What The Study Hides
873 Words
It was not Alpha Damon returning.
Rowan stood in the doorway, one hand still on the handle, his face pale. "You need to see this," he said, holding up a slim leather notebook that looked far too old to belong to anyone still living. "I found it in the hallway archive. It fell out of a box marked with the Wolfe pack seal when the delivery men brought Alpha Damon's things in for the visit."
My father frowned. "Rowan, that's private correspondence. You shouldn't have opened it."
"I know," Rowan said, "but Selene needs to see it before anyone realizes it's missing."
We gathered around the desk, my father, Kade, Rowan, and me, four people bent over a notebook that smelled of dust and old secrets. Rowan flipped to a page marked with a faded ribbon and set it in front of me.
The handwriting matched. The same slanted, careful strokes I had just seen on the treaty, the same disguised version of my great grandfather's signature, practised over and over across three full pages like someone perfecting a forgery
Underneath the practice signatures, a single line in Damon Wolfe's own unmistakable hand.
The Ashworth line carries more than land. Once the girl is bound to my son, everything buried in her blood becomes mine to claim.
I read the words three times before they made sense.
"Everything buried in her blood," Kade said quietly, reading over my shoulder. "What does that mean?"
I did not know. Not yet. But something cold settled in my chest, a certainty I could not explain, that this was never about territory or debts at all. This was about something older, something hidden in my own family line that even I did not fully understand.
"My father is not a man who chases land for the sake of land," Kade said slowly. "He chases power that compounds. If he thinks your bloodline carries something valuable, he will not stop until he has it, marriage or no marriage."
Rowan closed the notebook carefully. "We need to figure out what that something is before the wedding, not after."
I thought of the treaty forged in my father's own family name, of a debt that had never actually existed, of an engagement announced with impossible speed for reasons that clearly had nothing to do with honoring an old promise.
In my first life, I walked into my wedding, believing I understood exactly what I was giving up. I understood nothing.
"There's an archive room at Blackthorn Academy," I said suddenly, memory surfacing from a conversation I once overheard during my first marriage, a offhand comment from an old pack historian about records older than any living Alpha. "Bloodline records going back centuries. If there's something buried in my family line, it might be documented there."
Kade's eyes met mine, something sharpening in his expression, decision settling over uncertainty. "I can get us in. My father doesn't know I have access to the restricted section."
"Since when do you have access to a restricted archive," I asked.
"Since I started preparing for the day I would need to know more than my father wants me to know," he said, and for the first time, I saw something in him that looked almost like the boy I might have loved freely, in a life where neither of our fathers had ever made a single choice for us.
We agreed to meet after midnight, when the academy halls would be empty and the training instructors long asleep. My father protested weakly, worried for my safety, but even he seemed to understand there was no version of the next four days that did not require answers we did not yet have.
I spent the hours before midnight pacing my room, turning the notebook's words over and over. Everything buried in her blood becomes mine to claim. I thought of my mother, who died of a fever no healer could explain in my first life, gone before I ever thought to ask her about our family history. I thought of my grandmother, who I barely remembered, who my father rarely spoke of at all.
What if her death had not been a fever. What if someone had wanted her gone long before I was ever born, for the exact same reason Alpha Damon now wanted me bound to his son before the full moon.
At midnight, I slipped out of my room and made my way toward the academy grounds, moonlight silvering the path ahead of me, my heart hammering with something that was equal parts fear and reckless hope.
Kade was waiting exactly where he said he would be, a shadow at the edge of the tree line, and when he saw me approaching, he stepped forward without a word and offered his hand.
I hesitated only a second before taking it.
His fingers closed around mine, warm and steady, and for one strange, dangerous moment, walking through the dark toward a room full of buried secrets, it did not feel like strategy at all.
It felt like trust.
We had barely crossed the tree line when a twig snapped somewhere behind us, sharp and deliberate in the silent night.
We were not alone.
- Writer
