her plate, but not before I caught something in her expression — a small, settled satisfaction, the kind that comes from knowing a move landed.

She said, quietly, without looking up: "The way she burned that ring last night — don't assume she still has the patience you're counting on."

I didn't answer her. But I kept thinking about it.

The afternoon brought a different problem. Vira came to find me, said she'd lost one of her carved wolf-pup toys somewhere in the fortress and thought she might have left it in the Sacred Chamber. I wasn't in the mood, but I took her anyway, let her look around while I stood near the door and turned the moonstone supply numbers over in my head for the hundredth time.

I wasn't paying attention when I crouched down near the altar base to pick up something that had caught my eye. Small, dark, disc-shaped. I turned it over in my hand.

My palm went cold.

It was a memory crystal. Recording type, activation-ready, positioned at the exact angle needed to capture the full length of the chamber floor.

I turned it over again. My mind went to Selene immediately — then stopped. If she had known what happened in this room, she would not have held still. She would have broken down, confronted me, done something. She was too devoted, too deeply bonded to simply sit on information this significant. She didn't have the temperament for cold patience.

Did she?

I called Erik within the hour and told him to sweep the entire fortress. He came back with two more crystals — one in the council hall, one near the weapons store, both the same cheap recording model that outside intelligence operations favored. The pattern was clear. External infiltration. Someone had been mapping Ironwood's interior for weeks.

Erik laid it all out: the trade line disruptions, the elder council leaks, the timing of the moonstone suspension. All of it connected. All of it pointing outward. I stood in the middle of my own war room and felt the pieces settle into a shape that made sense, and I told myself the relief I felt was reasonable.

But Elora's voice kept threading back through it. Don't assume she still has the patience you're counting on. And underneath that, a question I couldn't quite put down: Selene's calm this past month — her steady voice, her even eyes, the way she had said of course last night without a single hesitation — had any of that been real?

I stood at the window and stared at nothing, and for the first time in three years, I genuinely didn't know.