🗡️ Chapter 03🗡️

I didn't sleep.

I don't think I was capable of it. I sat on the wet grass beside my parents' graves until the rain stopped and the sky turned that cold, flat grey that comes before dawn, and then I just... kept sitting. My clothes were soaked through. My hands were still caked with dirt from the digging. Around me was a skeleton of blackened walls and collapsed roof where my childhood used to be.

I watched the sun come up over the ruins of my house.

I felt absolutely nothing. And then I felt absolutely everything. And then nothing again.

Grief, I was discovering, doesn't arrive in a straight line. It comes in waves that knock you flat, and then it retreats just long enough for you to stand up, and then it comes back.

I stood up.

Not because I was ready. Not because I felt strong or certain or any of the things you're supposed to feel when you make a decision that changes your life. I stood up because my mother was dead and my father was dead and the only name I had was Alpha Drakan and sitting on wet grass wasn't going to do a single thing about that.

I turned and looked at what was left of the mansion.

The main structure was gone. The east wing roof had caved in completely. But the walls were still standing in some places, scorched and hollow, like ribs. And as I stood there staring at the wreckage of everything I had grown up in, something occurred to me.

My parents had secrets.

I had always known this the way you know something without letting yourself fully look at it. The way they'd hushed certain conversations when I walked into a room.

The way my mother would sometimes go still and distant, staring at nothing, her eyes carrying something I was too young to name. The way they'd shipped me off to the UK at eighteen with explanations that were just slightly too smooth, too prepared, like they'd rehearsed them.

*We want the best education for you, Zelda.*

*It's safer there, Zelda.*

*You'll understand when you're older, Zelda.*

I was older now.

And I was done waiting to understand.

I walked back into the ruins of my home.

---

The east wing was impassable. The main staircase had held but I didn't trust it, I went up slowly, testing each step with my weight before committing, one hand on the scorched wall for balance. The smoke smell was suffocating up here. Everything was either burnt black or soaked from the rain, the carpet a soggy, grey mess under my feet.

I wasn't sure what I was looking for. I just knew I was looking.

My parents' bedroom was at the end of the hall. The door was gone but the frame was standing, and the room beyond was damaged but not destroyed, the fire had eaten the curtains and blistered the walls and taken the furniture down to blackened frames, but the bones of the room were there.

I went through everything methodically. Wardrobe. Dresser. Bedside tables. I don't know what I expected to find. Whatever it was, I didn't find it.

I stood in the centre of the room and turned slowly.

My mother had been a careful woman. Precise. She'd had a particular way of arranging things, always the same, always just so. Even now, even in the wreckage, I could see the ghost of her system in what remained. Everything had its place.

Except.

I frowned, turning back to the far wall.

The painting that used to hang there, a landscape my mother had bought at some market years ago, rolling hills, very ordinary, was gone. Burned, probably. But the wall behind where it had hung was a slightly different colour than the surrounding plaster. Not from fire damage. Older than that. Like something had been covering it for a very long time.

I crossed the room and pressed my hand flat against it.

Hollow.

My pulse jumped.

I ran my fingers along the edges, pressing, testing, until something clicked under my palm and a section of the wall swung inward on a hinge so well-oiled it didn't make a sound.

I stood in the doorway of my mother's secret room and stared.

It wasn't large. More of a deep alcove than a room, maybe six feet wide and eight feet deep. But what was inside it made the air leave my lungs in a slow, stunned exhale.

The walls were covered.

Photographs. Documents. Handwritten notes on yellowing paper, pinned in clusters. Newspaper clippings, some in English, some in languages I half-recognised and half-didn't. Maps. Hand-drawn diagrams. A corkboard on the back wall with red string connecting photographs to names to locations like something out of a crime thriller.

But it wasn't a crime thriller.

It was a world.

I stepped inside slowly, my eyes trying to take in everything at once and failing. The photographs were of people I didn't recognise, men and women with a particular quality to them, a sharpness, an intensity, the way predators look when they're not bothering to disguise it. Some of the photos had names written underneath in my mother's handwriting.

Some of them had the word *PACK* written in capital letters. And the name of a territory. And a hierarchy.

Alpha. Beta. Delta. Gamma.

