Chapter 15 What the Night Showed Me
Bella’s POV
I stayed on the edge of that bed for a long time.
Not frozen. Just thinking.
Going to Rhys with what I’d seen was the obvious move. Which was exactly why it wouldn’t work.
The problem was simple. The Alpha currently thought I was a lying, ex-messaging human wife who had no business being in his pack in the first place. So I could walk into his study tomorrow morning and your brother is meeting outside wolves at midnight and he would look at me with that closed, careful expression, and the question behind his eyes would be the same one it always was. Why should I believe you?
And I wouldn’t have an answer.
Not yet.
What I needed first was something solid.
Something that didn’t depend on him believing me.
Evidence, I thought. Get the evidence first. Then talk.
It wasn’t the most comfortable plan. Comfortable would have been pulling a blanket over my head and letting someone else figure it out. But comfortable had never really been an option available to me, so I didn’t spend long grieving it.
I made a mental list of what I already knew. Ronan’s offer. The fence meeting. The outside wolves. The careful way he had never once asked what I actually wanted. Then I made a second, shorter list of what I needed to confirm before any of it became useful.
The fence itself was a starting point. Whatever those figures had left behind, footprints, anything dropped, any sign of where they’d come from, might tell me something about who they were.
Tomorrow morning. Before the grounds filled up.
I nodded to myself, which felt a little silly but helped, and stood up.
I needed water. My throat was dry and my head was developing the specific ache that came from being awake at midnight running through worst-case scenarios.
I pulled on a cardigan, opened my door quietly, and went down the corridor toward the kitchen.
\-----
The manor was different at this hour.
All the deliberate, ordered energy of it was gone. No staff moving with purpose, no sounds drifting in from the training grounds. Just stone and low firelight and the particular quiet of a building that had been standing long enough to be comfortable in its own silence.
I got my water. Stood in the kitchen for a moment, drinking it slowly, and let my mind go briefly, gratefully blank.
Then I started back.
I was halfway down the main corridor when I saw him.
Rhys.
Standing at the far end, at the wide window that looked out over the front grounds. Still dressed from earlier, or maybe he hadn’t slept either. His back was to me. One hand braced against the wall beside the window frame. The other hung at his side, loose.
He hadn’t heard me.
I stopped.
I should have kept walking. Should have gone straight back to my room before he turned around and found me standing in the corridor at midnight holding a glass of water like a person with very poor sleep habits.
But I didn’t move.
Because the thing about Rhys, the infuriating, confusing, impossible thing, was that he was different when no one was watching.
All of it was gone. The controlled posture, the careful blankness, the expression that never let anything in or out. Just a man standing at a window in the dark, looking at something outside, wearing on his face something I hadn’t seen from him once since I arrived.
He looked tired.
Not physically, though probably that too. The other kind. The kind that settles in when you’ve been holding too much for too long without putting any of it down. His jaw wasn’t set. His shoulders sat lower than usual. There was a line between his brows that looked like it had been there for months.
He looked, just in this moment, like someone who had not been fine for quite some time.
I stood in the middle of the corridor and didn’t breathe too loudly.
He reached up and pressed two fingers to his temple, slowly, like something hurt. Then he dropped his hand and stood there looking at the grounds.
Something tightened in my chest. Sharp enough to make me notice it.
Not sympathy exactly, or not only that. Something quieter.
I had worn that same expression before. In my father’s house. In mirrors I thought no one was watching. That particular look of a person carrying something heavy with no one to set it down in front of.
He wasn’t performing anything right now.
And what was underneath, when Rhys wasn’t performing, was someone carrying a very heavy thing with very little help.
I took one careful step back.
The floorboard creaked.
Of course it did.
He turned.
We looked at each other across the length of the corridor. His expression reset almost immediately, that familiar careful blankness dropping back into place like something picked up off a table by reflex.
But not fast enough.
For two full seconds, before it closed off, I saw it clearly. The tiredness. The strain. And something else underneath both of them, a flash of something unguarded that was there and gone before I could name it.
“Couldn’t sleep,” I said, because the silence needed something and I couldn’t think of anything better.
He said nothing.
“The water helped,” I added, and held up the glass slightly, in case he needed evidence I had a legitimate reason to be standing in his corridor at midnight.
His eyes moved to the glass. Then back to my face.
“Go back to bed,” he said. Quiet. Controlled.
“Working on it,” I said.
I walked back to my room and didn’t look behind me.
\-----
I was up before anyone else in the morning.
The grounds were still grey and cool, the light low and soft, the kind of early that felt borrowed. I pulled my jacket tight and crossed the grounds at a steady pace, heading for the outer fence like I was simply out for air.
Which I was.
The fence investigation was incidental.
Obviously.
I reached the far edge and slowed.
The ground here was softer than the maintained paths. Real earth, not stone, damp from the night’s chill. I walked along the inside of the fence slowly, eyes down, looking for anything the figures might have left behind.
Mostly I found mud.
I was nearly at the point where I’d seen Ronan standing when something caught my eye.
A strip of dark fabric, maybe two inches wide, snagged on the lowest bar of the fence. Torn at the edges, rough, not cut. Pulled free by someone moving in a hurry.
I crouched down.
The fabric was heavy and coarse, nothing like what anyone in Rhys’s pack wore. The color was wrong too. A deep charcoal with a texture I hadn’t seen on anyone here since I arrived.
I looked at the ground just beyond it.
The mud on the other side of the fence, right at the base, had been pressed down and partially dried overnight. Footprints, several of them, overlapping. And in the middle of them, a separate impression. Round, small, deliberate. Not a boot.
I leaned in as close as the bars allowed.
Pressed into the mud, clean enough to still be visible, was a circular mark.
A wax seal.
Something had been set down here, a container, a letter, something, and the seal had pressed clean into the soft ground when it was placed down.
The symbol inside the circle was small but clear.
I stared at it.
I didn’t recognize it. Not from anything in the city, not from anything I’d seen since arriving in this pack. Not from any crest or mark or family seal I had ever come across in my entire life.
But it was deliberate. Intentional. The kind of mark that meant something specific to the person who had pressed it there.
I straightened slowly, the torn fabric still between my fingers, my eyes on the impression in the mud.
Ronan knew these wolves.
Not casually. Not as passing strangers. The seal, the carefully arranged meeting, the prepared exit route he had offered me complete with timing and a car waiting. All of it pointed to something planned long before I ever arrived in this pack.
Which meant this had never really been about me at all.
I was just the piece that happened to be in the way.