Chapter 145: The Wrong Name All Along

Author’s POV~

Raven stared down at the floor, his brow furrowed in deep, troubled thought.

"Grandmother..." Raven began softly.

He paused for a heartbeat, lifting his head to lock his pitch-black eyes onto hers.

"There is something else I need to ask you," Raven said, his voice breaking the heavy silence with a dark, persistent edge. "You cancelled the family dinner."

The Dowager Luna’s eyes flicked over to him, cold and unreadable. "What about it, Raven?"

"The grand dinner you planned for today," Raven said, leaning forward until his elbows rested firmly on his knees.

"The one where we were finally going to introduce Adeline to the entire pack as our shared mate. You called it off completely. I know you said it’s because you originally thought Adeline is my mate alone but then now things have changed and you cancelled the dinner. Why did you do that?"

"Because it is not the right time, Raven," Gwen answered smoothly, her face an impassive porcelain mask.

"It isn’t the right time?!" Raven’s voice rose, filled with a sudden, dark frustration that rattled the silent hall.

"She is our mate! Our shared royal mate! The whole pack needs to know! They need to see her with their own eyes! They need to know who she is, and they need to see the four of us standing behind her to shield her from every bloodthirsty pack in the territory! It doesn’t matter whether she has a wolf awakened right now or not. She has us!"

"And what do you think would happen the second she steps onto that grand stage, Raven?" the Dowager Luna asked, her voice dropping into a low, dangerous whisper.

Raven opened his mouth to argue, the fiery defiance bright in his eyes, but no words came out.

"They would look at her," Gwen continued, her dark eyes burning with an intense, suffocating light.

"They would lean in close and smell her. And what would they find, Raven? An omega scent. A plain, ordinary, common omega scent... coming from the fragile girl who is supposed to be the sacred mate of four royal princes?"

She stood up slowly, the heavy silk of her dark gown rustling.

"They would start asking lethal questions!" the Dowager Luna snapped softly, stepping closer to her grandson.

"Questions that would bring civil war directly to our front gates! And she has no real wolf inside her to defend herself when the ancient elders challenge her right to the throne! Not yet! We need her true wolf awake before we present her to the realm."

"What is going on with that witch...?" Keiran chimed in, his deep voice gritting with impatience.

"The witch is still searching day and night!" Gwen said, nodding her head with a grim finality.

"I have given her my direct orders. She is working through the ancient, forbidden ledgers in secret, desperately trying to find a way to shatter the dark curse that is locking Adeline’s true wolf away in the abyss of her soul."

She paused, looking between the two broad-shouldered princes sitting before her.

"When we finally find that counter-spell," Gwen whispered, "her true wolf will wake up. Her real, royal scent will burst out for the whole continent to smell, and then, and only then, can we finally present her to the pack."

"Until that glorious day comes, nobody gets told anything. We don’t tell Adeline about her real wolf, and we don’t tell the pack about your mate. And all four of you... you will build a quiet, steady relationship with her. You will earn her fragile heart."

"We know," Raven muttered, staring down at his bruised knuckles. "We already agreed among the four of us to keep her safe and not fight over her like wild beasts."

"Then we wait," Gwen said flatly, turning her back to face the roaring fire.

Keiran folded his massive arms tightly across his broad chest, his jaw locked. "And what is our next move after the wait? What do we do the moment the witch finds the cure?"

"We wait," the Dowager Luna repeated, her voice as steady and cold as carved granite. "Patience is a weapon, Keiran. The ones who rush blind into the dark are always the ones who end up bleeding out on the stone."

Raven said nothing for a long, but his gaze was distant, dark, and filled with old, buried questions that had haunted him for months.

Finally, he looked up at the Dowager Luna, his voice dropping into a tone so quiet, so agonisingly deep.

"Grandmother," Raven said softly. "I have been wanting to ask you something for a very long time."

Gwen did not turn around. "Ask me, Raven."

"Do you know who Adeline’s real parents are? What happened to them?"

The Dowager Luna did not move a single muscle. Her hands remained perfectly still.

"I searched for them," Raven said slowly, every single word heavy with dark suspicion. "I walked into the locked library, the forbidden archive in the east wing. I went through the ancient ledgers shelf by shelf, with my own hands. I checked the birth records. I checked the pack registries. I checked the secret royal archives dating back two centuries. And I found nothing, Grandmother. Not one single record with the name Adeline written on it."

Raven’s eyes glued to his grandmother’s motionless spine. "And I asked Adeline herself. I asked her what her parents’ names were when we were alone. She told me she doesn’t know. She told me she doesn’t remember a single thing about them before the age of ten. She said it like it was an old, bleeding wound she had stopped touching a long time ago."

"So I’m asking you right now, Grandmother," Raven whispered, his voice trembling with an intense, dark demand. "Do you know anything about her parents? Anything at all?"

The Dowager Luna turned around slowly to look at her grandson, her eyes sharp, dark, ancient, and heavy with a terrifying secret she had carried in silence for far too long.

"You searched the forbidden ledgers yourself, Raven?" she asked softly, her tone unnaturally flat.

"Yes."

"You went through every single page with your own hands?"

"Yes," Raven said, standing up to meet her gaze. "And I found no ledger with her name in it. Nothing exists."

"Of course you couldn’t find it, Raven," Gwen said.

"How could you ever find what you were looking for... when you were searching for someone with the wrong name all along?"

Raven’s breath caught sharply in his throat. "What?"

"Because Adeline is not her real name," Gwen said. "It never was. And I bet even she doesn’t know about it, yet."