Wren POV
I didn't move.
That was the first thing that surprised me. Every muscle in my body should have been pulling backward, away from him, away from those cold gray eyes and that quiet, terrible sentence. Any smart person would have stepped back.
I stood completely still.
You killed Lyra. I bought you so you can spend the rest of your life wishing you hadn't.
The words landed in my chest like stones dropped into still water. I felt the ripple of them go all the way down. My brain was already screaming Lyra? What does Lyra have to do with him? What does he think I did? but my face didn't move. I had learned a long time ago, living in my father's house, that showing your reaction was the same as handing someone a weapon.
I looked up at Kane Duskmore and said nothing.
He studied me the way you study something you're trying to understand and don't like the answer to. His jaw was tight. His eyes moved over my face once, quick and sharp, and then settled somewhere just past my shoulder like looking directly at me was something he had decided against.
Good. I needed him underestimating me.
A guard touched my arm. I let him steer me through the hall and out a side door into the cold night air. The auction house fell away behind us. I breathed in the dark pine trees, wet earth, the cold edge of coming autumn. Underneath all of it, something else. Something that made the strange warmth in my chest flare up again before I could stop it.
His scent. Pine and ash and lightning.
I hated that I recognized it. I hated that it felt like something I had been missing without knowing I was missing it. I hated every part of the mate bond and everything it meant because the universe, apparently, had an extremely cruel sense of humor.
My mate had just told me he bought me for revenge.
A black SUV was parked at the curb. The guard opened the back door. I got in without being pushed, because I was choosing to get in, and that difference mattered to me even if no one else could see it. Kane got in on the other side. A second guard took the front passenger seat. The driver didn't look back at us.
We pulled out into the dark.
Kane sat with his arm resting against the window, his face turned away from me. I sat with my bound wrists in my lap and my back straight and tried to think clearly through the noise in my head.
Lyra. He thought I had something to do with Lyra's death.
Lyra Ashvale was my half-sister. My father's golden daughter the one he was proud of, the one who got the good room and the nice clothes and the future. Lyra and I had never been close. She found my wolfless status embarrassing and kept her distance, and I found her cruelty casual and exhausting and kept mine. We weren't enemies. We just weren't anything.
She had died in the battle. I knew that. Everyone knew that.
But I had been three rooms away when it happened. Hiding. Surviving. Doing exactly what Cole had told me to do.
Someone had told Kane something different. Someone had put my name to her death.
Who? And why?
"Stop thinking so loud."
His voice came out of the dark, flat and quiet. I turned to look at him. He was still facing the window.
"I'm not doing anything," I said. First words I had spoken directly to him. My voice came out steady, which was the only victory I had right now and I was taking it.
"You are." He still didn't look at me. "Your breathing changed. You're planning something."
I almost said I'm always planning something. I stopped myself.
"I'm sitting in a car with my hands tied," I said instead. "What exactly do you think I'm planning?"
Now he looked at me.
I wish he hadn't. Up close, in the low light from passing streetlamps, he was harder to reduce to a monster. The scar that crossed his jaw. The exhaustion sitting deep around his eyes, the kind that doesn't come from one bad night but from years of them. He looked like a man who had been carrying something very heavy for a very long time.
His wolf was close to the surface. I could feel it not the way a wolf-blooded person would, but in the way the air between us felt charged, pressed, like the moment before a storm breaks. The mate bond hummed in my chest, embarrassingly loyal to a man who had just threatened me.
Traitor, I thought at it.
"You're thinking about who told me," Kane said. "And whether it's true."
I met his gaze. "Is it?"
Something shifted in his expression. Not softening he didn't seem like the type who softened. More like a wall developing a hairline crack it immediately tried to seal. "A soldier gave a dying account. He named you. He had no reason to lie."
"Dying people lie all the time," I said. "Fear does strange things to memory."
"You're saying you didn't do it."
"I'm saying I was three rooms away and I have no idea what you were told, but whoever told it gave you a story that ends with me on an auction stage and you paying for me." I held his gaze. "Who benefits from that?"
Silence.
The car moved through dark trees. His jaw worked once, like he was chewing something bitter.
"You're very calm," he said, "for someone in your position."
"My brother taught me that panic doesn't solve problems." My voice came out steady but something underneath it hurt. Cole's name always hurt. "Being calm does."
Kane's eyes moved to my face. Really looked this time, not the quick assessing glance from before. Something moved behind his gaze fast, complicated, gone before I could name it.
"Your brother is dead," he said. Not cruel. Just fact.
"Yes," I said. "Because of your war."
The air in the car went very still.
His wolf pressed against the surface hard enough that I felt it like pressure against my skin. His hands, resting on his knee, curled once and released.
"Get some sleep," he said finally, and turned back to the window.
I looked down at my bound wrists. The rope was still rough. My skin was still raw. Nothing had changed about my situation I was still bought, still trapped, still heading into the territory of the man who blamed me for a death I didn't cause.
But he hadn't shut me down. He'd actually listened.
And whoever had lied to him about me had made one serious mistake.
They'd put me close enough to find out why.
I closed my eyes and let myself think. Not panic. Think. There was a name somewhere in this story the soldier, the witness, the person who stood over their own death and used their last breath to bury me.
I was going to find it.
I was going to find all of it.
The car moved deeper into Duskmore territory. The pine trees closed in around us like walls.
And in the dark, pressed against my ribs without my permission, the mate bond glowed warm and steady as a candle that refused to go out.