THE ALPHA WHO REJECTED HIS FATE

Chapter Nineteen

Nyx POV

The archive door was still hanging from its single remaining hinge, exactly as we'd left it the day before, and for one brief, foolish second I let myself hope that meant nothing had been disturbed.

Then I stepped inside and saw the drawer.

It was open. Not forced, not broken, simply open, pulled out at an angle that told me whoever had done it hadn't been in a hurry, hadn't needed to be, because every wolf who might have stopped them had been sleeping on their feet along the perimeter fence at the time.

"It's gone," I said, and heard my own voice come out flat, disbelieving, the particular tone of someone confirming a fear rather than discovering a surprise.

Seraphine reached the doorway behind me, breathing hard from the run, and I watched her face when she saw the empty drawer, watched the same understanding move through her that had already settled cold and sick in my own chest.

"The letter," she said. "My father's letter."

"Gone," I said again, because there wasn't a gentler way to say it, and gentleness had never been something either of us had much patience for tonight anyway. "Whoever did this knew exactly where to look. This wasn't a wolf searching blind through a collapsed archive hoping to get lucky. This was someone who already knew the letter existed and knew precisely where I'd left it."

Seraphine POV

I stood in the doorway of the ruined archive with my hands pressed flat against the frame, steadying myself against a wave of something that wasn't quite grief and wasn't quite fury but sat somewhere close to both at once.

Voss had died with that letter's existence on his lips, a taunt thrown at us in his last living breath, as though he'd wanted us chasing it even as he made sure we'd never catch him for it. And now, hours later, while the entire settlement slept unnaturally still around us, someone had walked in and taken the one piece of my father's truth that might have explained what Voss meant by it.

"This has to be connected," I said. "Voss doesn't mention a letter by pure coincidence hours before someone we've never seen walks in and steals it out from under us."

"Unless Voss already told them where it was before he died," Nyx said quietly. "Unless this was never really about Voss confessing anything to us at all. Unless he was simply keeping us busy long enough for someone else to finish the actual job."

The thought settled into me with a cold, sinking certainty, and I understood, standing in that half-collapsed room, that we had all been looking in exactly the wrong direction all night, exactly as I'd told Nyx moments before we ran here. Voss's confession, his dramatic death, the ring Zane had found on his body, all of it had bought someone else the time and the quiet they needed to walk unnoticed through a sleeping settlement and take the one thing none of us had even known to guard.

Nyx POV

I turned to leave the archive, intending to raise the alarm properly this time, to wake whoever could still be woken and start a real search before whoever had done this got any further than the tree line.

Then I felt it. A warm, wet spreading beneath the bandage on my shoulder, the wound Voss's men had given me hours ago finally deciding it had been ignored long enough, and my legs went unsteady beneath me in a way they hadn't since the fighting first ended.

"Nyx." Seraphine's hand caught my arm before I fully understood I was swaying. "You're bleeding through again."

"I'm fine," I said, which had stopped being true several hours ago and had never once stopped me from saying it anyway.

"You are not fine. You haven't slept, you haven't eaten, and you've been standing guard on a wound that should have kept you flat on your back since midnight." Her voice carried an authority I hadn't heard from her before tonight, not quite Alpha command, not yet, but something close enough to it that I found myself listening despite every instinct telling me to argue. "You will sit down. Now. I will not lose you to stubbornness on top of everything else this night has already tried to take from us."

I wanted to argue. I opened my mouth to argue, out of pure habit if nothing else, and found that my body had already made the decision for me, my knees buckling just enough that Seraphine had to catch most of my weight against her own exhausted frame.

"Someone needs to keep watch," I said, even as she lowered me down against the archive's broken wall. "Someone needs to be awake in case whoever did this comes back for anything else."

"Wren is with Lyra. I'll wake the healthy wolves myself and post a proper watch this time, one that actually stays awake." She pressed a hand briefly to my forehead, checking for fever the way she'd learned to check every patient who passed through her care over the last eight months. "You have done enough tonight, Nyx. You barred a door with your own body. You bled protecting my daughter before she'd even finished her first hour of life. Let someone else carry this next part."

I let my head fall back against the wall, the fight finally draining out of me all at once now that my body had made the argument for me that my pride never would have allowed, and closed my eyes for just a moment, just long enough to steady the spinning behind them.

That was when I heard it, faint at first, then unmistakable, the sound of horses coming in hard and fast from the direction of the gate, too many of them, too urgent, for this to be a slow, exhausted return.

Seraphine went still beside me, her hand tightening around the knife she hadn't set down all night.

"That's not the rebuilding crew," she said quietly.

Neither of us knew, at that moment, whether it was Kael's column finally returning, or something far worse arriving to finish what tonight had already started.