The Archive Room
899 Words
Kade pulled me behind the wide trunk of an old oak, one arm sliding protectively across my waist, both of us going still as statues while footsteps crunched over dry leaves somewhere close.
A figure passed between the trees a few yards away, moving fast, cloak pulled tight against the night air. I caught only a glimpse of dark hair before the figure vanished toward the eastern dormitories.
"Isolde," Kade breathed, barely audible.
My pulse spiked. "Do you think she followed us?"
"I don't know." His arm stayed around me a moment longer than necessary before he seemed to realize it and pulled back, clearing his throat. "We should hurry. If she's out here, she might report seeing us together, and that's a complication neither of us needs tonight."
We moved quickly after that, cutting through the shadows toward the academy's oldest wing, a stone building separate from the main halls that housed record rooms most students never bothered to visit. Kade produced a heavy iron key from his jacket and unlocked a door I would have walked past without a second glance.
The archive room smelled of old parchment and dust, shelves stretching up into darkness beyond the reach of Kade's small handheld light. Bloodline records, treaty copies, birth registries going back further than either of our families could easily trace.
"Ashworth," Kade murmured, scanning the shelves. "Should be organized by pack name and generation."
I found the section first, my fingers trailing over cracked leather spines until I reached a thin, water damaged volume marked with my family crest and a date nearly seventy years old. I pulled it free and set it on the reading table between us, hands trembling as I opened the fragile pages.
Birth records. Marriage records. And then, halfway through, a section that made my breath catch entirely.
A name I had never once heard in either of my lives.
Wren Ashworth. Born to my great grandmother in secret, outside her marriage, fathered by an Alpha from a pack the records simply called the Marrow line, a bloodline noted only as extinguished during the same territory wars that produced the debt treaty downstairs.
Extinguished. Not defeated. Not surrendered. Extinguished, like something deliberately erased.
"The Marrow pack," Kade said slowly, reading over my shoulder, his voice tight. "I've heard that name before. My father mentioned it once, years ago, and told me never to repeat it."
"Why would he care about a pack that no longer exists?"
Kade turned the page carefully, revealing a single faded illustration of a crest, a silver moon wrapped in thorned vines, and beneath it, a note in cramped, ancient handwriting.
The Marrow bloodline carries the old magic, tied directly to the moon goddess herself, said to grant its heirs the power to walk between one life and the next.
The power to walk between one life and the next.
I stared at the words until they blurred, my heart pounding so hard I thought it might crack my ribs from the inside.
That was me. That was exactly what had happened to me. I had died and walked straight back into another life with every memory intact, and here, buried in a record book seventy years old, someone had written down the exact nature of the gift as though they had seen it happen before.
"Selene," Kade said carefully, watching my face. "You've gone white. What is it?"
I could not tell him. Not yet. Not until I understood what it meant myself, what it meant that my own bloodline carried a power my future husband's father wanted desperately enough to forge documents and force a wedding four days ahead of schedule.
"It's nothing," I lied. "Just surprised, that's all. I didn't know any of this existed."
Kade did not look convinced, but he let it go, turning back to the book, flipping toward the final entries in the Ashworth line. His finger stopped on a name near the bottom of the page, and his whole body went rigid.
"Selene," he said, his voice dropping to something barely above a whisper. "Look at this."
I leaned over his shoulder and followed his finger to the last recorded entry in the Marrow bloodline section, a name written in fresh ink, far newer than anything else on the page, added long after the rest of the record should have been closed.
My own name.
Selene Ashworth, heir to the Marrow line, written in a hand I recognized instantly, because I had watched him sign a hundred documents in my first life with that exact same careful, slanted script.
Alpha Damon Wolfe had known about my bloodline for years.
He had known before I ever met his son the first time. He had known, and he had built an entire marriage, an entire alliance, an entire debt trap around a truth I was only now discovering for myself.
Which meant everything that happened in my first life, every lie, every silence, every cold year of marriage, had never been about love or even about land.
It had been about this. About me. About whatever power slept inside my blood that Damon Wolfe intended to claim no matter what it cost either of us.
Behind us, the archive door creaked open on its old hinges, and a voice I did not expect to hear cut through the silence like a blade.
- Writer
