Seduced By My God-Father

chapter eight

WHISPERS ABOUT THE DEAD

I found the letters by accident.

This is important. I was not searching. I want to be clear about that, because what followed changed so much that the question of how it started matters. I was not searching. I was helping Mia organise the pack archives after two days of fruitless waiting for Roger to tell me the rest of what he knew, and I was in a room full of old files and older documents, and a folder slipped from a shelf and fell open on the floor.

My parents' names were on the top page.

I sat down on the floor right there and I read.

It was a pack investigation file. Internal file,not council-facing, not formal, just the raw working notes of someone who had been trying to piece together a timeline. The handwriting was Roger's. I had grown up seeing it on birthday cards and study notes and the occasional letter that arrived in my university mailbox, and I knew it as well as my own.

He had been investigating their deaths.

Not in the past few months. The dates on the documents started less than three weeks after the funeral. He had been investigating for four years.

I read it all.

My parents had not died in an accident. The accident,the car, the road, the formal story the pack had been given.... had been manufactured. The investigation notes said so in Roger's careful, precise language. Tyre marks. The wrong angle for what the official account described. A witness who had been present at the scene and then quietly moved to another territory.

The motive the file suggested: the bloodline. My mother's family, the anchoring power, exactly what Roger had told me on the back steps. But the file named a name I had not heard before. Not just Ashvale. One specific name. A wolf who had been present at the Silverwood-Ashvale border negotiations the month before my parents died.

A wolf who was, according to the most recent note in the file, currently living within the Silverwood territory.

I closed the folder.

I sat on the floor for a very long time.

Then I stood up and I went to find Roger.

He was in the training yard and he saw my face and he said, very quietly, "Where did you find it?"

"Archives," I said. "It fell."

He looked at me for a long moment, and then he nodded once, like something had concluded.

"Come inside," he said.

We sat in the study, which had become the room where our real conversations happened, and he told me everything.

My mother had known. Not that she would die because of it, she had not known that, but she had known about her bloodline, about the power in it, about the older packs who believed it was something to be possessed rather than respected. She had told Roger six months before she died. She had made him promise to protect me if anything happened.

She had made him promise.

He had been carrying this for four years. The investigation, the knowledge, the carefully constructed distance, the surveillance of my life from far enough away that I hadn't known it was happening, all of it fulfillment of a promise he had made to my mother before she knew she was making her last ones.

"The man named in the file," I said. "He's in this territory."

"He arrived eight months ago. Under a different name."

"And you've known?"

"I've been building a case. For the council. Something that holds."

"Roger, he's here. He's walking around in our territory and you haven't...."

"I cannot remove him without proof that will stand to council scrutiny," he said, and the control in his voice was absolute, but underneath it I could hear the other thing. The anger. The same anger that would be in my chest right now if I had more room for it next to the grief and the shock. "If I act without proof I give Ashvale grounds to have me removed as alpha, which leaves you unprotected and this pack destabilised. I need the evidence. I am close to the evidence."

I pressed my hands flat on my thighs.

"My mother's box," I said.

He went still.

"That's what's in it," I said. "Whatever you need. She gave it to me. She locked it and she left the key somewhere you were supposed to find it."

He looked at me.

"Where's the key, Roger?"

Very slowly, he reached into the collar of his shirt and drew out a chain I had never noticed before. At the end of it was a small brass key.

He had been wearing it since before I arrived.

He had been waiting until he trusted that I was ready.

I held out my hand.

He placed the key in my palm, and his fingers rested against mine for a moment, just a moment, and the pull between us was enormous and neither of us moved.

"Together," I said.

"Together," he agreed.