Kael’s POV
I stared at my mother.
"What did you say?"
She wasn’t looking at anymore. She was looking at the badge. At the dark tal in her palm. Her thumb moved across the engraving one more ti, slow and deliberate, like she was reading sothing in braille.
"Your father’s," she said again. Sa quiet voice. Sa careful certainty. "Or sothing very close to it."
The room felt smaller suddenly.
I stood up.
"What does that an," I said. "It’s his badge, it’s his *symbol* — what exactly are we talking about here?"
She exhaled. A slow, controlled breath, the kind she did when she was deciding how much to say and in what order. I recognized it. She’d been doing that my whole life. asuring. Choosing.
She handed the badge back to .
"Co with ," she said.
---
She led out of the sitting room and down the back hallway.
Past the kitchen. Past the small pantry that always slled like dried herbs and old wood. To the door at the very end of the hall — the storage room. The one that was always locked. The one I’d been told as a child held nothing interesting. Old furniture. Winter clothes. Broken things nobody had gotten around to throwing away.
She had the key already.
The lock turned. The door swung inward.
It slled like dust and ti. Like a room that had been sealed off from the present.
My mother walked in without hesitating. She knew exactly where she was going.
I followed.
The room was exactly what she’d always said it was — storage. Shelves along both walls, boxes stacked in careful rows, the kinds of things that accumulate in any household over decades. Old linens. A broken floor lamp. Crates I didn’t recognize.
She went straight to the back wall.
Third shelf from the bottom. She crouched down, pushed aside a wooden crate, and behind it — a flat wooden box. Dark finish, brass hinges, the kind of thing that held docunts or keepsakes. It was covered in a thin layer of dust that said it hadn’t been touched in a very long ti.
She lifted it out.
Stood. Set it on the shelf beside her.
"When your father was young," she started, her eyes still on the box, "he wasn’t the Alpha. He was just one of many. A strong one, yes. Ambitious, absolutely. But not the heir. Not yet."
I didn’t say anything. I was watching her hands.
"He gathered people around him. Boys, mostly. Young n with power and nowhere to put it. With anger and no na for it." She touched the lid of the box. "He gave them a structure. A purpose. Called it sothing — a brotherhood, he said. A way of rising together."
"A gang," I said flatly.
She didn’t argue the word. "By the ti he beca Alpha, it was large enough to be useful and dangerous enough to be a liability. So he dissolved it." She turned the box slightly. "Officially."
The word landed.
*Officially.*
"And unofficially?" I asked.
"He sent most of them away. Scattered them. So he rewarded. So he threatened." She pressed her lips together. "And so — the ones who had beco too much of a problem — you exiled them yourself. Years later. You didn’t know they were his."
Sothing cold moved through my chest.
I’d exiled six n in the past three years. Different offenses. Different circumstances. I’d gone through each case myself. I’d been thorough.
I hadn’t known what I was looking at.
"He t with them," I said. Not a question.
"I think so." Her voice was careful. "I don’t know when. I don’t know where. But your father has always been careful about keeping things in reserve. About having people who owed him things, who he could call on." She looked at . "He doesn’t give up power. Not any of it. Not even when he’s—"
She stopped.
I finished it in my head. *Not even when he’s been stripped of his title. Locked down. Officially removed from everything.*
My father had been neutralized. Contained. I’d made sure of it myself — or I’d thought I had.
Apparently he’d been busy.
My hand closed around the badge.
"This badge," I said. "The organization. What was it called?"
She opened the box.
Inside — papers, mostly. Folded. Old. A photograph face-down that I didn’t look at. And underneath all of it, at the very bottom of the box, wrapped in a cloth that had once been black and was now just grey with age—
She unwrapped it.
A badge.
Sa shape as the one in my hand. Sa rough casting. Sa dark tal. But older — the edges worn smooth, the tarnish deeper, the engraving rubbed down at the corners from handling. Soone had held this thing many tis. Carried it. Pressed their thumb across it exactly the way I’d been pressing my thumb across the new one.
She held it out.
I took it.
I brushed the dust off with my thumb.
The letters ca clear.
**DEFECTORS.**
I curled my fist around both badges.
The tal bit into my palm.
*Father.*
*Is this what you’ve been building? All this ti? While I was trying to hold this territory together, while I was trying to fix what you broke — you were out there, gathering your dogs, planning this?*
I stood there in the dusty storage room in the dark, with my mother watching and the lamp from the hallway throwing a thin line of amber across the floor, and I made myself breathe.
In. Out.
My jaw tightened until I felt it in my back teeth.
Father.
Are you really coming to take revenge on ?
Then co.
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