The silence in Blackwood Manor was deeper than the forest's. It was the silence of held breath, of centuries of accumulated secrets pressing down on the very air. Kiera moved through its halls like a ghost, feeling the weight of every portrait's gaze—stern-faced ancestors whose eyes seemed to follow her, judging her restlessness, her treasonous alliance with the outsider.
Her father was in the conservatory, a glass-walled room filled with improbable, lush greenery even in the heart of autumn. He was tending to a night-blooming cereus, its pale, intricate blossom just beginning to unfurl in the evening humidity. The act was one of tender focus, a picture of aristocratic leisure. But Kiera saw the tension in the line of his shoulders, the minute tremor in his fingers as he adjusted a support stake.
"The eastern post is gone," she stated, her voice cutting through the humid quiet. "Scorched clean. The boundary is fraying."
Sebastian didn't look up. "I am aware, Kiera." His voice was calm, too calm. It was the sound of a lid being screwed tightly onto a boiling pot. "The Covenant demonstrates its capabilities. A message."
"Is that all it is to you? A message?" She stepped into the room, the scent of damp earth and night flowers filling her senses, mingling uncomfortably with the ever-present hum of the curse in her blood. "Every ward they destroy makes the forest more volatile. The Moon-Touched are howling at the edges. It's only a matter of time before one stumbles into town, or a fully changed cousin loses their bearings and does something... irreversible."
"Then we shall contain it, as we always have." He finally turned, his green eyes, so like her own but fathoms older, meeting hers. There was love there, a desperate, possessive love, and a profound exhaustion. "The old ways have kept us safe, kept this town from burning us at the stake for two hundred and fifty years."
"Safe?" The word burst from her, sharp and bitter. She pushed up the sleeve of her sweater, thrusting her scarred wrist into the light. The silvery brand of interwoven leaves and thorns seemed to writhe in the gloom. "Is this safety? This mark you burned into me to 'focus my will,' to make me a more useful anchor for your dying wards? I feel every breach, father. Like a tear in my own skin. The eastern post's destruction was a physical shock. This isn't safety. It's a slow death. For me. For all of us."
Sebastian's composure cracked. Pain flashed across his face. "It was to save your life! When the change first took you at sixteen, you were lost to the rage for three days. The old rituals, the anchors... they pulled you back. They gave you control others can only dream of!"
"Control?" She laughed, a short, harsh sound. "Or a leash? You handed one end to the ancient stones and you hold the other. And now the Covenant wants to take it from you. They don't offer a leash, they offer a cage. A sterile, observable cage where I can be poked and prodded and my 'anomaly' can be reverse-engineered. And you're considering it!"
He turned away, his hands clasped tightly behind his back, looking out at the dark forest beyond the glass. "I am considering the survival of our line, child. The world is closing in. The old compact with the town is brittle. Vance is weak, terrified. The Covenant's resources are... vast. Their science offers a predictability the old magic no longer guarantees. If they can suppress the change, eliminate the risk..."
"At the cost of our souls! At the cost of turning us into their property!" She moved to stand beside him, her reflection a pale, angry ghost superimposed on the dark trees. "You heard what they asked for. Blood samples. Neural scans during the lunar peak. Access to the Stone Circle. They don't want to cure us; they want to own the curse. To manufacture it. And they'll start with me."
"And what is your alternative, Kiera?" he asked softly, the fight draining from his voice, leaving only a hollow dread. "The rebellious journalist? A man who sees us as a story, a monster to be exposed? Do you think his world will be any kinder? They will drag us into the light and we will burn, literally and figuratively."
"He's looking for Lily," Kiera insisted, though a part of her feared her father was right. "He sees her as a person, not a specimen or a casualty. That's more than the Covenant offers. More than the town has ever done."
"Lily Greene is likely dead, or worse," Sebastian said, the finality in his tone like a tombstone settling. "A tragic loss. But one life against the survival of an entire bloodline, against the prevention of a panic that could see this forest razed and every last one of us dissected? The calculus is brutal, but it is clear."
The words hung between them, the gulf of their perspectives widening into a chasm. He was the patriarch, his vision measured in centuries, his strategies forged in the fire of old persecutions. She was the new generation, choking on the dust of those old strategies, feeling the cage not as protection but as confinement.
"Your mother felt as you do," Sebastian whispered, so quietly she almost didn't hear. "She believed there was another path. Reconciliation with our nature, not endless war against it. She sought answers in places even I feared to go." He touched the glass, as if touching the memory. "The forest took her, Kiera. On a night when the wards were strong and the moon was quiet. It didn't come from outside. It came from within her. From the hope she dared to feel."
Kiera had been seven when her mother vanished. She remembered scent more than sight—wildflowers and sadness. She'd never heard this version of the story before. It was always "lost in the woods." Not claimed by her own hope.
"Is that what you're afraid of?" Kiera asked, her anger cooling into a deep, resonating sorrow. "That if I look for another way, the forest will take me too? Or that I will simply walk away from you and into the dark?"
Sebastian finally looked at her, his eyes gleaming with unshed tears in the reflected moonlight. "I am afraid of losing the last piece of her I have left. I am afraid of the world that wants to devour you. And I am afraid that my power, which has protected us for so long, is no longer enough." He reached out, a hesitant gesture, and cupped her cheek. His hand was cold. "The Covenant is hosting a private gathering at the Vance estate tomorrow night. A 'philanthropic thank you' for the town's cooperation. They have requested our presence. Yours, especially."
A command. A delivery into the lion's den.
"Requested or demanded?"
"Is there a difference anymore?" He dropped his hand. "We will go. We will be courteous. We will listen. And you will see the reality of the power arrayed against us. Perhaps then you will understand the necessity of... compromise."
He walked out of the conservatory, leaving her alone with the blooming night flower and the suffocating silence. The scent of the blossom, once delicate, now felt cloying, funereal.
Compromise. The word tasted like ash. He was preparing to trade her autonomy, their very essence, for a guaranteed, sanitized survival. The gilded cage was being offered, and her father was seriously considering locking the door from the outside.
She looked down at her branded wrist. The scar throbbed, a sympathetic ache for the destroyed ward. She was an anchor, tied to a sinking ship. Her father's plan was to negotiate with the boarders who were actively drilling holes in the hull.
Alex Reed was a wild card. An unstable element. But he was outside the system. And he was moving. The scorched earth at the ward post proved that. He was a spark in the tinder-dry silence. A dangerous, reckless spark.
She made her decision. She would go to the Vance estate. She would smile and nod and let the Covenant's agent, this J. Carver, assess her. But she would not be a passive piece on their board.
Pulling out a small, burnished silver compact from her pocket—an heirloom from the mother who sought another path—she used its sharp edge to carefully pry up a loose floorboard beneath a potted fern. From the hollow, she retrieved a few items: a small vial of inky liquid (nightshade extract, distilled by Lily Greene), a lock of coarse, grey fur (not from any natural wolf), and a folded, hand-drawn map on vellum, older than the one in the archives, showing paths to the Stone Circle that were not marked on any other.
Her mother's legacy. Not of fear, but of seeking.
She would listen at the party. But she would also prepare. If the cage door began to close, she would not be inside it. She would take her mother's path into the dark heart of the forest, to the very source of the curse, and find the truth that everyone else was too afraid or too calculating to seek.
And perhaps, just perhaps, the reckless journalist with a flashlight and a conscience would be the distraction she needed to slip away.