[Ciri's POV]
The dead drop feels watched. Theron's questions have sharpened beyond curiosity, and the way he looks at me has changed — not with anger, but with a sadness that confuses me more than hostility would.
I spend the night on my quarters floor, back against the wall, pocket knife turning in my hands.
Dull blade, nicked edge — found it as a child in the Ashenmoor armory, discarded and forgotten. Much like me. The only thing I own that wasn't given as a tool for someone else's purpose.
I think about who I am without the mission, without Cyrus, without the family that treated me as furniture. The answer is terrifying: I don't know.
Theron remains. The thought surfaces unbidden. He remains as the first person who saw someone worth listening to and worth keeping close.
I have feelings for him.
The admission arrives quietly and settles into my chest beside the guilt and the fear — a warm thing in a cold space. I let it stay because I'm too tired to fight anymore.
I write one final report, two lines: Interior defenses remain as reported. No changes to recommend.
The thinnest intelligence I've ever produced. I know what it means, and I'm choosing.
The hollow oak stands where it always stands. I kneel, place the parchment inside, and press my palm against the bark. This is the last report I will ever write for my brother. Then I straighten, turn around, and everything stops.
Theron is standing between the trees.
Arms folded, body still with the stillness of a man who has been watching longer than the last few minutes. His face is set with the control of someone who has processed his emotions and arrived beyond them.
"You'll tell me everything now," he says. The quiet command of an Alpha who has finished waiting.
My hand moves toward my knife — reflex — and I force it back down.
"My name is Ciri of Ashenmoor," I say. The forest goes silent.
"My brother Cyrus sent me here to infiltrate your pack and map your defenses, your weaknesses, to prepare the ground for an attack he's been planning since the day you killed her."
My voice cracks, but I don't look away. "I cut my own arm to fake the injuries. I rehearsed every answer I gave you in the healers' wing. Everything about my arrival was manufactured."
Theron doesn't move. The silence is so dense I can hear my own blood in my ears.
"When does he march?"
"Five weeks, maybe less. He expects me to open the gates."
"How many wolves?"
"Ashenmoor's full force — eighty, possibly a hundred if he's been recruiting from the border packs. Cyrus doesn't do surgical strikes, he does overwhelming force and fear."
"What did you tell him about our defenses?"
"Patrol schedules from weeks ago. The keep's layout before Senna's modifications. Also, your personal routine from a month before you started varying it."
I swallow hard. "I've been sending him stale intelligence, Theron. Everything in those reports was outdated by the time it reached his hands. I stopped giving him anything real weeks ago."
"I know." His voice is level, terrifyingly calm. "I decoded your reports and planted information to test whether you'd pass it along. You withheld all of it."
He's known. A counter-intelligence operation while I discussed winter provisions.
"How long have you known who I am?"
"Long enough. The paper carries Ashenmoor scent, and your name is in a census record — minor household member, no title, no rank… listed beneath your sister like an afterthought."
Something moves across his expression. "Your brother weaponized your invisibility and pointed it at me."
"Yes."
"Did you volunteer for this?"
"He gave me a blood oath and an order, and refusal meant exile or worse. Cyrus doesn't distinguish between disobedience and betrayal."
I force my hands to stay still at my sides:
"But I want you to hear this clearly, Theron. I could have refused to do that but I didn't, choosing to come here. I chose to cut my own arm and walk into your territory with a mission that put your entire pack at risk. Whatever happened afterward, the choice to begin was mine."
"And your choice to stop?"
"The night you told me about Celeste and the shame of who you were, the fear that redemption might be performance." The words come ragged.
"You handed me your vulnerabilities, and all I could think was that you trusted me with your worst fears while I catalogued them for a brother who'd use them as weapons."
"So?"
"I couldn't do it anymore. Every report I wrote after that night was empty — surface details, outdated intelligence, nothing that could hurt you. I was buying time against an outcome I no longer wanted."
"The outcome being my death."
"That’s Cyrus's plan. Your death, the fall of Shadowpine, his wolves sitting in your great hall. He swore a blood oath to avenge Celeste, and he means to honor it by burning your world to the ground."
Theron is quiet for a long moment. Wind moves through the pines above us.
"You love her," he says. "Your sister, despite what she became."
"She braided my hair when our mother was too busy to notice I existed. She saved me the bigger honeycake every feast day." My throat closes.
"She was the only person in my family who ever saw me as a person instead of a shadow. Whatever she did at the end — I can't stop loving who she was before it."
"I understand that," his voice roughens. "I killed her, Ciri. I put a sword through her ribs to save Kira, and I would make the same choice again. That's something you need to hear from me directly."
"I've known since before I came here."
"So why still talk to the man who took everything away from you? Why not kill me right here and now?"
The words land with a weight that thins the air. I didn't say it. He read it — in my reports, in my behavior, in whatever he saw while watching me choose his pack over my brother.
"I know what my sister became. I’m not happy with what you did to her, but I see that you’re not the monster," I whisper.
Theron unfolds his arms and steps forward. Twenty feet narrows to ten, and I can see his face clearly — the hard jaw, the dark eyes holding something I'm terrified to name, the tension of a man who is furious and relieved and devastated in measures he hasn't sorted.
"Five weeks," he says. "You're going to tell me everything about Cyrus's forces — numbers, weapons, strategy, every detail you know. And then we're going to prepare Shadowpine for what's coming."
"And then?"
"You've given me honesty tonight — late, forced by circumstance rather than freely offered. I can work with that, but trust is a different architecture than honesty, and the one you demolished will take longer to rebuild than a single confession."
"I know."
"We start tomorrow. Go back to the keep and get whatever sleep you can."
He holds my gaze, and beneath the Alpha's control I see the man who told me about his worst fears in a firelit study — still present, still wounded, still refusing to let the wound dictate his response.
"And Ciri — the knife at your belt… Leave it in your quarters from now on. I need you to show me you don't need it anymore."
I wrap my hand around the handle — years of carrying, years of the only thing that was mine — and nod.
"Tomorrow," I say.
He turns and walks into the trees. I stand alone beside the hollow oak, my brother's empty report still inside it, and the forest settles around me with the indifference of a world that has witnessed confessions older than mine.
The knife sits heavy at my belt. Tomorrow I'll set it down.