Chapter 10 Everything you didn't tell me

Chapter 10 Everything you didn't tell me
Caden
He took her to the overlook.
It was the highest point on the eastern edge of Ashveil, a flat shelf of rock above the tree line where the whole town spread out below like something from a storybook, the church spire, the diner lights coming on in the early dusk, the forest rolling out in every direction like a dark green sea. He came here when he needed to think. It had always felt like a place where things could be said plainly.
He was going to need that.
Scarlett sat on the rock beside him with her knees pulled up and her jacket zipped to the collar and said nothing, which was one of the things about her he'd come to understand, she didn't fill silence with noise. She waited. She let things arrive in their own time.
He didn't deserve that patience right now.
"I need to tell you something," he said. "Several things. And I need you to let me get through all of it before you"
"Caden." Her voice was quiet. "Just say it."
He looked at her. The last of the evening light was doing something to her eyes that made them look almost silver, and he thought about the photograph she didn't know he knew about and her mother's handwriting and Ashveil, E says it's time and felt the weight of everything he was about to put on her shoulders like a physical thing.
"Werewolves are real," he said. "Vampires are real. Most of what lives in Ashveil is one or the other." He paused. "I'm a werewolf. Alpha of the pack here."
She looked at him.
He waited for the laugh, the denial, the automatic reaching for a rational explanation.
She said, very carefully, "Keep going."
He did.
He told her about Ashveil, the territory, the pack, the vampire community that occupied the north side of town with the armed neutrality of two groups who had learned that coexistence was preferable to the alternative. He told her about Dorian Blackthorn, who he was, who his father was. He told her about hybrids what they were, how rare, what they meant in the politics of both worlds.
Then he told her about her.
He watched her face as he said it. She had gone very still in the way she did when she was processing something too large for immediate reaction, her eyes fixed on the town below, her hands loose on her knees.
"Your mother," he said, as gently as he knew how, "was vampire nobility. Old bloodline. Your father is... was ...pack. Not Ashveil's pack, but wolf. Which makes you"
"Both," she said.
"Both."
The word sat between them.
"The pull," she said, after a moment. "Since I got here. The compass feeling"
"Mate bond," he said. And then, because there was no version of this that was served by half measures "Mine. You're my mate, Scarlett. I've known since the night you arrived."
She turned to look at him then. Really look. Those silver eyes moving over his face with an expression he couldn't fully read, not anger, not fear. Something vast and very controlled.
"You knew," she said. "What I was. Since the beginning."
"Yes."
"And you didn't tell me."
"I was trying to find the right"
"How long?" Her voice hadn't risen. That was almost worse. "How long were you going to let me walk around not knowing what I am while a vampire had his hand around my throat?"
He had no good answer for that.
"I'm sorry," he said. He meant it with everything he had. "I handled it wrong. I was trying to protect you and I made the wrong call and I'm sorry."

Scarlett
She heard all of it.
She sat on that rock above Ashveil as the last light left the sky and she heard every word and felt her entire life rearranging itself around the new information the way a room looked different once you'd moved the furniture, same walls, same dimensions, completely unrecognisable.
Werewolves. Vampires. A mate bond. Her mother, vampire nobility, old bloodline, and suddenly the photograph made sense, the woman standing beside her mother in the forest, the formal way she held herself, Ashveil, E says it's time, her mother had known this place. Had known what it was. Had known what Scarlett would be.
And Dale had known too.
That was the part that landed hardest. Not the supernatural architecture of a world she'd apparently been living alongside her whole life without knowing. Not even the mate bond, which she was going to need considerably more time with.
Dale had known.
Every silence. Every deflection. Every time she'd asked about her mother and he'd shut the door, he'd known. He'd looked at her her whole life with that unreadable expression, grief and anger fused together, and he'd known exactly why she was different and he'd said nothing. Let her think she was ordinary. Let her think she was alone in it.
She stood up.
"Scarlett"
"I need to go home," she said.
Caden stood too, immediately. "Let me come with you."
"No." She looked at him. His face was open and sorry and she believed the sorry, she did, but that was a separate problem from the one that was currently burning a hole through her chest. "This is something I have to do alone."
"He's not safe when he's"
"Caden." She held his gaze. "I have been managing Dale my whole life. I know exactly what he is." A pause. "I just didn't know what I was. And that's on him."
He looked at her for a long moment with those dark honey eyes and she could feel the pull of the bond telling her to let him come, let him stand beside her, let someone be in her corner for once.
She filed that away for later.
"I'll call you," she said. "After."
She didn't wait for his answer.
The house was lit when she got there. Television on. One beer on the coffee table.
She walked in and didn't take her jacket off.
Dale looked up from the couch. Read her face the way he always could when he was sober enough to bother. Something shifted in his expression, a wariness, the particular alertness of a man who recognised an incoming reckoning.
"Scarlett"
"She was vampire," Scarlett said. "My mother. Old bloodline, apparently. Which makes me half vampire, half wolf, and you knew." She stood in the middle of the living room and looked at him steadily. "You've always known."
The silence was enormous.
Dale set his beer down very carefully.
"Who told you," he said.
"Does it matter?"
"Who told you, Scarlett."
"Someone who was more honest with me in two weeks than you've been in nineteen years." Her voice was still level. She'd promised herself level. "I found the photograph. Mum in Ashveil. Her handwriting on the back. You brought me here, of all the places we've moved, you brought me to the one place she'd been, the one place that" She stopped. Steadied. "Why? Why here, why now, why have you never once"
"Because I was trying to protect you." His voice came out rough. Older than she was used to.
"From what?"
"From all of it." He stood up, and for once he didn't look like a man looking for something to land on. He looked like a man who had been holding something very heavy for a very long time and had finally lost his grip on it. "From the vampires who would have used you. From the pack that would have claimed you. From a world that was going to want things from you the second it knew you existed."
"That wasn't your choice to make."
"You were my daughter. It was the only choice I had."
"I am still your daughter." The level voice cracked, just slightly, on the last word. She let it. "And I have spent my entire life feeling like I didn't fit anywhere and didn't know why and you could have, you could have just told me"
"I know." His voice was rough. "I know, Scarlett."
"Tell me about her." She looked at him with everything she had. "Tell me about my mother. All of it. Right now. No more protecting me from things I have a right to know."
Dale looked at his daughter for a long moment.
Then he sat back down and put his face in his hands and said, "Her name was Evangeline."
Scarlett sat down across from him.
And for the first time in nineteen years, Dale started to talk.