Rossana
I began making contingency plans.
The contingency plans began with Ava.
I want to be honest about what I was planning before the claiming. Not because honesty is comfortable but because the alternative — the self-serving version where I was simply a mother making impossible choices in impossible circumstances — is too easy and I have never allowed myself easy things.
I had bribed the driver.
Tomás. He had been making the Thursday produce delivery for eleven years and he was a man who understood that questions were expensive and silence was cheap and the money I had given him was sufficient to purchase a very long silence and a very specific route. Not to Aunt Margret. There was no Aunt Margret. There was a road that went north and kept going and a driver who had been paid to keep driving until the palace was so far behind him that it had stopped being a relevant consideration.
I had been planning it for four months.
Not because I hated her. I cannot say that enough times for it to feel sufficient and I know it will never feel sufficient and I have accepted that. Not because I hated her. Because she was becoming impossible to manage and the wolf that was waking up inside her was going to surface soon and when it did it would carry something visible and identifiable and I could not be in the same territory as that wolf when it arrived.
I had convinced myself it was mercy. A fresh start. A life somewhere without the weight of the Cole family's disgrace pressing down on her. Somewhere she could be nobody in particular and build something real from that nobody.
I had been very creative in the ways I framed it to myself.
Then the claiming happened.
And that night the letter arrived.
I read it in my quarters with the door locked and the candle low and my hands completely steady because I had trained my hands to be steady a long time ago.
He had been looking.
Twenty years and he had been looking — not continuously, not with full certainty, but with the persistent quiet focus of a man who had been told something he didn't fully believe and had never entirely stopped pulling at the thread of it. He had been told the child was dead He had believed that because I had been very convincing and because the alternative required him to believe I was capable of something he couldn't quite bring himself to assign to me.
He was beginning to revise that assessment.
The letter was careful. Measured. Ominous
"Dear Rossana, I hope this letter meets you well, I've been having sleepless nights for months now. My wolf tells me to go look for my lost child, I know she's out there somewhere which brings me to the realization that you lied to me, I want you to know that I will find my daughter with whatever it takes and you cannot stop me, may the goddess punish you for your sins".
With bad blood,
Jason.
I read the letter twice.
Then I held it over the candle and watched it burn and I thought about Tomás and the road north and the money I had paid him and I understood with complete and immediate clarity that I had just run out of time for that plan.
A girl alone on a northern road with a bribed driver was findable.
A girl in the household of the most powerful prince in the territory was not.
Varder's claiming had been an inconvenience two hours ago. It was a solution now. The best solution available.
Better than anything I could have arranged with four months of planning and a driver's silence.
Nobody walked into Blackfurs territory and removed someone from it. Not without starting a war. Not even a man with a claim that predated pack law and a letter that asked careful questions in controlled language.
Ava inside those walls was Ava beyond his reach.
I let the letter finish burning.
I thought about him for a moment — the last time I allowed myself that specific indulgence.
The man I had chosen not to choose.
I did not think about Ava in the bag in the storage room.
I did not think about what she was feeling in the dark or what she was hoping for or the specific trust of a daughter who believed her mother was coming the next evening to take her to safety.
I had learned a long time ago that there were things you could not afford to think about and remain capable of doing what needed to be done.
I was very good at not thinking about things.
I thought about walls instead.
The walls of Blackfurs territory. How thick they were. How high. How completely and permanently they separated everything inside them from everything outside.
I thought about how safe those walls would keep my secret.
The baseline was that I could not let Ava go she was my passport to keeping my secret safe, I would have to make her marry varder tomorrow, it didn't matter that she was already hiding inside the bag.
This is the part where I'm very grateful to Hazel, she made my job so much easier, I was about to blow Ava's cover by sending a maid to fetch the linens inside the canvas bag when Hazel for whatever reasons informed varder that she knew where Ava had been hiding taking the stress entirely off me.