Chapter 3 What Cael doesn't say
He had the dream forty-seven times.
He knew the exact number because after the third week he started keeping a tally in the margin of his intelligence briefings, small marks that he told himself were incidental and that his brother would have had opinions about if he'd noticed them. Rook noticed everything. He had the grace, at least, not to say everything he noticed.
The dream wasn't a nightmare. That was the part that made it worse. He could have handled a nightmare — could have named it as threat-processing, could have done something productive with it, filed it under stress responses of a sitting Alpha during a political escalation period and moved on. But it wasn't that.
It was her hands.
Just her hands, specifically, doing something unremarkable — moving through his hair, maybe, or resting flat on a table in a room he couldn't quite see, silver traced and steady. And his whole body oriented toward those hands the way his wolf oriented toward things it had decided were important, with a total and unhurried certainty that was worse than any urgency.
He always woke before she spoke.
He sat up in the dark of his chambers every time and put his hands on his knees and breathed through the pacing of his wolf, which had not settled for six months now — not truly settled, not the real settling, the kind that meant something had been resolved. It paced and it returned and it pulled, always, along the thread that should have been severed at the ceremony and wasn't. Not severed. Just — changed. Banked. Waiting.
He had done everything correctly. He wanted that on record, at least internally — he had reviewed the decision thoroughly, he had weighed the political calculus, he had considered the Confederation's standing and the council's expectations and the very real fact that arriving at a Bloodmoon ceremony and having his wolf select a Blackmoor omega with no wolf and no bloodline and silver marks that at least three of his council members would have called a bad omen was not a beginning he could afford.
The argument still worked. He was still right about the logic of it.
He just woke up at four in the morning with his wolf pressed against the inside of his ribs, and the ghost of something he couldn't name lived in the margin between sleeping and waking, and increasingly he was having trouble maintaining the fiction that these were unrelated phenomena.
The night before the Bloodmoon
Rook came to find him at midnight.
This wasn't unusual. Rook operated late, always had — he claimed his best thinking happened after ten and Cael had stopped arguing about it years ago because it was simply true. What was unusual was the expression he was wearing when he sat down, which was the expression of a man who had a conversation in his own head and hadn't liked how it resolved.
"The Bloodmoon is tomorrow," Rook said.
"I know."
"Bond selection could go anywhere."
Cael set down the intelligence report. "It won't be a problem."
"How are you certain of that?"
"Pack law is explicit. The Alpha's discretion is absolute when it comes to bond acknowledgment. Whatever the bond selects, I have the authority to override it if it's not strategically viable."
He said it the way he said most things — even, factual, carrying the specific weight of a man who had spent eight years building himself into someone who didn't need to raise his voice to be believed. It was true and he believed it and he had reviewed the relevant pack law twice to make sure he was right.
Rook was quiet for a moment. He had a gift for silences, a specific talent for making the air between words do work. This one meant something on the order of: you're wrong about something and I'm deciding whether telling you which part is my job.
"Get some sleep," Cael said.
Rook stood. He said, at the door: "Just — be fair to whoever it is."
Cael didn't answer. Rook left.
In the morning Cael dressed in ceremony blacks and rode to Blackmoor with his delegation and the complete and entirely misplaced conviction that he had already handled this.
He had. He just hadn't handled it fairly. He understood this now. Understanding it now, six months later, while his wolf paced at four in the morning, was the specific kind of late that didn't offer much of a remedy.
The Voidborne report arrived on a Wednesday.
Three settlements hit in the eastern neutral territory. One taken. The village healer, specifically — a Voidborne acquisition, not a kill, which meant they wanted information. His intelligence chief had flagged it with a note: the neutral-territory healer network appears to have a central node. One individual moving through the entire region, known to every settlement, trusted by the unaffiliated wolf population in a way that pack healers never achieve. If the Voidborne want to map the network, this is the person they'll go for.
He read it twice. Then he read the name at the bottom of the next page, which his intelligence chief had appended as: subject identified, cross-referenced with your Bloodmoon file as a courtesy.
Seraphine Vale.
His wolf went still.
Not the restless pacing of six months. A different kind of still — the kind that was also a gathering. Every alert thing in him narrowing to a single point on the map.
He sat at his desk for a moment and breathed.
Then he called for Rook.
"Go get her," he said, when Rook appeared.
Rook looked at the report. Then he looked at Cael. His face was doing the thing it did when he had opinions he was technically keeping to himself.
"Cael."
"She's a target. She has information we need about the neutral-territory network. It's a straightforward intelligence acquisition." He turned to the window. The training yard below was empty in the morning light, long shadows from the east. "Tell her it's a protection arrangement. Tell her it's temporary, if that helps."
"What do I tell her," Rook said carefully, "when she asks why you care?"
Silence.
"Tell her whatever gets her through the border," Cael said.
He heard Rook stand, cross the room, and leave, and when he was gone Cael put both hands flat on the windowsill and looked at his own reflection in the glass and watched his eyes — gray on a good day, gold when his wolf was close to the surface — bleed slowly from one to the other and back again.
He had not slept through the night in six months.
He had, in that time, reviewed and re-reviewed his reasons and found them sound and also found them, increasingly, beside the point. The point was something else. The point was that his wolf had found something in that clearing and he had spent half a year paying the price of overriding it.
He would not call it a mistake out loud. Not yet. Maybe not ever, in those exact words.
But in the privacy of his own chest, standing at the window while his wolf went quiet for the first time in six months, he let himself think: I was wrong about which parts were strategic.
Then he went back to his desk and got on with it.