Chapter 31 31

Chapter 31 31
Chapter 31
Daphne's POV

They brought her in at five past eleven.

I was already seated when she arrived, which had been deliberate. I had not wanted to be standing when she came through the door — standing would have made it a greeting, and this was not a greeting. I sat in the chair on the near side of the table with my hands folded on the surface in front of me and my back straight and my face arranged into the neutral expression I had spent years perfecting, the one that gave nothing away before I had decided what to give.

Caspian stood near the window to my right. Not seated, not behind the desk, just present in the room the way he was present in rooms — with the full weight of his authority occupying its own space without requiring demonstration.

Edgar was at the door.

She came in between two of the border wolves who had gone to collect her from the east gate, and they stepped back once she was through the door and took up positions either side of it, and for a moment she simply stood there in the room and I looked at her and she looked at me and the room held its breath around all of us.

She was older than I had imagined her.

I had no reference point — no photographs, no memories, only the childhood understanding of mother as concept rather than person. I had filled the absence with something vague and soft, the way children fill absences, and what stood in front of me now was neither vague nor soft. She was perhaps fifty, slim, with the particular upright quality of someone who had learned to carry themselves carefully over a long time. Her hair was dark with grey at the temples. Her eyes were green.

The same green as mine.

That was the thing I had been told and had understood intellectually and had not been prepared for in the actual moment of it. The eyes were not similar. They were the same — the same shape, the same depth of colour, the same slight downward tilt at the outer corners that I had looked at in mirrors my entire life without knowing where they came from.

I watched her face.

The first second.

What happened in it was not what I had expected. I had anticipated calculation, or the managing of a prepared response, or the careful performance of emotion that people produce when they know they are being watched and assessed. What I saw instead was something that arrived before any of that — a flinch, almost, something that moved through her whole face at the sight of mine and was gone in less than a second but was entirely real while it was there.

It looked like pain.

Old pain. The kind that has been carried so long it has become structural, part of how a person holds themselves, and only surfaces when something external strikes it directly.

She sat down across from me without being asked.

For a moment neither of us spoke.

"You look like him," she said.

It was not what I had expected her to say first. I had expected to be the one to speak first — I had planned to be, had prepared the opening, the questions in their order. Instead she had spoken and what she had said had taken the ground slightly out from under me because it was not strategic and it was not an opening position. It was just a thing that had come out of her when she saw my face, the way things come out when the prepared version fails.

"My father," I said.

"Yes," she said. "Around the eyes. And the way you're looking at me." A pause. "He used to look at people like that. Like he was reading something they hadn't said yet."

I held her gaze. "Who are you," I said.

She blinked. "I'm your mother."

"That's a relationship," I said. "Not an answer. Who are you."

Something shifted in her expression. Not offense. More like recognition — the look of someone who has just understood that the person across from them is not going to be easy to manage, and is not entirely surprised by that.

"My name is Seren," she said. "I was born in the Silverfang Pack. Your grandfather's pack. I left when I was nineteen."

"Why," I said.

She glanced briefly at Caspian near the window. Then back at me. "Because your grandfather wanted to use me the way he used everyone around him," she said. "As a piece in something larger. I was supposed to be placed strategically. A marriage, an alliance." Her hands were folded on the table, very still. "I refused. I ran. I found your father." A pause. "He was outside pack society. Completely. Living in the borderlands. He was the last person Quintus would have chosen for me, which was most of why I chose him."

"And then," I said.

"And then you were coming," she said. "And Quintus found out. And everything changed very quickly."

The room was quiet. Outside the window the winter sun had held, thin and pale, doing its limited best against the cold.

"He threatened you," I said.

"He did more than threaten," she said. "He told me that if I brought you back into the world and your father's bloodline became known, he would have your father killed and take you himself. Raise you in Silverfang as whatever he needed you to be." She looked at her hands briefly and then back at me. "He told me the safest thing I could do for you was to disappear. To let you be registered as the child of a dead woman. To give you no connection to me that could be used against either of us."

I sat with that.

"So you chose to be dead," I said.

"I chose for you to live," she said. "It is not the same thing."

"It felt the same," I said. "From where I was."

She did not look away from that. She received it without deflecting, which I had not expected and which moved something in me against my better judgment.

"I know," she said quietly. "I know it did."

The room held the silence between us. Caspian had not moved from the window. I was aware of him with the peripheral awareness I always had of him now, steady and present at the edge of everything, and the steadiness of it allowed me to stay in the conversation without the ground feeling as uncertain as it might have otherwise.

"You said in the letter there are things about this pack I don't know," I said. "Before I ask you about my grandfather, about how long you've been in contact with him, about all of it — I want to know what you meant by that."

She looked at me steadily.

Then she looked at Caspian.

"What I meant," she said carefully, "is that the person who killed his brother is the same person who has been reporting your location to Quintus since the day you arrived here."

The silence that followed was a different kind than any that had come before it.

I did not look at Caspian. I kept my eyes on her face and kept my face still and felt the room reorganise itself around the sentence she had just placed in the middle of it, quiet and precise as a blade set down on a table.

"How do you know that," I said.

"Because," she said, "I have been watching this pack for four years."