LOGINElara’s Pov: Silas ordered the fragment secured with the other documents, making sure the guards understood that nothing recovered from the property was to be discarded or handled carelessly. Before we could continue examining the remaining indexes, one of the guards approached us with a report that made Silas turn toward the entrance.A vehicle had been spotted near the outer approach to the property, remaining at a distance before moving away from the road leading toward the building. The guards had not been able to identify its occupants, and there was no confirmation that the vehicle had entered the grounds or that its presence had anything to do with our investigation.Silas immediately ordered the guards to remain alert, but he did not send anyone after the vehicle, refusing to divide our small team or leave the evidence unsecured in pursuit of an uncertain lead. I understood the decision, even though the timing unsettled me, because the vehicle had appeared after
Elara’s Pov:I had begun to understand that the abandoned Blackwood property was not simply a place where old family secrets had been stored, but a place where someone had carefully decided which secrets deserved to survive and which ones needed to disappear. The more records Silas and I examined, the more obvious it became that the missing register was not our only problem, and continuing to search the same rooms for something that might have been removed years ago would accomplish nothing if we did not first understand how the remaining documents were connected.Silas stood beside the damaged cabinet, studying the empty compartment while I arranged the papers we had already examined across the desk, separating the transfer records from the authorization documents and the fragments recovered from the hidden spaces. The small communication device discovered beneath the vehicle had been secured without anyone attempting to activate it, and the partial reference number we had found earl
Elara’s Pov: “If someone knew we were coming, they might have expected us to find the records,” I said quietly, looking toward Silas. “But we cannot assume the device was used to follow us until we know what it is capable of doing.”Silas agreed, although his expression showed that he shared my concern. He ordered the guards to examine the vehicle carefully and check whether anything else had been concealed around it before we decided how to proceed.Once the search was complete, we returned to the documents and organized the evidence into separate groups, keeping the property records apart from the material connected to Rowan’s murder. I wanted to avoid making the same mistake we had made earlier, when the trail leading toward Victor’s territory had encouraged us to treat separate pieces of evidence as though they belonged to one deliberate plan.The shipping records had pointed toward Victor, but we had never established who approved the shipments or whether
Elara’s Pov: I remained beside the desk, staring at the partial reference to the missing register while Silas instructed the guards to secure the documents we had recovered from the abandoned property. The discovery had given us a direction to follow, but it had also raised questions that made me increasingly uncomfortable, because someone had deliberately removed information that could identify the people authorized to use the old Blackwood system. If Rowan had been investigating the same authority before his death, then the missing register might have been connected to his murder, although I was not prepared to assume that every missing document had been removed for the same reason.“We need to establish whether another copy of this register exists before we leave,” I told Silas, pointing toward the reference on the surviving index. “If someone removed the original, there may still be a record somewhere else, and I would rather know what we are searching for than return to Blackwoo
Elara’s Pov: I stared at the notation beneath Rowan’s reference number, trying to understand why someone had gone to such lengths to preserve a record while removing the information that would have explained its purpose. The abandoned Blackwood property had already revealed more than I expected, from the documents connecting my name to events that occurred before Silas and I officially met to the mysterious authority that someone continued to exercise despite the system supposedly being closed. Now, with the warning left at the entrance still fresh in my mind, I could not shake the feeling that we had stumbled upon something its creators had never intended us to find.Silas stood beside the desk, examining the same notation while one of the guards waited near the doorway. The envelope lay beside the other documents, its message directed at him with a familiarity that suggested the sender understood his position and knew precisely what we had been investigating.“You said this refe
Silas pov: I joined her in searching the drawers, checking behind the wooden runners and beneath the loose panels where papers might have slipped during the clearing. It was while examining the lowest drawer that I found a narrow strip of paper wedged behind the runner, so carefully positioned that I might have missed it if the drawer had not resisted when I tried to close it.The strip contained a partial entry number written in the same format as the codes in the register, along with a date that fell within the period when Elara had first been connected to the Blackwood family records. Although the entry was incomplete, its surviving digits matched the beginning of the reference printed beneath her name, giving us a specific number that could be compared against the original archives when we returned to the pack.I turned the paper over, hoping to find another notation, but the reverse side was blank, and the remaining writing offered no name or signature that could i
POV: ElaraThe first thing I felt was a dull throbbing behind my eyes, and when I tried to move my hand, it felt like it was weighted down by lead pipes, so I just laid there for a moment listening to the steady beep of a machine nearby. I slowly forced my eyelids open, and the bright fluorescent
POV: ElaraThe plastic stick felt heavy in my hand as I stared at the two pink lines, and my heart was racing so fast that I could barely breathe.I had waited three years for this moment, three years of being the "rogue wife" everyone whispered about in the hallways, but I was sure everything wou
Elara~I woke up the next morning with this weird ache in my back that made me shift around on the bed a couple times before I gave up and just sat there staring at the bare walls. The room felt different without all that old stuff from before. My hand went to my stomach again without thinking, and
POV: SilasI stood at the head of the long dining table and watched the seats fill up with my high-ranking warriors and their mates, but my mind wasn't on the border reports or the upcoming hunt because I couldn't stop thinking about the way Elara had looked at me in her bedroom.I expected her to