I reached out and touched one of the clippings. A news article, the paper old and brittle. The headline was about a series of unexplained deaths in a rural area, investigated and closed as animal attacks. I recognised the pattern immediately because I'd spent four years studying forensic criminology and I knew what the polite explanation for werewolf looked like in a police report.

I had always known I was a werewolf.

Kind of.

My parents had told me just enough. That we were different. That we had to be careful around other people. That I needed to control it. They'd taught me the basics, how to suppress the shift, how to keep the wolf quiet in public, how to read a room the way a predator reads a room. I knew what I was in the same way I knew my own face. Familiar, Unquestioned.

But this.

Packs. Territories. Hierarchies. A whole hidden world with its own structure and politics and power, apparently operating right alongside the human one, I had known this existed the way you know other countries exist. Abstractly. Distantly. My parents had kept us deliberately on the outside of it, no pack, no territory, no connections.

I had thought that was just how we lived.

I was starting to understand it was a choice they had made very deliberately. And it had something to do with the name on the back wall.

I turned to the corkboard.

In the centre, connected to almost everything else by red string, was a single photograph. A man. Large, dark-featured, the kind of physical authority that comes through even in a still image. Beneath it, in my mother's handwriting:

ALPHA DRAKAN — VORDHEIM

And below that, underlined twice:

DO NOT ENGAGE. DO NOT APPROACH. KEEP ZELDA AWAY.

My jaw tightened.

I kept looking. There was a manila envelope pinned below the photograph. I pulled it free and opened it with hands that were steadier than they had any right to be.

Inside was a letter.

My mother's handwriting. Dated three months ago.

Zelda,

If you are reading this, then I wasn't fast enough, and I am sorry. I have been trying to find a way to tell you the truth for years. I convinced myself there was still time. There wasn't.

You need to know what we were before we were your parents. Your father and I did not always live quietly. We were part of a world you have never seen, a world of packs and Alphas and territory wars, and we did things in that world that we are not proud of. Things that made enemies. The most dangerous of those enemies was Alpha Drakan of the bloodmoon pack in vordheim.

I will not explain everything here. There is too much and the details are not what matter now. What matters is this: Alpha Drakan has reason to want us dead. We have spent seventeen years making sure he could not find us. It seems he finally did.

Do not come after him, Zelda. I mean this. He is not like anything you have encountered. Vordheim is not a place you walk into and walk out of. Whatever you are feeling right now, whatever the wolf in you is demanding, do not listen to it.

Come home. Whatever is left of home. Grieve. Live.

I love you more than I knew how to say.

— Mum

P.S. The address is on the back of this letter. Not because I want you to go. Because I know you, baby girl. And if you are anything like me, and God help you, you are, you were already looking for it before you finished reading.

I flipped the letter over.

There it was. An address. A region. A set of coordinates handwritten below it.

And at the very bottom, in smaller writing, like she'd added it as an afterthought and then decided to leave it:

Be careful of his son.

I stared at that last line for a long moment.

Then I folded the letter carefully and put it in my pocket.

I looked around the room one more time, at the maps, the photographs, the years of careful, quiet fear my mother had documented on these walls. All the truth she hadn't been able to say out loud.

"You were right," I said quietly, to no one. To her. "I already finished reading."

I walked out of the secret room, down the ruined staircase, and out of what was left of my parents' house for the last time.

---

I took only what I needed.

My suitcase from where I'd dropped it on the driveway the night before, miraculously untouched by the fire. My passport. The small hunting blade my father kept in the gardening shed, that I had always pretended not to know about. The letter. The photograph of Alpha Drakan I'd unpinned from the corkboard.

I stood at the gate of the estate and looked back one more time.

Two fresh mounds of earth in the garden. The blackened frame of the house behind them. The morning sun making it all look almost peaceful, which felt like an insult.

My mother had said don't go.

My mother had also written down the address.

She knew me. She had always known me. And she had left me the choice anyway, the way you leave someone a door and trust them to decide.

"I'm sorry, Mum," I said softly. "Whoever did this, I will find them. I will look them in the eye." My voice didn't shake. I was proud of that. "And I will kill them. Slowly. Deliberately. With every single thing I have."

A breath.

"Nobody erases my family and walks away breathing."

I straightened up.

Squared my shoulders.

And walked through the gate without looking back.