The Alpha's Rejected Healer

Chapter 12 — The Vault of Stolen Names

The pendant burned against my sternum like it wanted to c***k my ribs open and run the rest of the way itself.

"Elara." Rhain caught my wrist in the temple corridor. "Slow down. You're shaking."

"It's pulling toward the vault." I pressed my palm over the silver crescent at my collar. The mark under my skin answered the pendant with a second heartbeat. "My mother's pendant, Rhain. It never did this. Not once in ten years."

His jaw worked. Crimson Hollow's Alpha was not a man who flinched, but something in my face made his eyes darken.

"The vault is sealed. Only the High Priestess holds the key."

"Then we don't use the door."

"Elara."

"She tried to d**g my tea this morning, Rhain. Seraphine. Sweet as honey and her beads stank of Blood Rot." I was whispering but it came out shredded. "She is hiding something with my mother's name on it. I can feel it."

He looked down at me for a long moment. Snow still clung to the fur at his collar from the courtyard.

"Then we go now," he said. "Before the midnight bell, when the acolytes change shift. I know a novice who owes me his life."

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The novice was a boy no older than sixteen with a stutter and a scar across his throat. Rhain had pulled him out of a rogue ambush two winters ago. He did not ask questions. He only handed Rhain a ring of iron keys and melted back into the shadows of the cloister.

The vault door was carved with the old moons. Three crescents stacked like a spine.

I touched the lowest one and the metal warmed under my fingertip.

"It knows me," I breathed.

"Of course it does." Rhain's voice was low behind my shoulder. "You're a Moonsinger. This place was built before Seraphine rewrote what that word means."

The key turned. The door sighed open on a breath of dust and old beeswax.

Inside, the air was colder than the corridor. Shelves lined every wall, stone alcoves cut deep with rolls of parchment, leather ledgers, little reliquaries of bone and silver. A moonstone lamp on the altar flared awake the moment I stepped in, like it had been waiting.

My pendant jerked forward so hard the chain bit my neck.

I followed it.

Past the shelves of pack treaties. Past the genealogies of Shadowfang Alphas, their portraits inked in cruel, precise lines. To a low cabinet in the back, unmarked, sealed with a wax sigil I didn't recognize.

The pendant dropped against the wood and went still.

"Here," I whispered.

Rhain broke the seal with his thumbnail. "If we're caught, Elara, there is no apology that saves us."

"Then don't get caught."

He almost smiled. He pulled the drawer open.

Inside were ledgers. A dozen of them, bound in dark green leather, their spines stamped with a single word in the old tongue.

*Moonsingers.*

My knees went weak.

I sank down right there on the vault floor and pulled the top ledger into my lap. The parchment was thin, brittle, centuries old. Names, columns of them, in five different hands across the years.

Every single name had a line drawn through it.

Some in black ink. Some in red. Some in a brown that I refused to believe was anything but ink.

"Rhain." My voice didn't sound like mine. "Rhain, they're all crossed out."

He crouched beside me. His hand settled warm at the small of my back.

"Keep reading," he said gently. "I'm here."

I turned the page. Then another. Dates. Pack affiliations. A column labeled *Disposition.*

*Burned at the altar. Drowned in the Silver Ford. Given to the rot. Claimed stillborn.*

My stomach turned over. I pressed the back of my wrist against my mouth.

"Shadowfang did this." Rhain's voice had gone to iron. "Generations of it. They hunted your line and called it worship."

"They would come to us for healing." I was crying and I hadn't noticed. "My grandmother told me. Packs came to Moonsingers when the Blood Rot ran through their warriors. She said we were sacred."

"You were useful." He said it like it cost him. "Until a healer could suppress the rot, they needed you. After the plague years passed, they wanted the bloodline gone. No one with the power to expose what they were doing with it."

I flipped faster. Hands trembling. I was looking for one name now. Only one.

I found her on page forty.

*Liora Seren. Moonsinger. Crescent mark, left clavicle. Shadowfang territory.*

A line through her name. Red ink. Beside it, in a neat devotional script I already hated:

*Retired from service. Sanctified.*

"Sanctified." The word came out of me like a curse. "That's what they called it. Sanctified. They killed her and wrote it like a prayer."

Rhain's hand tightened on my back.

I could not breathe. My mother's face swam up out of memory, humming in a kitchen, braiding silver thread into my hair, pressing her thumb to the little crescent on my skin and whispering, *our secret, little moon, our secret.*

She had known. She had known they were hunting her and she had kept singing anyway, so I could grow up thinking the world was soft.

I turned the page again because I could not stop.

And there, under her entry, in the same devotional hand, was a second line.

A name I knew in my bones before I read it.

*Elara Seren. Infant daughter. Crescent mark confirmed at birth.*

A line through it.

Red ink.

*Claimed dead at birth by order of the High Priestess Seraphine. Remains committed to the moonstone altar. No further record required.*

I stopped breathing.

The ledger slid off my knees.

Somewhere above us, far away through stone, the midnight bell began to ring, and under it, closer, much closer, I heard the vault door grind open behind us and a soft, honey-sweet voice I already knew too well.

"Oh, little moon," Seraphine sighed. "You weren't supposed to find yourself."

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