Chapter 24 024

Chapter 24 024
Chapter 24
Daphne's POV

The letter arrived at noon.

I was in the library when Mrs. Dorothy brought it — a small envelope, plain, no identifying marks on the outside except my name written in handwriting I didn't recognise. She set it on the table beside my book without comment and left, which told me either she didn't know what it contained or she had decided it was not her business to know.

I looked at it for a while before I picked it up.

The handwriting was careful and deliberate, the kind that comes from someone who learned to write in formal circumstances and has never quite lost the stiffness of it. My name. Just my name, no title, no house, nothing that would have helped whoever delivered it find me if I had been anywhere other than exactly where I was.

I opened it.

The letter was short. Eight lines, maybe nine, written in the same careful hand. I read it twice before the meaning settled.

It was from my mother.

My mother, who died when I was four years old. My mother, whose grave I had visited once at my father's instruction — a small stone in a churchyard two miles from the house, a date of death that predated my earliest memories, a name I had been told was mine by inheritance. My mother, who was not, according to this letter, dead at all.

I set the letter down on the table and looked at the fire.

The words stayed where they were in my mind with the flat insistence of things that are too large to immediately process — present and unignorable and not yet real in the way that reality is real when the body has caught up with the information. I was aware of my own breathing. Aware of the fire. Aware of the particular quality of silence in the library that I had come to find comforting and which now felt slightly different, slightly less certain, as though the room itself had shifted an inch in some direction I couldn't identify.

She was alive.

She had been alive my entire life.

She had found me here.

I picked the letter up again and read it a third time, looking for the thing I had missed, the qualifier that would make it less absolute than it appeared. There wasn't one. The writing was plain and without decoration, the way my own voice was plain when I was saying something I had decided to say without softening. I understood the tone because I used it myself. It was the tone of someone who has rehearsed this enough times that the emotion has been pressed out of the language and only the facts remain, because the facts are the only part you can trust yourself to deliver without falling apart before you finish.

She had not been able to come before, she wrote. She had not been safe. She was not certain she was safe now. But she knew where I was and she knew what I had been brought here for and there was something I needed to know about my bloodline before anyone else told me, or before I told anyone else things I could not yet understand the full weight of.

Do not tell the Alpha, she wrote, at the end. Not yet. Please. There are things about his pack you do not yet know and I need to reach you first.

I folded the letter carefully and held it in both hands.

The fire ticked and settled.

Do not tell the Alpha.

I sat with that sentence and felt it press against everything that had happened in the garden that morning — his arms around me, his mouth on my temple, the way he had said tell me true things, whatever you're thinking, I don't want you deciding I can't handle something. I had said only if you do the same. He had said yes.

Less than four hours ago.

And now I was sitting in his library with a letter from a woman I had been told was dead, asking me to keep something from him before I even understood what the something was.

I pressed my fingers against my eyes.

The architecture of my life had always been other people's decisions layered over each other until the thing underneath — which was me, which was what I actually wanted and knew and felt — was buried so deep it took sustained effort to locate. I had spent the last two weeks beginning, slowly and with great care, to excavate that. To say true things. To sit in rooms without calculating the cost of being in them. To let someone hold me in a cold garden and feel the warmth of it rather than the risk.

And now this.

I looked at the letter again.

My mother's handwriting.

Whatever she was, whatever she had done or not done or been prevented from doing, she had found me. Had known where I was. Had known what I was brought here for, which meant she knew things about my situation that I had not told anyone, which meant her knowledge came from somewhere inside a network I could not yet see the shape of.

That last part was the one that sat uneasily.

How did she know where I was.

Who had told her.

I stood up and went to the window. The courtyard below was busy in the midday way — people crossing, a delivery being received near the east gate, two of the senior pack members in conversation near the main door. Ordinary. The ordinary surface of a place that had, two weeks ago, been entirely foreign to me and had become, in the way that places do when you are finally sleeping properly in them, something close to known.

I looked for him instinctively, which told me something about how quickly the instinct had formed.

He wasn't there.

I looked down at the folded letter in my hand.

My mother had said do not tell the Alpha. She had said there are things about his pack you do not know. She had framed this as protection — for me, the way people always framed the things they withheld as protection.

But I had been protected like this before.

By my father.

By silence dressed up as care.

I folded the letter and put it in my pocket and stood at the window for a long time watching the courtyard and thinking about the difference between a secret kept for someone and a secret kept from them, and how in my experience the difference was rarely as clear as the person asking you to keep it wanted you to believe.