What They Don't Know

I could not sleep that night.

I lay on my back in the small infirmary room and stared at the ceiling and listened to the sounds of Nightfall Pack settling into its night around me, the distant footsteps in the hallways above, the occasional low voice somewhere down the corridor, the sound of wind moving through the pine trees outside my window. It was all completely unfamiliar and I was too exhausted to sleep and too wound up to rest and my mind would not stop going where I did not want it to go.

It kept going back to Silverstone.

I kept thinking about what the pack must look like right now, whether the celebration after the ceremony had continued or whether the wrongness of what happened had settled over everything the way it had settled over me. I thought about the great hall full of wolves eating and drinking and pretending that watching their Luna candidate fall to the ground and get escorted to the border was a normal thing to witness. I thought about the torches still burning in the ceremonial circle and the stone floor where I had pressed my palms trying to find something solid to hold onto.

I thought about Caden.

I did not want to think about him but I could not seem to stop. I kept seeing his face at the altar, that careful composed expression that had not shifted once the entire time, not when he said the words, not when I fell, not when three hundred wolves watched me walk out of that circle alone. I had spent six years learning every version of his face and I had never seen that particular version before, the one that looked completely certain and completely unreachable at the same time. I did not know what to do with the fact that the man I thought I knew better than anyone had stood in front of me and shown me a face I had never seen.

I wondered if he was sleeping right now.

Probably, I thought, and the thought sat in my chest like something cold and heavy.

Probably he was sleeping fine, with Selene beside him in the room that had felt like home to me for three years, in the bed I had sat on the edge of a hundred times waiting for him to come back from late night Alpha duties, in the packhouse that still had my handwriting on the supply lists in the kitchen and my training schedule pinned to the board in the hallway. All of that was still there and I was not, and life in Silverstone was probably moving forward exactly the way life always did after something difficult, by simply continuing.

I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth and breathed through it slowly.

The thing that kept catching me off guard was not the anger, although the anger was there, sitting low and constant underneath everything else. It was not even the grief, although that was there too, enormous and shapeless and impossible to look at directly. The thing that kept catching me was the specific particular pain of realizing that I had not known him as well as I thought I did. Six years of choosing someone and believing you understood them and then discovering there was an entire version of them you had never been allowed to see. That was its own kind of loss, separate from everything else, the loss of the story I had been telling myself about who we were to each other.

I rolled onto my side and looked at the pale rectangle of the window and the dark sky beyond it. My arm had stopped hurting completely, which still made no sense to me when I thought about it, and the rejection bond was doing its low persistent pulse through my chest that I was beginning to accept as simply the new background noise of my existence. It hurt less when I did not focus on it directly, which seemed like a reasonable metaphor for most things in my life right now.

I thought about Selene.

She had been in Silverstone for two years.

Two years of training alongside the pack, eating in the great hall, joining the women's warrior group that I led every Tuesday and Thursday morning. Two years of smiling at me across tables and asking about my training techniques and once, memorably, telling me over dinner that she thought Caden and I were perfect together and that she hoped things worked out for us. I had thanked her. I had genuinely thanked her and meant it and thought she was kind for saying it.

The memory made me feel sick in a way that had nothing to do with the rejection bond.

I did not understand yet what Selene was or what she had done or how deep the thing she had built inside Silverstone actually went. All I understood in that moment, lying in the dark in a stranger's pack with the night settling around me, was that she had come to the ceremony wearing white, and that white dress had not been a coincidence or an accident or a poor choice of outfit. She had known exactly what was going to happen that night and she had dressed for it, and that single detail told me that whatever I thought I had understood about the last two years of my life was significantly less than the full picture.

I was still turning that thought over in my mind when I heard something outside my door.

It was quiet and careful, the sound of someone moving slowly in the hallway and trying not to make much noise. I held very still and listened, and then the sound stopped completely and the hallway went quiet again. I lay there for a moment and then I pushed back the blanket and padded quietly to the door and opened it a crack and looked out into the dim corridor.

The hallway was empty in both directions.

But on the floor directly outside my door, sitting on a small wooden tray, was a bowl of something warm and steaming, a cup of water, and a piece of bread still soft enough that it had clearly been made recently. I looked at it for a long moment and then looked up and down the empty corridor again, but there was nobody there in either direction and no sound of retreating footsteps anywhere.

I picked the tray up and looked at it carefully. There was no note. No explanation. Nothing to tell me who had left it or why or what I was supposed to make of the fact that someone in this pack had gotten up in the middle of the night to bring food to a stranger who had arrived on their border two days ago with nothing.

I carried it back inside and sat on the edge of the bed and ate every single bite of it, and I sat in the quiet of the room afterward and thought about the hot meal and the empty hallway and the absence of any note, and I felt something shift very slightly in the tight closed place in my chest that had not moved at all since the Blood Moon ceremony.

It was small and I did not trust it yet and I was not ready to name it. But it was there.