Ava's POV
Thursday came in gray and cold and I was already awake before my alarm.
I had been lying in the dark since five thinking about what Elena might say and trying to prepare myself for something I couldn't prepare for because I didn't know what shape it was yet. That's the thing about waiting for information. Your brain fills the gap with everything it can imagine and by the time the actual thing arrives you're already exhausted from all the versions you invented.
She arrived at eleven.
Her suggestion to come to the manor rather than meet somewhere public told me before she walked through the door that this was not a coffee and catch up conversation. She stood in the entrance hall and looked around at the high ceilings and the heavy dark wood of the place and her expression did the thing it did when she was processing something and keeping her face neutral while she did it.
"This is where you live now,"
"For now."
She looked at me properly then. The doctor look, the one that goes past the surface. "You look different."
"I haven't been sleeping great."
"Not that." She was studying something specific. My face, my eyes, something. "It's something else." She stopped herself. "Where can we talk?"
I took her to the library and closed the door and sat across from her and waited.
Elena is not someone who builds up to things slowly when she has decided to say them. She took a breath and said, "Your mother's bloodline. Did she ever tell you anything about her family?"
"Not much. She grew up somewhere rural in Louisiana. She didn't talk about it. I thought it was just hard memories."
"It was more than that." She folded her hands in her lap. "Her family belonged to a lineage. An old one. Connected to a world that most people don't know exists."
I looked at her. "Elena."
"Werewolves," she said. Simply. Directly. Like she was telling me a diagnosis. "I know how that sounds. I know you're about to look at me like I've lost my mind. Just let me finish."
The library was very quiet.
"Your mother came from a bloodline called the Ashmoon Clan," she continued. "Old, significant, feared in certain circles. She left before you were born. She suppressed the gene intentionally and it stayed dormant her whole life which is why she never showed signs and why you grew up with none either."
"But…" I said.
"But the gene doesn't disappear. It waits." She leaned forward slightly. "What you've been feeling, the burning, the warmth, the senses sharpening, that's not stress Ava. That's the gene waking up."
I sat with that for a moment.
And then the pieces started moving.
The warmth that tracked Damian's location through walls. The burning at three in the morning. My eyes in the mirror looking back at me like something that wasn't just me. Luca's gaze that always felt like identification rather than observation. Jamie saying he watches you like he's waiting for something. Damian awake at three. Damian's partial answers. The soon that sounded like a promise with a deadline attached.
"He knows," I said.
Elena's expression shifted.
"Damian," I said as realization dawned on me, "He knew from the beginning. That's why he offered the contract."
"Ava…"
"That's why Luca looks at me like that. That's why he always knows where I am. That's why he's been up at three in the morning and watching me and giving me half answers and saying soon like he's managing a clock I can't see."
I stood up. The warmth was moving through me fast now, agitated, and the sharpness in my senses kicked up and I could hear footsteps two floors above me and a phone buzzing somewhere down the hall and both sounds were too clear for the distance they were coming from. "How long have you known?"
"Your mother told me before she died," Elena said quietly. "She made me promise to watch for signs. She didn't think the gene would ever activate. The suppression was supposed to hold permanently."
"But it didn't."
"No."
I walked to the window. Snow drifting sideways past the glass. The garden white and still below.
"Am I going to turn into a wolf," I said. Not hysterically. Just asking, because I needed to know.
"Eventually. If it keeps progressing." She came to stand beside me. "But this isn't something being done to you. It was always part of you. Your mother was afraid of it because of what her world cost her. It doesn't have to cost you the same things."
"What did it cost her?"
"That's a longer conversation and I don't have all the pieces yet."
I turned from the window. My hands weren't shaking exactly. More like humming. A vibration under the skin that I understood now was the gene reacting to what I was feeling.
"He didn't tell me," I said.
"He didn't tell you," Elena agreed carefully. "That's different from lying. At least, it can be."
She stayed another hour and gave me what she had in careful pieces. Enough to hold onto. Not enough to answer everything. She left at one with a hug that did the apologizing her words didn't.
I stood in the entrance hall alone and breathed for a while.
Then I went to the kitchen and started making soup because I needed my hands busy and something useful at the end of it. I was chopping onions harder than necessary when I heard the front door at six and Damian's footsteps stop at the kitchen doorway.
"Elena came today," I said without turning around.
"I know."
"Luca told you."
"Yes."
I set the knife down and turned around. He was standing in the doorway still in his suit and he looked different from his usual end of day version. More open somehow. Like he had made a decision in the car on the way home about how this conversation was going to go.
"You knew," I said. "From the hotel lobby. You knew what I was."
"I sensed something," he said. "I wasn't certain."
"Certain enough to offer the contract."
"Certain enough to know you needed to be somewhere safe whether you understood why or not."
I looked at him across the kitchen. The warmth was there. Steady. Making more sense now than it ever had before, which somehow made it more complicated rather than less.
"Were you going to tell me?"
"Yes." No pause, no qualification. "I meant soon. I still mean it."
"Soon isn't good enough anymore Damian."
"I know." His voice was quiet. There was something underneath it that I hadn't heard from him before. Something that sounded like it cost him to let out. "I know that. I don't have the right words yet but I'm not going to pretend I don't owe you the truth."
I turned back to the onions because I needed somewhere to look that wasn't his face right now.
"Sit down," I said. "And start."
He pulled out a chair and sat down at the kitchen table.
And for the first time since Christmas Eve, Damian Hawthorne started telling me the truth.