Old Habits

i passed Lira in the corridor on my way to the archive, and she fell into step beside me without asking, the way she used to when we were children and neither of us had learned yet to keep our distance.

"Everyone's still taking about it," she said." Kai Thorn, riding out here himself. You've made quite a name for yourself this week."

"I'm aware."

"Are you going to tell me why you really said no?" She kept her tone light, curious, the tone of a sister making conversation and nothing more, her eyes lingered on my face a beat too long, waiting for something I wasn't offering. "Or Is that a secret too?"

"There's no secret. I didn't want the marriage."

"No one ever wants the marriage," she said. "That's never stopped anyone before."

"Maybe I'm not anyone."

She studied me a moment longer, and I watched her decide, visibly, not to push further, folding whatever she actually wanted to say back down into something smaller and safer.

"Enjoy your scrolls," she said instead, peeling off toward the east stair, and I stood there for a moment longer than I needed to, watching her go, certain I'd just watched her swallow something she badly wanted to say out loud.

The Voss archive had always been my favorite place in the pack house, back when I was the kind of girl who found comfort in old books instead of old wounds. I'd spent half my childhood curled up between the shelves, reading treaties and prophecy fragments no one else cared to touch, and it turned out that habit was useful for more than passing time. Nobody questioned Selene Voss wanting to spend her mornings buried in dusty scrolls. I'd built that reputation before I knew I'd need it.

Elder Thorne kept the library with a proprietary tenderness that made him suspicious of anyone who touched his shelves without asking. He was old even in my first life, and older now, his hands spotted with age, his eyes pale and sharper than they had any right to be at his years.

"You're back early," he said, not looking up from the scroll he was rebinding. "Twice this week. Should I be worried Nightfang's courtship has driven you to prophecy for comfort?"

"Something like that," I said, running my fingers along a shelf of treaties I'd read a lifetime ago, back when I'd had no reason to care what any of them actually said. "Do you still keep the older records In the back room? The ones from before the moon pact was formalized?"

"Some of them." He glanced up at that, curiosity sharpening into something more careful. "Most of what predates the pack were never meant for general reading. Half of it isn't even catalogued properly. What exactly are you hoping to find back there?"

"I'm looking for records on old pack debts," I said. "Pacts that predates the moon pact, specifically. Anything involving outside parties."

His hands went still. Just for a second, but I caught it.

"That's an oddly specific interest for a girl who was, last I heard, refusing marriage proposals rather than studying legal history."

"Can't I have two interests?"

"You can have as many as you like." He set the scroll down and looked at me properly, the way he looked at me in my first life when he suspected I was lying about something, which had been often, because I'd learned young that Elder Thorne could smell a half truth from across the room. "I've kept this archive for forty years, Selene. I've known every scholar who's come through those doors, and I know what genuine curiosity looks like versus a girl hunting for something specific and hoping I won't notice."

"Maybe I'm hunting for something specific."

"Then perhaps you'll tell me what."

"Does it matter, if I find it?"

"It matters to me," he said, "because I have kept this archive since before your mother was your age, and in all that time, I have learned that the questions people ask reveal more than the answers they're given. So humor an old man. What is it you're really looking for, Selene?"

I studied him for a moment, weighing how much of the truth this version of him had earned. In my first life, I had never once come to him with questions like these, too consumed with a marriage that hadn't yet started falling apart to think of digging into old pacts and older debts. This Elder Thorne was a stranger to me in a way that mattered, even wearing a face I'd known my whole life.

"I'm looking for anything in obligations that predate the moon pact," I said. "Specifically ones involving bloodlines. Inheritance debts. That kind that don't expire just because the ones who signed them did."

"That's a specific kind of nothing to be curious about."

"You knew my mother," I said. It wasn't a question. "You've been here longer than she was alive. If anyone in this house had ever heard of a debt tied to her line, it's you."

His expression didn't change, but something behind it did, a door closing very quietly and very deliberately. "Your mother was a remarkable woman. That isn't the same as saying i know what happened to her, Selene. I've spent eleven years grieving that mystery same as your father has."

"That's not what I asked."

"No," he agreed. "It isn't."

I hesitated, weighing how much to give him. Elder Thorne had never betrayed me in my first life, not once, not even when he probably should have. But that life hadn't included a ledger with Vesper's Kane in it, hadn't included a father too frightened to explain himself, hadn't included any of this.

"Have you ever heard the name Vesper Kane?," I asked.

"Where did you hear that name?"

"Does it matter?"

"It matters a great deal," he said, and for the first time since I'd known him, in either life, his voice had an edge in it that almost sounded like fear. "That is not a name young women ask about idly, Selene. Tell me where you heard it."

"Why does it frighten you?"

"I didn't say it frightened me."

"You didn't have to." I kept my voice even, though my pulse was doing something different entirely. "I've known you my whole life, Elder Thorne. I've never once seen your hand go still on a scroll like that before."

He looked down at his own hands as if surprised to find them unsteady, and pressed them flat against the table, like stillness could be commanded if he wanted it badly enough.

"I found it in an old ledger," I said, choosing the truth because I was tired of managing everyone's fear except my own. "Attached to a pact concerning my mother's bloodline. Dated the week she disappeared."

"You shouldn't have found that," he said, mostly to himself. "You shouldn't know that name at all."

"Why not?"

"Because some names carry weight, child, and that one carries more than most." He looked at me then, really looked, the way he used to when he was trying to decide if I was old enough for the truths he kept locked away with the forbidden texts. "The questions you're asking. The things you already seem to know before I told you a word it it. I've catalogued every scholar who's walked through this archive for forty years, and I have never once met a nineteen-year-old who asks questions like these."

"Like what?"

He didn't answer right away. He just studied me, long enough that I felt the silence pressing against my ribs, long enough that I understood, with a lurch of something between hope and dread, that he saw something in me that he couldn't explain and wasn't going to let go of easily.

"Like someone," he said finally, "who's already lived the answer."

The words landed harder than he could have known, and I felt my composure slip for the first time since I'd woken up in this life, a crack running clean through the careful mask I'd been wearing for days.

"That's a strange thing to say to a girl who's lived here her whole life," I managed to say.

"Is it?." He didn't look away. "I have watched you grow up in this archive, Selene. I know the shape of your curiosity, the way you asked questions because you wanted to understand the world. This is different. This is a woman gathering evidence, not a girl satisfying idle wonder. I may be old, but I'm not blind."

"What if I told you I couldn't explain it? Not because I don't want to, but because I don't know how you'd believe me if I did."

"I have spent forty years in a room full of prophecy and old magic no one fully understands anymore," he said. "There is very little left that I would refuse to believe."

I looked at him for a while, weighing the temptation to tell him everything against the memory of exactly of how badly trust had cost me the last time I'd handed it out freely. I wasn't ready. Not yet. Not until I understood more of what I was dealing with than a single name in a hidden ledger and an old man's fear.

"Someday," I said. "I might take you up on that."

"I'll hold you to it," he said, and there was something almost gentle in the way he said it, an offer left open rather than a door shut. "In the meantime, be careful whose questions you go asking with a name like Vesper Kane's attached to them. Some doors, once you knock on them, knock back."