Blood moon academy

SELENE

Draven's POV

I don't tell her.

That's the decision I make in the three seconds between recognizing the handwriting and opening my mouth to respond. I don't tell Arwen that I knew before she finished her first sentence. I don't tell her that the particular slant of those letters, the way the S curves at the beginning of every word, the precise pressure of a pen held by someone who learned to write from a tutor who emphasized control above everything else. I have known that handwriting since I was old enough to receive notes tucked into my school bag that said “I'm proud of you” and “Don't forget to eat lunch” and once, when I was ten and had a bad week that I thought I'd hidden successfully, “You don't have to be strong every single day. I won't tell anyone.”

I don't tell her any of that because I need sixty seconds to exist inside the knowledge alone before I share it with anyone. Maybe more than sixty seconds. Maybe a year.

My mother wrote that letter.

Selene Hunter — who I have spent seven years reconstructing into something I could hate without complication, who I rebuilt from the wreckage of one night into a person cold enough and calculated enough to smile at her husband over breakfast and destroy him by evening — wrote a blood letter to a child she hid in a werewolf pack. Used the last of her power, the letter said. The last of something. As a final act.

As a final act of protection.

I run the timeline in my head with the part of my brain that never stops calculating even when the rest of me is falling apart. Selene left when I was twelve. Arwen is eighteen. Which means Selene hid Arwen either just before she disappeared or in the years immediately following and if it was the years following, she was alive and operating and making deliberate choices in the world for years after the night I decided she had become nothing but absence and destruction.

The version of my mother I've been carrying for seven years doesn't write blood letters to protect children.

The version whose handwriting is on that paper might.

I watch Arwen fold the letter with careful hands. She holds herself very steady when something is costing her more than she wants visible. I've learned to read that about her in the weeks since she arrived, despite every intention I had not to learn anything about her at all. The slight tension around her eyes. The way her jaw sets when she's processing something enormous and refusing to let it show. She learned that from a life of being the person in the room nobody expected anything from, you get very good at managing your own face when nobody is watching yours.

She looks like my mother.

I have never been able to look at her without that fact sitting in my chest like swallowed glass. But right now the resemblance means something different than it did three weeks ago. If Selene is connected to her, if Selene hid her, wrote to her, spent the last of something precious on making sure she was safe, then Arwen's face isn't the ghost of my mother's betrayal wearing human skin.

It might be the last thing my mother ever did right.

That thought arrives with such unexpected force that I have to look at the table for a moment.

Maya leaves to find the reference text. Marcus stays at the edge of the table with the controlled expression of someone who has watched me hold myself together through various crises and is running calculations about whether this one crosses a threshold that requires him to intervene. It doesn't. I'm fine. I'm managing.

My hands are flat on the table and they are not shaking and that is the only metric I'm using right now.

"When Maya gets the reference text," Arwen says, "we translate the rest. Together."

I look at her closed hand around the letter. Then at her face. Something settles in my chest that I don't have a name for yet. Not peace, not resolution, something more like the feeling of a door that has been braced shut for seven years opening an inch. Just an inch. Just enough for light.

"Together," I say, and mean it in ways I couldn't have meant anything three weeks ago.

Her phone buzzes. I watch her read it and watch something flicker in her expression before she controls it. She flips the phone face down and doesn't share what it said, which I file away.

"I need to make a call," I tell her. "Pack business. The translation can wait an hour."

She reads something in my voice I didn't intend to put there. She always does. "Is everything okay?"

"Pack business," I say again, which is technically accurate and contains approximately eleven percent of the actual situation.

Marcus follows me into the hallway without being asked. He's been waiting to talk since I sat down at that table. I could feel him waiting, the particular tension of someone holding information they don't want to deliver because there's no good moment for it.

"The pack administrator's messages," I say, before he can start.

"All three of them, yes." He falls into step beside me and his voice drops to the register we use when the conversation needs to stay between us. "Someone has been accessing the Hunter Pack digital archives remotely. For the last ten days. Not breaking in, they used legitimate credentials. Old credentials. From an account that should have been deleted and wasn't."

I already know. I've known since he started the sentence. Some part of me knew since I looked at that handwriting and felt seven years of architecture begin to shift.

"Her account," I say.

"Her personal archive access. Research logs, correspondence files, private documentation from before—" He stops. Tries again. "Draven. Someone is actively pulling records. Everything connected to the Blackthorne bloodline, everything from the years before your father died, everything she kept separately from the pack's main files." He pauses. "And they haven't tried to cover their tracks. It's almost like they want us to know someone is looking."

I stop walking.

The hallway is empty. Morning classes haven't started. Through the tall windows the academy grounds are grey with early light, the stone walls running damp from overnight rain, and everything looks exactly as it always looks, which feels wrong given that the ground under seven years of certainty has just developed a c***k I can see through.

"Someone using her credentials," I say. "Or Selene herself."

Marcus is quiet for exactly the right amount of time. "The access started ten days ago," he says carefully. "The specific files being pulled are not random. It's a targeted search. Someone who knows exactly where to look and what they need."

"When did it start relative to Arwen's arrival?"

He meets my eyes. "Three days before she walked through the gates."

I look out the window at the grounds. At the path Arwen walked up on her first day, where everything in my carefully ordered world tilted sideways when I saw her face. Three days before she arrived, someone with my mother's credentials started searching the Hunter Pack archives for Blackthorne bloodline records.

That is not a coincidence. There is no version of that which is a coincidence.

Which means someone knew Arwen was coming here before she arrived. Someone positioned information, or retrieved it, or verified it, in the days before a girl with my mother's face walked into my school and opened a locket that had been sealed for eighteen years.

"I need everything," I tell Marcus. "Every file accessed, every timestamp, every IP trace they managed to pull before the trail goes cold. And I need it before Arwen finishes translating that letter, because whatever is in the rest of it is going to change things and I want to know the full picture before the picture changes."

"Already requested it," Marcus says. "Should have it within the hour."

I look back toward the cafeteria, where Arwen is sitting alone with a blood letter written in my mother's hand and a phone face-down on the table hiding a message she didn't share.

Seven years of a story I thought I knew completely.

Apparently I didn't know the first word of it.