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Chapter 3

Author: Heliotrope
I woke up at dawn the next morning.

Kane was still asleep beside me.

He was quiet when he slept.

All his sharp edges gone, just a regular, handsome man.

I sat up quietly, tiptoeing to the study.

Right in the center of his desk sat a photo.

A picture of him and me, taken by the snow mountain lake.

In the photo, I was smiling brightly.

He was looking down at me, his gaze soft.

Everything about it looked perfect.

I opened my computer and began organizing various project files.

Unconsciously, my gaze fell upon a file on the desktop.

MEMORANDUM

Without thinking, I flipped it open.

It was filled with entries.

Most of them work-related.

3 PM: Meeting with White Pack Alpha, finalize mining boundary

Final draft of south city energy station bid

Next Wednesday: Trip to European Wolf Alliance headquarters

And then, the smaller, more trivial things.

Ella’s favorite maple cake from the shop at the foot of the mountain is fresh every Wednesday, remember to pre-order

Next month’s anniversary: Take Ella to Aurora Bay, book the cabin with aurora views in advance

White Pine Valley west woodland border: Send men to patrol, stop neighboring packs from crossing the line

Each entry was precise, meticulous, mundane.

All of them is about work, about home, about me, about White Pine Valley behind me.

They looked perfectly normal.

So normal, I almost believed he had changed.

Perhaps he truly forgot what happened back then.

Maybe I should let go. Maybe I should just live with him, quietly, peacefully.

I smiled bitterly, ready to file the folder into my work partition, when I accidentally pressed a shortcut key.

A deeper, hidden encrypted partition suddenly appeared.

At its center: a single document, locked behind a password.

I tried our birthdays.

Wrong.

On instinct, I typed the date of our reunion three years ago.

The document unlocked.

The title read:

ELLA

My name.

In that instant, it felt like my breath, my blood froze solid.

My eyes dropped lower.

I saw the start date of the file’s entries.

The seventh day of the deep winter.

One year before we’d reunited at the Rite of Adulthood Ball.

A massive, unspeakable terror wrapped around me in an instant.

I couldn’t breathe.

My hands shaking, I used every ounce of strength I had to open the file.
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