Chapter 30

Wren

They made camp that first night just inside Ashenmoor's border, close enough to reach the ruins proper by midday tomorrow, and Wren found she couldn't sleep — not from the cold, and not entirely from the low, persistent wrongness still humming under her skin since they'd crossed the tree line, though that was certainly part of it.

She found Kade already awake when she gave up on sleep entirely and made her way to the low-burning central fire, sitting alone with a cup of something that had long since gone cold, staring into the flames with the particular stillness of a man doing the same math she was.

"Can't sleep either."

"No." He glanced up, made room on the log beside him without being asked, and she found herself sitting, telling herself it was simple practicality — shared warmth, shared watch, nothing more complicated than two Alphas unable to rest before a dangerous day. "This land. It doesn't feel like it wants us here."

"It doesn't feel like it wants anyone here." Wren pulled her knees up, wrapping her arms around them, watching the fire instead of him. "Ezra says the Nightshade bloodline could always sense truth from lies. I keep wondering if what I'm feeling out here is some version of that — if the land itself is lying about something, and some part of me can tell."

"What would it be lying about?"

"I don't know yet. That's the unsettling part." She was quiet a moment, letting the fire's warmth do what it could against a cold that felt like it came from somewhere other than the actual temperature. "Can I ask you something? And you don't have to answer, if it's not fair to ask."

"Ask."

"Your wife. Seraphine." Wren kept her eyes on the fire, needing the distance from his face to get the question out cleanly. "Is she — are you two — I don't actually know how to ask this without it sounding like something I don't mean it to sound like."

"You're asking if my marriage is real." He said it plainly, no offense in it, just honest acknowledgment of the actual question underneath her stumbling. "It's real in the sense that it's legally binding and five years old and I care about her considerably more than I expected to, going in. It's not real in the sense you're actually asking about. It's never been that, not once, not for either of us, and we both knew it walking into the ceremony." He paused, choosing his next words with visible care. "She knows about the conversation we had at the summit. She's known, honestly, for longer than that — some things aren't easy to hide from someone you live beside for five years. She told me to come on this expedition and find out honestly what I actually wanted, instead of circling it from a safe distance the way I've been doing since the night of the rejection."

Wren didn't have an immediate response to that, turning it over with the same careful caution she turned over most things involving Kade Voss these days. "That's a generous thing for her to offer you."

"She's a generous person. More than I deserved, marrying her the way I did, for the reasons I did." He looked at her then, and she felt the weight of his attention even without turning to meet it. "I'm not telling you this to pressure you into anything, Wren. I want to be clear about that. I'm telling you because you asked, and because I think, after everything, you're entitled to actual honesty from me instead of whatever careful non-answers I might have given five years ago."

"I appreciate the honesty." She finally let herself look at him, firelight catching the familiar planes of his face, close enough now that she was uncomfortably aware of exactly how easy it would be to close the remaining distance between them. "I'm not ready to do anything with it yet. I want to be honest about that too."

"I'm not asking you to be ready." Something gentle in his voice, entirely unlike the careful formality of the summit hall. "I've waited five years, Wren. I can wait for whatever pace you actually need, instead of whatever pace either of us wishes we could manage instead."

They sat there a while longer, close enough to share warmth, careful enough not to close the last of the distance between them, and Wren found, watching the fire burn low, that some old, stubborn part of her chest had started to unclench for the first time in five years — cautiously, incompletely, but undeniably, and she wasn't entirely sure yet what she intended to do about that either.

Morning came grayer than it should have, the sun struggling weakly through a canopy that seemed to actively resist its light, and the expedition broke camp with the particular quiet efficiency of people who'd all, individually, decided during the night that today required their full attention.

The ruins themselves came into view by midmorning — what had once been Ashenmoor's central hall, Wren understood immediately, some old instinct recognizing the shape of it even collapsed and overgrown as it now was, stone walls half-swallowed by forty years of reclaiming forest, a silence hanging over the whole site heavier than simple abandonment should have accounted for.

"Goddess," Rurik murmured, reining in beside her, taking in the scale of the destruction. "This wasn't a raid. This was an extermination."

Wren didn't answer, too occupied with the particular, unwelcome recognition settling into her chest — the same low hum of wrongness from the night before, sharper now, more specific, like the ruins themselves were watching the expedition approach and remembering, in whatever way old stone could remember, exactly what had happened here forty years ago.

She was about to find out. She could feel that certainty settling into her bones with the same unmistakable weight as the bond itself, and for the first time since crossing into this territory, she genuinely didn't know whether she was ready for the answer.