ISLA
He found me in the archive room at two.
I heard him before I saw him. It was the bond shifting with that particular quality it had developed over the past weeks.
Warm and deliberate, like he was announcing himself on purpose. Giving me time to close the text I’d been cross-referencing and look less like someone who’d been down a four-hour research spiral with no clear destination.
I didn’t quite manage it.
The texts were spread across the entire table by this point.
Three separate source documents, two indexes, a notation I’d found in a secondary reference that had sent me back to the primary, which had sent me to a tertiary I had to request from the restricted section of the archive.
The bloodline thread kept pulling, kept leading somewhere new, kept refusing to let me put
