[Ciri's POV]
He knows!
Theron hasn't confronted me, locked me down, or called his wolves to escort me from the keep. But there's a shift in his behavior I can feel like a change in air pressure — the way the atmosphere tightens before a storm breaks, when the wind hasn't started yet but every animal in the forest has already gone still.
He's watching me differently. Not the generalized scrutiny of a cautious Alpha assessing a newcomer — I lived under that gaze for weeks and learned its patterns.
This is targeted. The observation of a man who has found a particular thread and is deciding whether to pull it or let it play out until it leads him somewhere useful.
I consider my options before dawn, staring at the ceiling I've memorized.
Running confirms guilt, and staying means deepening the lie or abandoning it. Contacting Cyrus for extraction would bring his wolves to the border and trigger the very conflict I was sent to prepare.
My brother doesn't do quiet retrieval. He does statements — armed, bloody, designed to announce his presence like a forest fire.
None of these options lead anywhere survivable.
So I deflect. I throw myself into work with an intensity that borders on obsessive — intelligence assessments, diplomatic frameworks, strategic recommendations too valuable to dismiss.
"This is exceptional work," Senna tells me, reviewing the Ashford trade framework. "The seasonal tariff adjustments alone would have taken the council two sessions. You did it in an afternoon."
"I had good source material. Your preliminary notes were thorough."
"They were a mess, and we both know it. Don't deflect compliments — it makes you harder to trust."
"I'll work on accepting them gracefully."
"You'd better. Theron wants the framework finalized by Thursday. Can you handle the revision independently?"
"The core structure is sound. It just needs tariff calculations verified against last season's trade volumes."
"Good. And Ciri — whatever is driving this sudden burst of productivity, I'd appreciate it continuing. I haven't had an assistant who could keep up with me since Marcus left, and I'd rather not go back to doing everything myself."
"You won't have to. I plan on being very difficult to replace."
Senna studies me with the shrewd assessment of a Beta who's survived enough political weather to smell a storm building. "See that you are."
I haven't sent Cyrus a real report in a month. The messages at the dead drop have grown thin — weather patterns, outdated patrol schedules, nothing that would survive scrutiny. Cyrus is either too consumed by preparations to notice, or giving me rope.
One evening, working late in Theron's study, the candle burns low and the boundary between strategy and something more personal dissolves the way it's been dissolving for weeks — gradually, then all at once.
"Tell me about before," he says, setting down his pen. "Not the story you gave me when you arrived, but what actually made you who you are?"
"That's a dangerous question to ask someone you're still evaluating, Alpha."
"Consider it a calculated risk."
I should lie. Every instinct built by Cyrus's training says deflect, redirect, give him a version that satisfies curiosity without surrendering leverage.
But the candle is low and the fire is warm and Theron is looking at me with an openness that makes my chest ache with the weight of everything I'm carrying that he doesn't know about.
"I was invisible," I say, and the truth comes out before the lie can catch it. "In my family, attention was a resource allocated to the people who mattered. My older siblings were beautiful, dangerous, significant. I was the one they forgot to name at gatherings. The one who ate after everyone else because no one remembered to set a place."
"How did you survive that?"
"By being useful. I learned that if I couldn't be seen, I could be needed. The kind of person everyone relies on and no one remembers to thank."
"And the fighting?"
"No one assigned me a training partner, so I trained alone — every morning, before dawn, in the yard behind the kennels where nobody went. I found a pocket knife in the mud when I was nine and I've carried it ever since."
My hand drifts to the blade at my belt. "It was the first thing that was entirely mine. Everything else belonged to someone more important."
Theron is quiet for a long moment. The fire crackles between us, and when he speaks, his voice carries a roughness I've heard only once before — the night he told me about Celeste.
"I understand that," he says. "I spent years performing a version of myself that someone else designed, believing it was real because admitting it wasn't would have meant facing how hollow I actually was underneath."
He leans back in his chair, and the shadows carve his face into something older and more honest than the Alpha the pack sees.
"You taught yourself to be useful because no one saw you. I taught myself to be feared because I thought that was the same as being strong. We were both wrong, and we both survived it."
"Did we? Or are we still just performing better versions of the same survival strategies?"
"Maybe both. Maybe that's what growth is — performing until it stops being performance and starts being real."
The words settle into me, and I feel the ripples spread through every lie I've built since arriving — every curated truth, every report left in a hollow tree for a brother who wants to destroy the man sitting across from me.
"I should go," I say, and my voice betrays me — thicker than it should be, rougher around the edges. "It's late."
He holds my gaze.
"Ciri — whatever you're carrying that you haven't told me, I'd rather hear it from you than discover it on my own."
The sentence hangs between us like a bridge I could cross if I were braver. I nod, say nothing, and leave the study with my throat closed and my hands shaking inside my pockets.
In my quarters, on the pillow where it could not have been placed without someone entering while I was working, I find a folded parchment sealed with plain wax. No mark or signature, but I know my brother's hand the way I know the weight of my own knife.
The encoded message is brief. I crack it in under a minute, because Cyrus never bothered teaching me a complex cipher — he didn't think I was worth the investment.
‘I march in six weeks. If your reports don't improve, I will assume you've betrayed me, and I will treat you accordingly.’
Forty-two days before my brother brings his wolves to these walls, expecting the gate to open from inside.
I sit on the edge of my bed, holding the parchment, and the clock is ticking. I have no idea which side of it I want to be on when the time runs out.