Chapter 10: Kieran

I run for two hours.

Full shift. Low to the ground, lungs burning, the forest blurring past in long dark ribbons of shadow and root. My wolf doesn't want to stop. My wolf wants to keep running until the scent of her is gone from my nose, until the ghost of her pulse is gone from my memory, until the sound of her voice — I didn't say I didn't — stops replaying in a loop underneath every other thought.

It doesn't work.

I shift back at the edge of the eastern ridge, dragging on the clothes I left folded under a rock like a civilised creature, and I stand there in the cold dark and breathe, and I think about Lilian Hart.

Not Sienna.

Her mother.

Because that is something I can be angry about without it unravelling me.

***

I find her in the library.

Of course I do.

It's past midnight, and she's sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the lowest shelf, her shoes off, her hair loose, three books open around her like she's conducting her own small council. She has a notebook balanced on her knee,e and she's writing in it with the focused, private intensity of someone who has forgotten there is a world outside her own head.

She doesn't hear me come in.

I stand in the doorway for a moment and watch her. The lamp behind her throws gold across her hair. She bites the end of her pen, frowns at something she's written, and crosses it out.

"You're dripping on the floor," she says without looking up.

I look down. My shirt is damp from the run. "I went out."

"In the middle of the night."

"I do that."

She finally looks up. She scans my face the way she scans everything — quick, cataloguing, missing nothing. "You ran in wolf form," she says. "Your eyes are still slightly gold."

I cross the room and sit in the chair across from her, because standing in the doorway watching her feels like standing at the edge of something I can't come back from.

"I owe you an explanation," I say.

Her pen stills. "About what?"

"My father. Your mother. What I know. What I should have told you before tonight."

She sets the notebook down. Waits.

***

I've rehearsed this in my head before. Not for her specifically — I didn't know she existed until three days ago. But I've turned these facts over so many times. 

"My father's name was Callum Byrne," I start. "He was Alpha for eighteen years. He believed, genuinely, that the post-Exposure world could work. Wolves and humans cooperating. Not just tolerating each other — actually building something." I stop. "Most Alphas thought he was naive. I thought he was naive."

"You were wrong," Sienna says softly.

"I was twenty-three. I thought I knew what the world was."

She doesn't push. She just watches me with those dark eyes, and it's easier than it should be to keep talking.

"Your mother came to him with her research eight years ago. She was the first human geneticist who'd managed to map the shift sequence on a cellular level. Not theoretically — actually, with evidence. My father said she was extraordinary. That she moved through the science the way wolves move through territory — as she belonged there."

Something flickers in Sienna's expression. Pride, I think. Old and complicated.

"They were building something together," I continue. "An alliance between her research and the pack's cooperation. She had access to voluntary subjects — wolves who wanted to contribute. She had funding from the university. My father had political cover and community trust." I exhale. "And then she discovered what the Architects were doing with the data."

"Which was?"

"Using it to develop a weapon. Taking her work on werewolf biology and inverting it — not to understand us, but to dismantle us. Permanently." I meet her eyes. "She tried to stop them. She brought my father evidence. They made a plan to expose the Architects through supernatural council channels — the same way you did tonight, with your files and your photographs."

"What happened?"

I lean forward, elbows on my knees.

"She was dead within the week. Car accident, officially. My father went to the council alone. Three months later, he died in what the record calls a territorial challenge gone wrong." My jaw locks. "It was an execution. They sedated him first — the same chemical signature we found in Dario's blood — and then they staged the rest."

The room is very quiet.

Sienna hasn't moved. Her pen is lying on the open notebook, forgotten, and her hands are still in her lap.

"You've known," she says. "This whole time. You've known it was the same people."

"Yes."

"And you've been carrying that alone for five years."

I don't answer. The silence says it for me.

She unfolds herself from the floor in one quiet motion and crosses to the shelf directly beside my chair. I watch her eyes move across the spines, reading titles.

She pulls one out.

It's a small book. Old, cloth-covered, the spine creased with use. She turns it over, opens it to the first page, and holds it out to me.

I take it.

The handwriting inside the front cover is looping, left-slanted, and confident. An inscription. Not to me.

To Callum — who always believed the walls between us were only walls. Thank you for letting me through.

"My mother's handwriting," Sienna says. Her voice is steady, but barely. "I recognise it from the journals."

I stare at the inscription for a long time.

Callum Byrne kept this book on his shelf. And when he died, it came to me with everything else — his territory, his debts, his unfinished war — and I put it here without ever opening it.

"He kept it," I say more to myself than to her.

"He kept it," she agrees.

Neither of us speaks for a moment.

"I should have protected her," I say. "The pack should have. If we'd known what the Architects were planning —"

"You were twenty-three," Sienna says. She says it the same way I said it ten minutes ago, turning my own words back on me with perfect precision. "You thought you knew what the world was."

I look at her.

She looks back entirely too close, and my wolf goes absolutely still.

"I'm not going to let them do it again," I say.

She holds my gaze. "Neither am I."

Sienna reaches for the page to close it. Something slips out from between the paper, a folded document hidden deep in the spine. It looks old.

She frowns and opens it. Her eyes move across the page once, then again. Slowly, she looks up at me.

Her voice is barely distinct. "Kieran, what does bite compatibility mean?”

My stomach drops.