Chapter 4

The Past Between Us:

He showed up again the next afternoon, and this time she wasn’t surprised, which annoyed her almost as much as the visit itself.

She’d spent the morning staring at her father’s letter until the words stopped meaning anything, and then staring at the anonymous text until that stopped meaning anything too, and by the time Damon’s truck pulled up outside she’d worked herself into exactly the wrong mood for another conversation with him. Wrong for him. Right, maybe, for what she actually needed to ask.

She met him on the porch instead of letting him in. Small things. I felt like it mattered.

“You look tired,” he said, which wasn’t the opener she expected.

“I am tired. I’m going through a dead man’s filing cabinet, Damon, what did you think I’d look like?”

He winced, just slightly, and she almost regretted the edge in her voice. Almost.

“I wanted to check on you,” he said. “That’s all. I know that I know I don’t get to just show up here and expect you to want that from me. I’m not expecting anything. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine.”

“You don’t get an opinion on how I look.” It came out harder than she meant, but she let it stand, because underneath the anger was something rawer she didn’t want him anywhere near. “What do you actually want?”

He was quiet a second, jaw working like he was deciding how much to give her. “I regretted it,” he said finally. “What I did to you. I regretted it almost immediately. I want you to know that.”

“You’ve said that already.”

“I know. I don’t think you believed me.”

“I didn’t.” She crossed her arms. “Regret doesn’t undo it, Damon. Regret is what you feel after. It doesn’t change what you did before.”

“I know that too.” He looked away from her, out toward the tree line, like the words were easier to say to the trees than to her face. “I’ve never told anyone the whole reason I did it. Not the pack. Not Renata. Nobody.”

Something in her chest went very still. “Then tell me.”

He looked back at her, and for a second she saw something in his face she hadn’t seen since she’d been back, not the composed Alpha mask, not the careful regret, but something closer to the boy she’d fallen for in the first place, cornered and unsure of himself.

“Someone brought me evidence,” he said. “Five years ago. Right before the ceremony. Proof, or what looked like proof, that you’d been meeting with someone from the Ashcombe pack. Meeting in secret. Sharing information about our territory patrol schedules, border weaknesses, things only someone close to me would know to share.”

Elena felt the ground shift slightly under the porch, though it hadn’t moved at all. “That’s insane. I have never met anyone from Ashcombe in my life.”

“I know that now.” His voice cracked slightly now. “At the time Elena, I had documents. Correspondence. A witness who swore she’d seen you at the border with one of their scouts. It wasn’t just a rumor. It looked airtight. And I was young, and scared, because if it was true, if you really had been feeding them information, I was looking at a security breach that could’ve gotten pack members killed. I didn’t have time to investigate slowly. I had to make a decision fast, in front of everyone, before it could spread and do more damage.”

“So you rejected me instead of asking me.”

“I was wrong to do that.” He said it plainly, no hedging. “I should have come to you first. Privately. I should have given you the chance to explain before I ever said a word to the pack. I told myself I was protecting the territory. I think, if I’m honest, I was also protecting myself  because if it was true, and I hadn’t acted fast enough, that failure would’ve been mine to carry. I put the pack’s safety and my own fear ahead of you, and I have never once stopped regretting it.”

She stood there a long moment, arms still crossed, trying to hold onto the anger because the anger was easier than what was creeping in behind it, a slow, sick understanding that maybe this hadn’t been simple cruelty after all. Maybe it had been fear dressed up as leadership. That didn’t make it forgivable. But it made it different than what she’d told herself for five years, and different was its own kind of unwelcome.

“For the first time,” she said slowly, “I’m hearing that you didn’t just decide I wasn’t good enough.”

“You were always good enough.” His voice was low, rough at the edges. “That was never the question. I was terrified, and someone handed me exactly the evidence I needed to justify acting on that terror instead of trusting you. I’ve spent five years wondering if I’d have believed it if it had been about someone else. If I’d have moved that fast. I don’t think I would have.”

“Then why did you move that fast for me?”

“Because I loved you enough that the idea of you betraying me didn’t feel impossible. It felt like exactly the kind of thing that happens to people who love too hard and see too little.” He shook his head slowly. “That’s not an excuse. I know that’s not an excuse.”

She almost told him then, almost said her father’s name, almost said someone made very sure you’d believe it the words were right there, sitting on her tongue, and some old instinct kept them there instead of letting them out. Not yet. Not until she understood more than a letter and an anonymous text could tell her. If someone close to Damon had done this, she needed to know who was actually standing in front of her before she handed over what she knew.

“Who gave you the evidence?” she asked instead.

Something shifted in his face, surprise, maybe, that she’d asked at all, or maybe relief, that she hadn’t simply walked away. “Does it matter now?”

“It matters to me.”

He held her gaze a long moment, like he was deciding whether answering would open a door he wasn’t ready to walk through. Then, quietly: “Beckett brought it to me first. My Beta. He said he’d gotten it from someone inside your own circle. I never found out who, and he claimed the source needed to stay anonymous for their safety. I trusted him. I’d trusted him with my life more times than I could count by then. It never crossed my mind to question it.”

The name landed in her chest like something cold and sharp.

 Beckett.

She’d known Beckett for years before she left and had trusted him too, in her own way, the way you trust the people who are always standing a step behind the person you love. She thought of her father’s letter. Don’t trust everyone currently close to the Alpha. Not everyone. Someone. And now she had a name to set against that warning, uncertain whether it fit, but sitting there all the same, cold and undeniable, exactly where her father had told her to look.

“Elena.” Damon’s voice pulled her back. “What is it? You went somewhere.”

She looked at him, at the open, unguarded worry on his face, and made a decision she wasn’t entirely sure was wise.

“Nothing,” she said. “Just thinking.”

But it wasn’t nothing, and some part of her suspected he knew that too, watching her with the same careful attention he’d been giving her since she stepped back onto this territory like a man trying to read whether he no longer fully trusted himself to predict.

He didn’t push. She gave him that much credit, standing there on her father’s porch with the afternoon going gold around them he could have pushed, could have used the opening she’d just handed him without meaning to, and instead he just watched her, waiting, like he’d learned somewhere along the way that some doors only opened if you didn’t lean on them.

“I should go,” he said finally. “You’ve got enough to carry without me adding to it.”

“Damon.” She said his name before she’d decided to. He turned back. “Thank you. For telling me. I know that wasn’t easy.”

Something moved across his face, surprise, maybe, that she’d thanked him for anything at all. “It was the least I owed you.”

He left the way he had the last two times, unhurried, like a man pacing himself against wanting to run. She watched him go, watched him pause at the edge of the yard the same way he had before, and this time she didn’t look away first.

When his truck finally pulled out onto the road, she went back inside and sat down at her father’s desk, and pulled out her phone, and stared at Beckett’s name in her contacts old, unused, still there from five years ago because she’d never quite gotten around to deleting it.

She didn’t call him. Not yet. But she didn’t delete the number either.

Instead, she found a blank page in one of her father’s old notebooks and wrote the name down at the top, underlined once, and beneath it, in smaller letters, the question that had been sitting in her chest since the moment Damon said it out loud.

Who gave Beckett the evidence?

Because whoever that was the anonymous source inside her own circle, the one who’d apparently known exactly how to make a lie look like a fact that was the name her father had died still hunting.

That was the name she needed too.