Page 45 of The Fated Hunter Wolf

Begin when you knew I was Crux, but you continued to treat me like filth.

Shame flooded me. There had been several times over the years that Eve had come to me, probably sensing there wassomething we had in common, and every single time I had sent her off with insults. In my mind, it was the only way to keep space between us, but for her it must have felt like betrayal.

Even more so now.

“Why did you keep your distance?” she asked directly. “All these years, you knew what I was, and you let me suffer alone.”

“Because I couldn’t protect you if you knew the truth,” I said, the words coming easier than I’d expected. “And because there were others depending on me.”

“Others?” Eve looked at Astrid and then back to me.

I met her gaze.

“Explain yourself,” she said, her wolf rising to the surface and glowing through her eyes. The power of the Crux alpha washed over me, and I shuddered. My wolf, still quiet within me, reacted to the sensation by lying down and bowing her head.

With hands folded in my lap, I began.

“The first moment I saw you, there was fear in her eyes—your mother’s eyes. You were so little, weak, and entirely unaware of your wolf. I wasn’t much older than you, but I knew more than you did about how our world worked.”

Eve leaned forward, hungry for answers she’d been denied her whole life. “Tell me about that first day.”

I told her about how I’d followed her wherever she went. She was constantly in the company of her mother, and at that time, I didn’t know who her mother was. But even at my young age, I understood Eve’s mother was someone important, someone special. I scented it on her and found myself in a trance.

“I was hiding in the front garden,” I continued, “watching you sitting on the front step while your mother and Grayson argued inside.”

“What were they arguing about?”

“Protection. An alliance. And threats to reveal a secret.” I paused, remembering my mother’s hand yanking me from thatbush. “My mother found me eavesdropping. She was terrified—not because I’d been caught, but because of what I’d discovered.”

Eve’s breathing had quickened. “What had you discovered?”

“Alpha Grayson may have been the Heraclid alpha, but he wasn’t alpha to my mother and I. Your mother was—Alpha Nerys of the Crux pack.” The words hung in the air between us. “My mother made me understand that you—that little girl sitting on those steps—were the reason we could live free. Your mother had given up everything for us. Power and land, the ability to rule independently. We’d always have been a target, and she knew that. So she turned us into a nomad pack, knowing the Shadow Moon Goddess would one day give back to us all we needed. We had to believe in our alpha.”

I watched Eve process this, saw the moment when things clicked into place in her mind.

“That’s when I understood I would have a role to play in your future,” I said. “In the future of all Crux. My wolf felt it, and our true nature was called to serve.”

Eve was quiet. When she finally spoke, her voice was hushed. “You became the enforcer.”

“The guardian of Crux. The pillar that would ensure our alpha and our pack would not be wiped out.” I paused, another wave of Rhys’s pain making me grip the edge of the bed.

I didn’t tell her that being the enforcer was how I could use my hybrid nature for good. The air in the room grew colder still.

Eve listened as I finished the story. She was unreadable, as if she were revisiting each memory of our shared history and trying to fit it together with this new truth.

Finally, she leaned forward, elbows on her knees, hands clasped to anchor herself.

“I always wondered why you hated me,” she said quietly, not looking at me. “Why you looked at me like I was somethingbroken. I thought maybe you saw something in my future that I didn’t. Or you hated what I represented.”

She glanced up, and in her stare was a strange, mournful clarity.

“But you knew.”

My throat tightened. “Not everything.”

“You knew I wasn’t supposed to be Heraclid. You knew I was Crux.”

She didn’t ask. She stated it as truth.