Chapter 13

Chapter Thirteen

June's POV

I heard his footsteps on the stairs before I saw him.

I had learned already the particular weight of Cassian's step. Heavier on the left from an old injury he hadn't mentioned but that I had noticed in the way he descended stairs at the end of a long day. Steady and unhurried in a way that communicated everything about the kind of man he was before he even entered a room.

He pushed the library door open and found me in the window seat with the book still closed in my lap where it had been for the last two hours.

"He's gone," Cassian said.

"I know. I watched him leave." I looked at his face, reading it the way I had started reading it without meaning to, cataloguing the small signals. The set of his jaw. The particular quality of the quiet around him. "What did he say."

Cassian came and sat in the chair across from the window seat, forearms on his knees, and told me everything. All of it, without softening the edges or rearranging the order. When he got to the part about what June knew being the real reason Adrian wanted her back, he watched my face carefully.

I had already known.

Not consciously, not in words, but somewhere underneath the fear and the grief and the long months of surviving I had known that Adrian would eventually remember what I had been present for. How many meetings I had sat quietly through. How many conversations had continued around me because I was the Alpha's mate and therefore an extension of him and therefore safe.

"How much did you hear," Cassian asked. Not accusatory. Just direct.

"Enough," I said. "Pack finances that didn't align with what was reported to the regional council. Agreements with two other Alphas that weren't disclosed. A territory dispute that was resolved in a way that was not entirely legal." I looked at my hands. "I didn't fully understand all of it at the time. I wasn't paying close attention because I was too busy trying to be what he wanted me to be." I paused. "But I remember it."

Cassian was quiet for a moment. "Have you told anyone else."

"No. Who would I have told." It wasn't self-pity, just fact. "I had no one outside BloodMoon I trusted and everyone inside it belonged to Adrian."

He nodded slowly. "Okay. This is actually useful."

I looked up at him. "How is this useful. This means he won't stop. If it was just about pride or possession he might eventually decide I wasn't worth the effort. But if he thinks I'm a liability—"

"It means he has something to lose," Cassian said. "Which means he has something to protect. And people protecting something make mistakes that people simply attacking don't make." He held my eyes. "It also means that if this goes to council, you're not just a rejected mate seeking sanctuary. You're a witness to potential violations of Covenant law. That changes your standing considerably."

I turned that over slowly.

"You'd want me to make a formal statement," I said.

"Only if you're willing. And only when you're ready and we have the right support around it." His voice was careful and steady. "I'm not going to use what you know as a tactical move without your full understanding of what it means. This is your story, June. Not mine to deploy."

Something tightened in my throat.

I had spent two years in a pack where everything about me, my history, my pain, my knowledge, had been either dismissed or appropriated. The idea that someone was asking me what I wanted to do with my own experience felt so unfamiliar it almost hurt.

"I need to think about it," I said.

"Take whatever time you need."

Outside, the afternoon light was moving through the pines in long slow angles. The kind of light that made everything look temporarily peaceful regardless of what was underneath it.

"He'll escalate," I said. "Gordan coming here in person was Adrian testing the temperature. When Gordan reports back that you're not going to be pressured, Adrian's next move will be bigger."

"Yes."

"How much bigger depends on how threatened he feels." I pressed my thumbnail into the spine of the book in my lap without thinking. "When Adrian feels cornered he doesn't retreat. He redirects the threat outward. He finds something you care about and he makes you watch him damage it."

The room was very still.

"Is there anyone outside this territory he could use," Cassian asked quietly. "Anyone you care about who isn't protected."

I thought about it honestly and the answer was so bleak it almost made me laugh. "No. He already made sure of that. Isolating me was the first thing he did."

Cassian's jaw moved once.

"Then he'll come for something inside this territory," I said. "He'll look for a vulnerability here."

"Let him look," Cassian said, and his voice had dropped into something low and final that made Elara press forward with a shiver. "He'll find that I've spent seven years making sure there aren't any."

I looked at him sitting there in the amber afternoon light. The certainty in him was not arrogance. It was the specific confidence of someone who had built something real and knew every stone of it.

"You can't guarantee that," I said softly. "No one can guarantee that."

"No," he agreed. "But I can guarantee that whatever he tries, he won't find you unprotected in the middle of it." His eyes held mine. "That part I can promise."

I believed him.

That was still the part that undid me every time.

Not the strength of him or the steadiness. The fact that I believed him without having to talk myself into it. That something in me that had been closed and bolted for two cold years simply opened when he spoke.

I looked back out at the pines.

"I'll think about the statement," I said.

"Whenever you're ready," he said.

And we sat together in the quiet library while the light moved slowly across the floor between us.