Chapter 10

Ours:

It took two days to find the name her father never got the chance to write down, and when it finally surfaced, it came from a place neither of them had thought to look.

Osric found them first, early on the third morning, out of breath from the walk up to the house, a folder clutched against his chest like something that might blow away if he loosened his grip.

“I kept thinking about what you asked me,” he said, before Elena had even gotten the door fully open. “About who could’ve ordered a file sealed without going through the Alpha directly. I went back through the old council records last night. I found something I should have connected years ago and didn’t, because I never had a reason to look at it sideways until now.”

He spread the folder open on the kitchen table, and Elena felt Damon go very still beside her as Osric’s finger landed on a name at the bottom of a decades-old council ledger.

Councilman Aldric Thorne. Approved: northern boundary resolution, Ashcombe dispute.

“Thorne,” Damon said slowly. “He’s been on the council since before I took the Alpha seat. Longer than that, actually. He was there when my father held it.”

“He’d have been young then,” Osric said, tapping the old signature. “Young enough to have signed this as a junior council member, old enough now to have spent forty years making sure nobody ever looked at it twice. And he was on the council five years ago too, when your rejection ceremony happened, Elena. Close enough to leadership to know exactly how to make a lie look airtight. Close enough to have reasons to want you gone before you ever thought to start asking questions like the ones your father started asking.”

Elena felt something settle into place in her chest, cold and certain. “My father would have gone to the council eventually. With whatever he found.”

“He did,” Osric said quietly, and something in his face told her the rest before he said it. “I checked the visitor log for council chambers. He requested a private meeting with Thorne, three days before he died. Officially, to discuss an unrelated land matter. I don’t think that was ever really what it was about.”

The room went very quiet.

“He confronted him,” Elena said. “He went to the one man who had the most to lose, and he told him what he’d found.”

“And three days later,” Damon finished, his voice gone hard and flat, “he was dead of nothing anyone could explain.”

They didn’t go to Thorne alone. Damon called Beckett first, and Beckett came without hesitation, some of the weight finally lifting off him now that there was something useful to do with the guilt he’d been carrying. He brought two others from the inner circle, quiet, trusted, the kind of pack members who wouldn’t panic or talk before it was time. Renata came too, though Damon hadn’t asked her to; she showed up on her own, pale and resolute, and said only, “I owe her this much,” and nobody argued with her about it.

They found Thorne in his study, an old man now, silver-haired and composed, the kind of composure that had clearly served him well for forty years of exactly this sort of pressure. He didn’t look surprised to see them. If anything, something in his face looked almost relieved, like a man who’d been carrying something heavy long enough that even its discovery came as a kind of release.

“Elena Voss,” he said, setting down the pen in his hand with deliberate calm. “Your father’s daughter, through and through. He was just as stubborn.”

“You killed him.”

“I gave him a choice.” Thorne’s voice stayed even, unhurried, though his hands weren’t quite as steady as his tone. “I told him what would happen to this pack if the truth came out the reparations, the council seats that would fall, the shame that would attach itself to every family whose ancestors benefited from that land, including my own, and including yours, Elena, whether you like hearing that or not. I told him it was better left buried. He disagreed. I made sure his disagreement didn’t travel any further than that room.”

“You had him poisoned,” Damon said, and it wasn’t a question.

“I did what I believed the pack required.” Thorne looked at Damon then, something almost paternal in his expression, the look of an old man addressing a boy he’d watched grow up. “And I arranged what happened between you and Elena for the same reason. A united Alpha pair with Voss blood on one side, curious and unafraid, was always going to find this eventually. I simply preferred to control when.”

“You cost us five years,” Elena said, her voice shaking now, not with fear but with something closer to rage finally given somewhere to land. “You cost my father his life. You built a lie that made me believe I wasn’t wanted, that I wasn’t good enough, that everything I’d built my life on for five years was true, when all of it was just convenient. For you.”

“I’m not going to apologize for choices I’d make again,” Thorne said, and there was no cruelty in it, just a terrible, settled certainty that made it worse. “I did what I believed the pack needed.”

“The pack didn’t need any of it,” Damon said. “It needed the truth, and leadership willing to answer for what their ancestors did instead of burying it under two more generations of lies. You don’t get to decide that for all of us. Not anymore.”

He turned to Beckett. “Take him into custody. Full council hearing, records unsealed, everything the land dispute, my rejection ceremony, Elena’s father’s death, all of it laid out in front of the whole pack. No more sealed files. No more convenient silence.”

Thorne didn’t resist. He only looked at Elena one last time as they led him out, and said, quietly, almost gently, “Your father would have destroyed this pack to prove a point that was already forty years dead. I hope, for your sake, you’re wiser than he was.”

“He wasn’t trying to destroy anything,” Elena said. “He was trying to tell the truth. There’s a difference, even if you never learned it.”

Thorne didn’t answer that. There wasn’t anything left for him to say.

The council hearing took three days, and by the end of it, everything Elena’s father had spent two years chasing was laid bare in front of the whole territory the Ashcombe land, the forged letters, the sealed file, and finally, Thorne’s confession, given without much fight once the weight of it had nowhere left to hide. Reparations were promised to what remained of the Ashcombe line, wherever they could be found and however long it took. Renata stepped down from Damon’s inner circle without being asked, and though Elena couldn’t quite forgive her yet, she found she no longer needed to hate her either just a woman who’d made an ugly choice out of jealousy and been used by someone far worse for reasons that had nothing to do with her at all.

Elena stood at the edge of the packhouse three evenings later, her flight home long since cancelled, watching the last of the sunset burn out over the tree line, and felt Damon come to stand beside her before she turned to look.

“You could still go,” he said quietly. “Nobody would blame you. You came back for boxes, and you leave with a truth nobody should have had to carry alone. That’s more than most people manage.”

“I know I could go.” She looked over at him, at the face she’d spent five years trying to forget and four days remembering all over again, piece by piece, whether she wanted to or not. “I don’t want to, though. Not anymore.”

Something moved across his face, hope, unguarded now, none of the careful composure he’d been wearing all week. “Elena”

“I spent five years building a life that made sense without you in it,” she said, before he could say whatever he was working up to. “And it was a good life. But it was built on a lie, and now that the lie is gone, I don’t know how to keep pretending the rest of it still fits the way it used to.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying the string never actually snapped.” She stepped closer, close enough to feel the old pull settle into something steadier than it had been in five years, no longer aching, no longer bracing against loss, just present, waiting, patient the way it had apparently been the whole time. “I’m saying I came back for my father’s things, and I’m leaving with something I didn’t know I still had a right to want back.”

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. He reached for her hand instead, slow, careful, giving her every chance to pull away, and when she didn’t, when she let her fingers close around his like something long overdue finally allowed to happen, his wolf settled beneath his skin for the first time in five years, quiet and certain and sure.

 Ours, it said again, and this time, nothing in either of them argued.

The tree line went dark around them, and neither of them moved to leave it.