Wren POV
Wren told Daya everything before the sun was fully up.
She did not plan to. She had planned to sleep first, process second, talk third. But when Daya knocked at seven in the morning with two cups of kitchen tea she had clearly smuggled out under her jacket, Wren opened her mouth and the whole thing came out in one long quiet rush. The midnight fire under her skin. The forest. The shift. Ember. The white fur and the gold eyes and the size of herself that she still had not fully processed. And then the bond. The three flames detonating in her chest at the same time. The directions they pointed. The names she knew without being told.
She said the names.
Daya put her tea down very carefully on the floor beside her.
Then she sat very still.
Wren watched her work through it. Daya's face did several things in quick succession shock, confusion, a flash of something almost like fear, and then a long moment of very focused thought that meant she was taking it apart piece by piece the way she did with everything complicated.
The silence lasted almost a full minute.
"That," Daya finally said, "is the most incredible and terrible thing I have ever heard in my life."
"I know."
"All three of them."
"Yes."
"Zane, Kai, and River Reid."
"Yes."
"The three people who have made your life the most difficult."
"Daya."
"I am just confirming the full picture." She picked her tea back up. Her hand was not entirely steady. "And none of them felt it."
"None of them reacted at all." Wren paused. "Except River saw me in the woods afterward. He looked at me like I do not know how to describe it. Like something moved in him. But then he shut it down and left."
"He did not feel the bond."
"No. It was something else. Something confused. Like an echo he could not identify."
Daya was quiet again. Wren let her think. Outside the small window the pack was waking up, the usual morning sounds starting, ordinary life moving forward like nothing had changed. Inside this room everything had changed.
"A one-sided mate bond is not natural," Daya said finally. Her voice was careful now. Slow. "I looked it up once, a long time ago, because I read something about it in the archive history books. It does not happen on its own. The bond either connects both sides or it does not form at all. That is how it works. That is how it has always worked."
Wren already knew where this was going. She had been sitting with it since the forest.
"Someone made it this way," she said.
"Yes."
"The payment record. Maren. Six years ago."
Daya looked at her. "The week of your sixteenth birthday."
They sat with that together. Wren turned it over in her mind slowly. Six years ago someone had paid a witch a very large sum of money to do something that needed to be done around the time Wren turned sixteen. Around the time a wolf's bond sense first started waking up, even before the shift. Around the time the connection between fated mates first began to stir at the edges. Someone had known the bond was coming. Someone had moved to stop the brothers from feeling it before it could fully form.
Someone had decided that Wren Cole's mate bond was a problem that needed to be solved.
She sat with that feeling. She let it move through her fully the anger, the grief, the sheer exhaustion of understanding that this too, this most fundamental thing, had been taken from her deliberately. She had spent years believing she was defective. Broken. Too slow, too late, too weak for her wolf to come. She had carried that like a stone around her neck for years and it had not been true. None of it had been true. She had not been weak. She had been stopped.
There was a difference between those two things that she felt all the way down to her bones.
Something cold and clear settled over her. Not rage. Not yet. Something quieter than rage and in some ways more dangerous. Certainty. She was not broken. She had been suppressed. She had not failed. She had been blocked. And every person who had looked at her with pity or contempt for the past two years had been responding to a lie someone constructed carefully and paid good money to maintain.
She wanted to know who. She already suspected. But she wanted proof.
"We need to find Maren," Wren said.
"I know."
"She can tell us exactly what the curse does and who paid for it."
"I know." Daya hesitated. "Wren. If it is who we think it is "
"Then we need to know that too." Wren's voice was steady. "I am not running anymore. I changed my mind."
Daya looked at her for a long moment. Then she nodded once, firmly, like a decision being made.
They spent an hour going over what Daya had found in the archive. The payment record. The file with her parents' names. The Crescent title printed underneath in faded official ink. Wren kept coming back to that. Crescent Alpha Pair. She did not know what it fully meant yet but the pendant around her neck glowed every time she looked at the paper and that felt like an answer trying to reach her from somewhere she did not yet have access to.
She walked Daya out just before pack breakfast and went back to her room.
The jacket was on the floor outside her door.
She stopped.
She had forgotten about it in the hours since the forest, pushed out by everything else. Now she looked at it folded neatly on the ground where someone had left it and she knew without picking it up whose it was. She did not know how she knew. She just did.
She picked it up.
The bond flame connected to River the deep, quiet, coal-burning one flared so bright and so sudden that her knees buckled and she had to put her hand against the wall to stay standing. Not pain. The opposite of pain. Warmth so strong it was almost unbearable, rushing up her arm from where her fingers held the jacket, spreading through her chest and her throat and behind her eyes.
She sat down on the floor right there in the hallway.
She sat with the jacket in her lap and the flame burning in her chest and tried to breathe normally.
He had seen her in the forest and said nothing. He had reported her to pack enforcers twice and gotten her punished for things she did not do. He had looked at her for years with the same cold nothing as his brothers.
And he kept leaving her things.
Food she had not asked for. A jacket in the rain. This.
Wren stared at the wall across from her and thought about the look on his face in the forest before the mask came back down.
Something is wrong with this, she thought. Not just the curse. Something specific to River. Something he knows or feels or is fighting that the other two are not.
She folded the jacket carefully and held it against her chest.
The flame burned on quietly.
She needed to find Maren. She needed answers. But she also needed to understand why, of all the people in this pack, the one whose small quiet kindnesses she could not explain was the same one who had hurt her in the most careful and deliberate ways.
What are you hiding, she thought in River's direction.
Deep in her chest, Ember pressed forward like she already knew.