Chapter 3: Seven Years Later

The registry clerk had been lying to me for twenty minutes, and I was starting to enjoy it.

"I'm afraid those records are sealed, miss." He smiled the smile of a man nobody important had ever told no. "Pack business. You understand."

I smiled back, folded my hands on the counter and let the silence stretch.

He was young for his post, soft around the middle, with ink on his cuffs and heavy keys at his belt. Somewhere behind him was a ledger that didn't want to be found.

"Of course," I said. "Only, the Alpha's steward wrote that I'd be given access to the birth registers for the last thirty years. I have the letter here."

I slid a sheet across the counter. It was a very good forgery. It had taken me three weeks and a stolen seal.

The clerk skimmed it. His smile slipped. "This is the steward's hand?"

"Check the seal."

He did. It was perfect. He couldn't know I'd pressed the real seal into warm wax while its owner slept off a bottle of wine.

"Well," he said weakly. "If the steward says."

"I'd hate to trouble him." I tilted my head. "He's a busy man. Doesn't like being asked twice."

The clerk went pale. He unhooked the keys with trembling fingers.

Twenty minutes later I sat alone in the back room with the register open. I turned the pages with one finger and read.

I wasn't looking for births. I was looking for what was missing.

Three years ago I'd stopped trusting what records said and started trusting what they left out. A woman born, a woman wed, a woman who simply stopped appearing. No death entry. No transfer to another pack. If you looked at one village, it was an accident. If you looked at forty, it was a pattern.

I found the first gap in twelve minutes.

Marisse Orel, born in the autumn of the year of the flood. Mated, second year. Last recorded...

Nothing. The line ended there.

I wrote her name in my notebook and turned the page. Another. Then a third, a cousin of the first, whose entry had been scratched out so cleanly I had to hold the page to the candle to read the ghost of the letters underneath.

All of them were women. All of them were descended, however thinly, from the same old line. My mother's line.

I snapped the book shut.

My hands were steady. They hadn't always been. For the first year I'd shaken every time I thought of the road, and the dead man with the mark on his wrist. But I had learned to hold still. I had learned that grief was a kind of patience, if you let it.

My wolf stirred at the back of my mind, steady now. She had never recovered the song she'd had in the hall. But she'd learned a different tune, lower and harder, and I had come to prefer it.

Careful, she murmured. Footsteps.

I tucked the notebook into my coat just as the door creaked open.

"Miss?" The clerk hovered on the threshold, sweating. "The, ah. The steward's man is here. He wants to know whether you've found what you were looking for."

I stood slowly.

He's not the steward's man, I thought. He's the steward himself, and he's about to ask to see my letter again.

"Tell him I've finished," I said pleasantly. "I'm just leaving."

"But he's asking for..."

"I'm sure he is."

I was at the window before he finished. It was barely wider than my shoulders, but I'd measured it on my way in. I swung a leg over the sill, dropped into the alley and landed in a crouch among the rubbish bins. Behind me, a door slammed and voices rose.

Three streets later I tugged my hood forward and let the crowd swallow me. No one looked at me twice.

I had become very good at that.

The inn smelled of woodsmoke and boiled cabbage. I climbed to my room, locked the door and sat on the bed with my boots still on.

Seven years of searching, and all I had was a notebook of missing names and one dead man's last words.

The Alpha should have killed you when he had the chance.

Kaelith Veyr had rejected me. That was the fact I had built myself on. Whatever else he'd wanted, he had stood in front of the whole Dominion, said I reject you and sent me out to be hunted. I had no reason to wonder about the rest.

And yet.

Forgive me.

I rubbed my eyes. "Stop it," I muttered.

That was when I noticed the envelope.

It lay on the pillow, small and cream colored, set down with care. I hadn't seen it when I came in. The door had been locked. The window was latched. And yet there it sat.

My wolf went rigid.

My hand closed on the knife at my belt. Slowly, I crossed the room, picked up the envelope and turned it over.

No name. No address. A single dark seal pressed into the wax, and the shape stamped there stopped my breath.

Everyone in the Dominion knew it.

A wolf's head, crowned in thorns.

The royal seal of Moonfang.

My fingers weren't steady when I broke it. Inside lay one sheet of heavy paper. The writing was bold, hurried, slanted hard to the right, as if the hand had been in a rush or in pain.

RETURN TO MOONFANG.

YOUR ALPHA KNOWS WHO KILLED YOUR MOTHER.

I read it once. Then again. The words didn't change.

My mother. Seven years of wondering, and no one had ever said the word killed. Not once. Not even me.

My eyes dropped to the signature, and the whole room tilted.

Two words. A name I had heard whispered in a throne room and cursed on a lonely road, a name I had sworn I would never read again.

Kaelith Veyr