Chapter 5 Chapter 5

“Silver,” I whispered. My teeth wanted to chatter, though the air was hot with lingering smoke. “She used silver. I remember the smell now. And rain. And someone saying I should have died before I ever became a problem.”

The silence that followed was worse than any gasp. Ty’s hands tightened once, just once, and in that tiny betrayal of control I heard the violence of his guilt. “I should have been there,” he said, the words so raw they barely sounded like him

“You weren’t,” I said. It came out sharper than I intended, because pain always sharpened truth. Then I swallowed. “But you’re here now. So, help me end this.”

For a heartbeat neither of us moved. Then Ty exhaled, rough and deliberate, and the moment closed. “Stay with me,” he said. We ran again.

The trail narrowed as it climbed. I recognised the old boundary path by the change in the ground beneath my boots—less leaf mould, more exposed stone, the wind moving differently through the higher trees. Marian knew where she was going. Beyond this ridge lay disputed land and, farther still, rogue territory. If she crossed the border, taking her back would get far more complicated.

“Closer,” Neeka said, every syllable a hunt. “She’s slowing. She’s hurt.”

A branch snapped somewhere ahead. Then came ragged breathing, the scrape of someone stumbling against bark, and at last a woman’s voice—breathless, vicious, and horribly familiar. “You should have stayed broken,” Marian hissed into the trees.

I stopped dead. Memory did the rest. The same voice, smeared with rain and cruelty, leaning over me in the dark. The same voice from my nightmares. The same voice that had whispered while I bled. Some girls are born to be broken.

Ty shifted instantly, placing himself half in front of me. “Marian,” he said, every letter edged like a blade. “Run again and I’ll drag you back by the throat.”

She laughed, and the sound was ragged with pain and smoke. “Still dramatic, little Alpha. Has no one told you? You’re already too late. She remembers enough now.”

My pulse thundered. “Why?” I called into the dark. “What did I ever do to you?”

Leaves rustled. I could almost feel her smile. “You were never the problem, child,” Marian said softly. “What you heard that night was.”

Every muscle in Ty’s body went taut beside me. Neeka lunged against the inside of my mind so hard it hurt. I opened my mouth to ask what Marian meant, but she spoke again first, her voice turning almost triumphant.

“The night I blinded you,” Marian said, “you weren’t alone.” She let the silence sharpen. “You heard Ty kill your father.”

The world inside me split cleanly in two.

For one terrible heartbeat, I heard nothing but the roar of blood in my ears. The forest disappeared. The smoke disappeared. Even Ty’s hand on mine disappeared beneath the violent rush of memory and grief and disbelief. My father. Ty. Kill. The words did not fit together. They struck against each other in my mind like flint, throwing sparks into places already drenched in old pain.

My knees nearly gave way. Ty’s grip tightened, catching me before the ground could. That should have steadied me. Instead, it broke something open. The same hands that had once tucked flowers into my braid, that had guided me across creek stones, that had fastened my necklace with trembling fingers, were now wrapped around the possibility of the one wound I had never survived. I tore my hand from his as the contact burned.

Marian heard it—the tiny sound of separation, the fracture she had wanted—and laughed softly through the trees. “There it is,” she crooned. “Truth always sounds like that when love finally breaks.”

“Don’t listen to her,” Ty said, and the rawness in his voice hit me harder than a shout. He was no longer the controlled, lethal Alpha trainee from moments before. This was the Ty I had once known, buried under all that power—ragged, desperate, and one breath away from shattering. “Sila, look at me.”

A laugh clawed its way out of me, jagged and wrong. “Look at you?” I whispered. “That’s cruel even for you.” The silence that followed was brutal. Then, lower, with all the damage I could no longer hold back: “Did you kill him?”

He did not answer fast enough.

That single, broken pause hollowed me out more efficiently than any blade. If he had denied it at once, maybe I could have clung to that. If he had shouted, lied, cursed Marian and the moon above us, maybe I could have pretended certainty still existed. But Ty’s silence cracked through me with the force of confession. My father’s laugh flashed through my head—deep, rare, more felt than heard. So did his hands, rough from training, lifting me to sit on the fence rails when I was little. Then came the ugly truth beneath it all: I could barely remember his face anymore, but I had never stopped mourning him.

“Something is wrong,” Neeka snarled, torn between fury and instinct. “He smells like grief, not guilt. But if he hurts you, I will still remove his throat.”

“Your father died because of me,” Ty said at last, each word dragged up from somewhere brutal. “But not the way she wants you to believe.”

Marian clucked her tongue. “Such careful phrasing. He always was quick.” Leaves rustled as she shifted farther back, keeping just enough distance to stay hidden. “Go on, Ty. Tell her how noble it all was. Tell her how much blood was on your hands when she was screaming for her father.”

“No more fragments.” My voice shook, and I hated that it did. “No more half-truths. No one speaks around me anymore. Ty, if you ever meant a single thing you promised, tell me what happened that night.”

For a moment, the only sounds were Marian’s ragged breathing, the hiss of faraway fire, and the wind moving hard through the pines. Then Ty spoke.