Chapter 4: The Funeral

The camp was somewhere in the mountains.

That was all I knew for the first few days. They had moved me after the fall, which meant someone had found me at the bottom of that slope before I found my own way out. I had fragments of memory from that, rough hands, something bitter forced between my lips, the jolting movement of being carried. When I came back to full consciousness I was in a small stone structure with a dirt floor and a single door reinforced with iron bolts on the outside.

My shoulder had been set. Badly, but set. My ribs had been wrapped in something. They had fixed me up just enough to keep me functional, which told me the same thing the conversation in the truck had told me. I had value to someone. Live value specifically.

I tested the door on the first day. The hinges, the bolts, the gap at the bottom, the way the frame sat in the stone. I looked for weaknesses the way Damon had trained me to look for weaknesses. There were not many. Whoever had built this place had built it to hold wolves whose shifting ability was being suppressed.

I tried to shift anyway.

Nothing. The drug, or something they were putting in the water or food they gave me, was keeping my wolf completely buried. I could feel her distantly the way you can feel a word sitting just behind the tip of your tongue. Present but completely unreachable.

I tried the bond again that night.

Still silence.

I lay on the dirt floor and pressed my fist against my sternum where the bond lived and I talked to him in my head the way I had no other way to do. I told him I was alive. I told him not to believe whatever they were saying. I told him I was coming home.

The silence on the other end did not change.

I told him anyway. Every night. It was the only thing I had.

On the third day, I found a loose stone in the back wall.

It was not loose enough to matter yet. But it was looser than the stones around it and when the guard brought my food in the evening I sat with my back to that wall and my hands behind me and I worked at it. Slowly. Carefully. A small amount of pressure sustained over a long time.

On the fifth day, I tried to rush the guard when he came in.

I almost made it to the door.

Almost.

I woke up the next morning with a new cut above my eyebrow and both wrists chained to a bolt in the wall, a shorter chain than before, and the loose stone in the back wall had been filled in with fresh mortar.

They were watching more closely than I had thought.

I had to be smarter.

I started over.

Back home, the lie was spreading the way lies do when they have been built carefully by someone patient and clever.

Vanessa was patient. Vanessa was very clever.

She did not push. She did not advocate loudly for her version of events. She simply made herself available and present and sympathetic. She sat with the elders when they gathered. She offered small additions to her original account when asked, always framed as reluctant memory, things she had not wanted to mention but felt obligated to share now that the situation had become what it had become. She cried at the right moments. She was gentle with Damon in a way that looked like friendship and concern and nothing more than that.

Damon was not functioning well.

He was still searching. He had warriors out in every direction. He had sent word to three allied packs asking for information about rogue activity near the mountain roads. He was not sleeping. He was barely eating. The Beta was managing most of the day-to-day pack business because Damon was spending every hour he was not giving orders sitting at his desk reading that letter over and over.

He did not believe it.

But not believing was costing him more than certainty would have, either way. The not knowing was eating him from the inside in a way that showed on his face and in his eyes and in the way he moved through the pack house like a man walking through water.

The Beta told him to rest.

Damon told the Beta to find his mate.

The burned body was found on the eighth day.

A patrol near the northern mountain road came across the remains of a small fire at an abandoned rogue camp. Among the ash and debris, there was a body. Female. Burned severely enough that identification was not straightforward.

She was wearing my necklace.

The gold chain with the small wolf pendant. The one Vanessa had brought in blood-stained on the first morning. Someone had put it back on a body and burned it and left it to be found and it had been found exactly on schedule, exactly when the search was losing momentum, exactly when the elders were beginning to have the quiet conversations about what the pack did now.

The elders brought in the pack healer to examine the remains.

The healer was thorough and careful and deeply uncomfortable with what she was being asked to determine. The body was too damaged for certainty. She said this clearly and repeatedly. She could not confirm identity from what remained. She could say the build was consistent. She could say the necklace was known to belong to the Luna. She could say the location matched the direction of multiple reported rogue sightings.

She could not say it was Aurora.

She said all of this to the elders with her hands folded in front of her and her eyes very steady and her discomfort visible to anyone paying attention.

The elders thanked her.

Then they declared me dead.

I do not know exactly when it happened. I was in that stone room working on a new weakness I had found in the door frame, a slow patient project that I was not allowing myself to rush. I had no way of knowing what was happening at home. I had no way of knowing that at the moment I was pressing careful steady pressure against a rusted bolt, a room full of old men who had known me for five years were deciding I was gone.

I only found out later.

But sometimes I think about that overlap. Me working patiently on a door, full of intention, full of the absolute certainty that I was getting home. Them sitting in that room being certain I was not coming back. Both things are happening at the same time in the same world.

It still makes something in my chest feel strange.

Damon refused for two days.

That is what the Beta told me later. That was when the elders came to him with their declaration and their decision about a funeral, but Damon refused. He said the evidence was not sufficient. He said a necklace on an unidentified body proved nothing. He said his mate was alive and he would not stand in front of his pack and say otherwise.

He held that position for two days.

I do not know exactly what broke it. The Beta was not specific about that part and I never asked Damon directly, not even later when we were in the same room and the truth was already between us like a wound. I did not ask because I was not sure I could hear the answer without it destroying something in me that I needed to keep intact.

What I know is that on the third day after the declaration, Damon agreed to the funeral.

The Beta said he looked like a man doing something he believed was wrong but could no longer find the strength to keep fighting against. Which is its own kind of breaking. Not the loud kind. The quiet kind that nobody sees happening until it is already done.

The funeral was held at dusk.

Silver Moon Pack gathered in the grounds where the Moon Festival had been held nine days earlier. The ribbons were gone. The tables were gone. In their place was a low stone platform with white flowers laid across it and a carved marker with my name on it that someone had worked through the night to finish in time.

I was not there.

I was in a stone room in the mountains pressing my hands against a door frame and thinking about Damon and talking to him in my head the way I had every night since they took me.

The pack grieved. From what the Beta described they grieved genuinely, which meant something to me when I heard about it later. I had not been wrong about belonging there. I had not been wrong about being loved by those people.

Vanessa stood near the back with her eyes cast down and her hands folded and her expression composed into something that looked like grief if you did not know her face the way I knew her face.

Damon stood at the front.

He did not speak for a long time after the elder finished the formal words. He just stood there looking at my name carved in stone and the Beta said it was the most painful thing he had ever watched, which is saying something because he had been through real battles.

When Damon finally spoke he said only a few words. The Beta remembered them exactly.

He said she was the best thing in his life. He said he was sorry he had not found her. He said he would carry that for the rest of his days.

Then he stopped speaking and looked back at the stone and the white flowers.

It hit him in that moment. While he was standing there at the edge of what he believed was my grave.

A pulse through the bond.

Not the silence he had been living with for nine days. Not the empty nothing that had been sitting in his chest since the festival. Something else. Something that moved through the dead quiet like a sound in an empty room. Faint and broken and very far away but undeniably there.

Undeniably me.

He went completely still.

The Beta noticed. Touched his arm. Asked if he was alright.

Damon did not answer. He had his hand pressed against his chest and his eyes were closed and he was reaching, the way I had been reaching every night from my side, pushing everything he had toward that thread between us.

The voice that came through was barely a whisper. Fragmented. Like a signal breaking up over a vast distance.

But he heard it.

Three words.

The last line I will give you before everything that came after.

“Damon… I’m alive.”