Chapter 20 020

Chapter 20 020


Zelyne's POV

Three weeks after the coronation, two weeks into watching Dominic become something slightly different under the weight of the Alpha title — harder at the edges, more closed off, the gap between us quietly widening again just when it had started to feel like something else.

I'd been going through the room properly for the first time. Not because anything prompted it — just one of those mornings where the restlessness needed somewhere to go and cleaning was the most acceptable version of that. Moving things, straightening things, getting into the corners that had been ignored since I arrived.

It was in the back of the wardrobe.

Small. Dark wood, carved with something I didn't recognize — not pack markings, something older than that, the grooves worn smooth like it had been handled a long time before it ended up here. I turned it over in my hand and my wolf went absolutely still.

Not the alert stillness from the corridor outside Aliya's room.

Different. Flatter. Like something pressing down.

I sat on the edge of the bed and held it and paid attention to what my body was doing and what my body was doing was — less. Everything in me was quieter with this thing in my hand than it had been a minute ago. The warmth in my chest that had been building since the coronation, the steady presence of my wolf that I'd started to rely on without realizing — both of them muted. Like a hand over a flame. Not out. Just smaller.

I put it down on the bed.

The warmth came back.

I picked it up.

It went quiet again.

I sat there and did that three more times just to be sure and each time it was the same — the object in my hand and everything in me going smaller, the object on the bed and everything coming back.

I wrapped it in the corner of my pillowcase so I didn't have to touch it and went to find Sera.

\---

She was in the garden.

She was always in the garden in the mornings now, ever since I'd started using it. We'd fallen into a quiet habit of it — her working, me sitting, not always talking, sometimes just existing in the same space which was its own kind of company.

She looked up when I came in and saw my face and put down what she was holding.

I unwrapped the object and held it out.

She looked at it without touching it. For a long moment she just looked.

"Where did you find this," she said.

"Back of the wardrobe. Hidden."

She looked up at me. "How long has it been there."

"I don't know. Since before I arrived maybe. I don't know."

She took it from me carefully, two fingers only, like she didn't want more contact with it than necessary. Turned it over. Looked at the carvings.

"Do you know what it is," I said.

"Yes." She set it down on the garden wall. Stepped back from it slightly. "It's a suppression seal." She looked at me. "Old craft. Not pack magic — older than that, the kind that doesn't get used anymore because most people don't know how." A pause. "Someone put this where you'd be close to it. Where you'd sleep next to it every night."

I looked at it sitting on the wall. Small and dark and unremarkable looking. Just a piece of carved wood.

"My wolf," I said.

"Yes," Sera said. "Your wolf."

I stood there and let that settle.

All those years. All those mornings pressing my hand to my chest and finding nothing, convincing myself it was just how I was built, that maybe some people just didn't get that part. Every girl I knew with her stories about the first time her wolf surfaced — the heat, the rush, the feeling of being whole — and me with just the quiet, just the absence, just the particular loneliness of being missing something everyone else seemed to have.

Not broken.

Blocked.

Someone had done this deliberately. Put that thing in my wardrobe and let me sleep next to it and made sure my wolf stayed down.

"Who," I said. Quiet.

Sera looked at me carefully. Like she was deciding how much to say.

"You already know," she said.

I did.

I'd known since the corridor. Since Darius's warning. Since every interaction with Aliya that left me feeling checked and assessed and handled.

I knew.

Hearing it confirmed was different though. Hearing it confirmed did something specific to the thing that had been building quietly in my chest since I arrived here — the patience, the carefulness, the keeping my face right and my cards close. It didn't make me want to blow anything open. Didn't make me want to run to Dominic or Kael or anyone.

It made me go very still.

The same way my wolf had gone still when I held that object.

Except this was the opposite kind of still.

This was the kind that meant I was paying attention.

\---

I didn't put it back.

I thought about it — thought about the possibility that leaving it out would signal something, that Aliya would notice and know and move faster. But I couldn't make myself put it back in that wardrobe and sleep next to it another night.

I wrapped it back in the pillowcase and that evening when Dominic was out I took it to the far end of the garden and buried it deep under the roots of the old rose bush in the corner, the wild one nobody had ever cut back.

Patted the dirt back down.

Stood up.

My wolf moved in my chest — not a flicker, not a surge, just a steady warm presence settling in like she was making herself at home for the first time.

I stood in the garden in the dark and pressed my hand to my chest and she pressed back and I almost laughed out loud at the feeling of it.

There you are, I thought.

I've been looking for you my whole life.