Chapter 9: The First Memory

POV: Evana

The woman was crying before I ever saw her.

Soft sobs, echoing through a room too dark to place. I stood in a doorway I hadn’t chosen, unable to move, unable to speak, with no memory of how I’d gotten there.

Then I saw him.

Arthur’s father. The late Alpha, standing beside a heavy desk, his face set in a seriousness I recognized without knowing why. A woman stood across from him, someone I’d never seen before, her fear plain even in the half-light.

“You don’t understand,” she whispered.

“I understand perfectly,” he said.

“They’ll find her.”

“Not if we protect her.”

She shook her head, desperate. “The council will kill her if they learn what she is.”

My heart slammed against my ribs. Who were they talking about?

Then he said something that froze the whole dream around me.

“The Moon-Blood must never be discovered.”

I gasped, and the sound seemed to carry, the woman’s eyes snapped toward the doorway, toward me, wide with sudden terror.

“You promised.”

“I did.”

“What about the girl?”

He looked down. “She must remain hidden.”

My head spun. The room blurred at the edges, the woman’s voice growing distant, fading into something I could barely hold onto.

“One day,” she said, “she’ll remember.”

I woke up screaming.

I sat upright, tears already streaming down my face before I understood why I was crying at all. I touched my cheeks like I could figure out the source of them through touch alone.

The dream had felt different. Too real. I could still catch the ghost of that room’s scent, still hear the exact pitch of the woman’s voice, still see the precise shape of fear on Arthur’s father’s face.

I looked down at my own hands.

That wasn’t a dream.

The thought arrived without asking permission. It was a memory. But how could I remember something I’d never lived?

I climbed out of bed. I needed answers, and I knew exactly where to look for them.

His father’s study.

The study had stayed locked for years, since before I’d ever set foot in this house, as far as I knew. But I’d found the door while wandering the upper hallway one evening, restless, and the old lock had given way after enough patience.

Dust hung in the air when I stepped inside. Everything felt strangely, unsettlingly familiar, the desk, the shelves, the dead fireplace, like I’d stood in this exact room before, in a life I couldn’t account for.

I checked the desk. Nothing. The drawers, empty.

Then I remembered the vision, his father standing beside this same desk, close enough to touch it.

I knelt. Ran my fingers along the floorboards until one gave under the pressure differently than the rest.

I pressed it. It shifted.

Underneath was a small metal box. Inside, a single envelope.

My name was written across the front in handwriting I’d never seen and somehow recognized anyway.

EVANA.

I stared at it, my pulse loud in my own ears. Why would a dead man have written my name on anything?

I reached for the seal.

The door slammed open behind me.

I spun around. Arthur stood in the frame, his eyes locking onto the envelope in my hand, all the color draining out of his face in an instant.

“What are you doing here?”

“I could ask you the same thing.”

“This is my father’s study.”

“And apparently he left something for me.”

His gaze didn’t move off the envelope. “Give it to me.”

“No.”

“Evana.”

“I want answers.”

“You don’t know what you’re dealing with.”

“Neither do you.”

That landed. I saw it land.

I held the envelope against my chest. “Why did your father write my name?”

He stepped closer. “I don’t know.”

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not.”

“Then why are you afraid?”

His jaw tightened. “I’m not afraid.”

“You were afraid when you saw the book.”

He said nothing to that, because there was nothing true he could say.

I stepped back. “I’m opening it.”

“Don’t.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know what’s inside.”

“Then we’ll find out together.”

I broke the seal.

He reached for the envelope at the same moment, and our hands collided over it, and the instant they touched, something in him detonated.

Arthur staggered back, a growl tearing out of his throat that didn’t sound entirely human, his eyes flashing gold-bright. Something in me answered it before I could think to stop it, power rushing through the room fast enough to rattle the windows and gutter every candle at once.

We stared at each other, both of us shaken, neither of us understanding what had just happened between two hands and a sealed envelope.

Then his eyes dropped back to the paper.

Fear. Recognition. Something underneath both that looked almost like grief.

“My father,” he said, quiet, “wrote this before he died.”