Chapter 38

Wren

Ezra didn't answer right away, and the silence stretched long enough that Sable finished securing their prisoner and the rest of the pack began the grim work of treating wounds and counting losses before he finally spoke.

"Not here," he said quietly. "Not in front of the whole pack, half of them still bleeding from tonight. Come to my quarters. I'll tell you everything I know, and I should have told you years ago."

She followed him to the small quarters he'd kept since relinquishing the Alpha seal, and found him pulling an old, weathered book from beneath a loose floorboard she hadn't known existed in six years of visiting this room — a book bound in dark leather, considerably older than anything else Wren had seen at Nightshade, its pages covered in the same script from the vault beneath Ashenmoor.

"I found this the year before you arrived," Ezra said, setting it carefully on the table between them. "Buried in the old records, mostly forgotten, the last surviving Nightshade Alpha's private journal before the pack fell into decline. I couldn't read most of it — the old script, same as the vault. Took me years, working with what fragments I could translate, to understand even part of what it says." He met her eyes, something heavy with guilt behind his weathered expression. "There's a prophecy in here, Wren. About a wolf born after the bloodline goes dormant, who carries more of the old power than anyone in living memory. About a reckoning between that wolf and whatever destroyed Ashenmoor, one that decides whether the god-blessed lines survive at all, or finally go extinct the way the Moonless have been trying to make happen for longer than anyone alive remembers."

Wren sat very still, absorbing this, six years of her life reorganizing itself around a piece of information she hadn't known existed until this exact moment. "You knew this. When I fought off those rogues, six years ago. You already suspected."

"I suspected. I didn't know for certain, not for a long time, and by the time I was certain enough to be sure, you'd already built something real here, something that didn't need the weight of an old prophecy sitting on top of it." Ezra's voice cracked, guilt finally breaking through decades of careful control. "I told myself I was protecting you. Giving you the chance to just be Alpha, just be yourself, without an ancient book deciding what you were supposed to become. I understand now that might have been a mistake. I'm sorry, Wren. I should have trusted you with this a long time ago."

"What does it actually say. The prophecy." Wren's voice came out steadier than she felt, old habit reasserting itself even now. "Don't soften it for me, Ezra. I need to know exactly what I'm supposed to be facing."

Ezra opened the book carefully to a marked page, tracing the old script with a finger that wasn't entirely steady. "As best I've translated it — and I'll admit the language is imprecise, prophecy usually is — it says the bloodline's return marks the beginning of a reckoning. That the one who carries it will face a choice the old Nightshade Alphas were never strong enough to make: destroy the Moonless completely, ending the threat forever but at a cost the book doesn't specify clearly, or fail, and watch the bloodline finally go extinct the way the Moonless have wanted for generations." He looked up at her, old eyes heavy with the weight of finally sharing this. "There's a line, near the end, that I've turned over more times than I can count. 'She will not stand alone, if she is wise enough to let herself be found.' I always assumed that meant Nightshade — the pack, the family you'd build. I'm less certain of that, the longer I sit with it tonight."

Wren sat with the weight of it a long moment, the old ache behind her ribs — quieter these days, but never fully silent — settling into something that felt, for the first time, less like a wound and more like a purpose. "Kade," she said quietly, understanding arriving slowly, certainly. "That's who the line means, isn't it. Not just found by my pack. Found by him too."

"I don't know for certain. Prophecy's rarely that convenient." But something gentle crossed Ezra's weathered face, an old man who'd watched her build an entire life from nothing now watching her step toward something considerably larger than either of them had planned for. "I know this much, Wren. Whatever's coming, you're not facing it as an omega nobody bothered to see. You're facing it as Nightshade's Alpha, with a pack that would follow you into the Moonless's teeth without hesitation, an alliance across three territories, and — if I'm reading tonight correctly — a man who just rode three days to make sure his own house was in order specifically so he could stand beside you when this reckoning finally arrives."

Wren looked down at the old book, at six generations of Nightshade history compressed into water-stained pages, and felt something settle into her chest that was equal parts terror and resolve. "Then I suppose we'd better be ready," she said quietly, "for whenever it decides to arrive."