Vincent’s POV
The records room held more truth than the council ever would.
Rowan stood beside me while I paged through brittle files and cold, typed summaries—reports compiled the week Adeline’s tribe fell. Most lines were clean. Perfectly spotless. They read like someone had polished grief into neat paragraphs and called it history.
Halfway through a folder, a phrase snagged.
“One young tribesman was sent to the human world to study before the disaster.”
I read it again. Tribesman. That single word didn’t fit anything I remembered or anything the elders had sworn was true. The fallen tribe’s men had been too old or too young; the academy rosters from that cycle had listed no boy of their blood.
I angled the page toward the lamplight. Ink covered a correction. Whoever altered the fi
