Chapter 4

Ivy's POV

"You need to sit down before you fall down." My father's voice was steady despite the alarm etched into every line of his face, and I let him guide me into the chair at his kitchen table because my legs honestly were not sure they could hold me up much longer.

"Dad, look at it." I slid the envelope across the table, my hand trembling so hard the paper made a papery, frightened sound against the wood. "That is her handwriting, I’d recognize it anyway papa." I said

He did not touch it right away. He just stared at it, his weathered face going pale in a way I had only seen once before, the night he told me my mother's family was something I could never ask about.

"Where did this come from?" he finally asked.

"A courier. No return address. It just showed up at the bakery today." My voice cracked on the last word. "Dad, she has been dead for five years. I watched them bury an empty casket because they never found her body. How is she sending me letters?"

He opened the envelope with careful, deliberate movements, and pulled out a single postcard, plain white, with six words written across the back in handwriting I would have recognized anywhere.

You should not have taken what is mine, the card reads

The kitchen went silent except for the sound of my own heartbeat pounding in my ears.

"What does that mean?" I whispered. "What did I take from her? I don't even know what it meant"

My father set the postcard down slowly, and something in his expression shifted, a decision being made behind his eyes. "Ivy, I think it is time I told you something about your mother's side of the family."

"Dad, now is not the time for another one of your mysteries, I need to know if my best friend is alive."

"I think this is connected." His voice sharpened, and I stopped talking, because in twenty eight years I had rarely heard him speak like that. "Your mother's pack was destroyed before you were born. Wiped out in a single night by a rival pack that wanted their bloodline gone. Your mother was one of the only survivors, and she spent the rest of her life hiding what she was, hiding what you would become, because the pack that did it was still out there, still powerful, still hunting for anyone left of her line."

My whole body went cold. "You are telling me people died trying to kill my mother's family, and you never once thought I should know that?"

"I was protecting you."

"You were lying to me dad." My voice cracked, half grief, half fury. "For twenty eight years, Dad. And now Mari's handwriting is showing up on postcards and I do not even know what is real anymore."

He reached across the table and gripped my hand, his own trembling slightly. "I do not know who is sending these. I do not know if it is really her, or someone using her memory to hurt you. But I know this. Whatever it is, it is connected to the same danger that destroyed your mother's pack. And if that danger is circling back now, after all these years, it means someone knows exactly who you are."

"Or what I can do." I whispered

 The healing. The secret I had carried since I was a little girl, the one thing I had never told a single living soul except him.

"Or what you can do," he agreed quietly.

I pressed my palms flat against the table, forcing myself to breathe, forcing my mind to stop spinning long enough to think clearly. "Roman asked me today if I knew why his wolf reacted to me. He said he feels like he is supposed to remember something."

My father went very still. "What did you tell him?"

"Nothing. I could not." I swallowed hard. "Dad, the night I healed him, five years ago, I did something I have never told anyone. I was so scared of what would happen if he remembered, if anyone found out what I could do, so I put my hands on his head and I took the memory away."

The silence that followed felt like it lasted an hour.

"You erased his memory," my father finally said.

"Yes." My voice broke on the word. "But that is not even the worst of it. Dad, Mari was still out there that night. Whatever attacked them left her hurt somewhere Roman could still have reached, if he had remembered the second he woke up, if he had known she needed him. But I took that from him too. He did not just forget me. He forgot her. He forgot he had a reason to go back."

My father's face went a shade paler than I had ever seen it. 

"Ivy." he called my name with worry

"I did not know. I swear to you I did not know what I was taking when I took it. I just wanted him to forget what happened between us, and I never once thought about what else was tangled up in that same memory." Tears burned hot and sudden behind my eyes.

 "I might be the reason she died alone out there, and not Bloodmoon. Me." i said sobbing

"Ivy, look at me." He waited until I did, until I forced my eyes up from the table to his. "You did not attack them. You did not leave her on that hillside. Whatever you took, you took trying to survive a world that has never once been safe for people like us. That is not the same as killing her."

It did not feel different. Atleast not yet, and not with her handwriting still sitting on the table between us.

"Ivy." He said my name like a warning. "Do you understand what it means once his memories are starting to come back on their own now? That is not something that happens by accident. Something, or someone, is forcing them loose."

My stomach turned to ice. "You think Marisol is doing this?"

"I think," he said carefully, "that whoever is sending you these postcards wants you scared, wants you desperate, and wants you making mistakes. And I think the safest thing you could do right now is stay far away from Roman Darkwood until we understand what we are dealing with."

I thought about Hazel's bright, delighted face every time she looked at Roman. I thought about the way his voice had gone soft and careful when he asked me what was wrong. I thought about five years of guilt sitting like a stone in my chest, and the postcard sitting on the table between us like a threat I could not ignore.

"I cannot stay away from him," I said quietly.

"Ivy."

"If someone is trying to hurt him too, Dad, I cannot just let that happen. Not without warning him. Not after everything I already did to him without his permission."

My father studied me for a long moment, something between fear and reluctant pride settling into his tired eyes. "Then you had better decide exactly how much of the truth you are willing to give him. Because once you start pulling on this thread, Ivy, there is no telling how much unravels."

I looked down at the postcard again, at those six accusing words written in handwriting that belonged to a dead girl, and felt the ground I had built my entire careful, quiet life on start to crack wide open beneath my feet.

Tomorrow, I decided, I would go find Roman Darkwood. And I would finally tell him the truth.

Or at least enough of it to keep him alive.