023 ~ The forgotten journal ~

Rain sealed the watchtower off from the rest of the world, drumming against cracked stone while the fire Kieran had built burned low, throwing long shadows across the circular room.

Neither of them had spoken in minutes. Too many questions had been asked with too few answered.

Selene's voice broke the air first. "So what happens now?"

Kieran sat with his back against the wall, his bound shoulder aching under the cloth she'd insisted on tying despite his protests. "We wait for daylight," he whispered loud enough for her to hear, watching the flames instead of her.

"And after that?"

"We go back."

She laughed, dry without any form of humor lacing it. "Back to what?"

"The mansion, the alliance."

"The lies... Victor?"

"The people trying to kill you," he said, and didn't bother softening it.

She shook her head slowly, disbelief bleeding into her voice. "Do you hear yourself? Yesterday I thought you were the reason my life fell apart. Tonight you're telling me someone rewrote your memory. As if it couldn't get any worse, masked wolves are hunting me through the woods, and somehow we're supposed to walk back into Ashfang as if none of it happened."

"We don't have another choice."

"There's always a choice."

"Not if we want answers."

He breathed out, keeping his eyes on the fire. That calm was more than enough to sharpen her anger. "You always make it sound simple."

"I know it isn't."

"No." She rose to her feet. "You don't."

The words hung there, heavier than she'd meant them, and Kieran lowered his gaze. "You're right."

The admission disarmed her faster than any argument could have. She turned away before he could see it land.

The tower was older than she'd realized at first— dust thick on every surface, decades of neglect scattered across broken furniture and a collapsed shelf leaning beneath a narrow staircase that climbed toward the ruined lookout above.

Anything, she decided, was better than sitting still with her thoughts.

"I'm going upstairs."

Kieran was on his feet before she'd finished the sentence. "Alone?"

"Planning to stop me?"

"No. I'm coming."

"You really don't know how to let someone breathe."

"And you have an unfortunate habit of walking into danger."

"That happened once."

He only looked at her.

"...Twice," she admitted, and for one unguarded moment the corner of his mouth threatened a smile before he caught it and let it die.

The upper level was colder, wind slipping through the gaps in the stonework and carrying the smell of rain and wet earth.

Most of the room had collapsed years ago, leaving fragments of chests and rusted weapons half-buried in debris. Selene nudged a broken shield aside with her boot.

"This place hasn't been touched in years."

"It was abandoned after the massacre."

She went still. "What did you say?"

"I said it was abandoned after—"

"No. Why?"

He looked around the ruined room as though the answer might be written on the walls. "I don't know. I remember hearing it was unsafe."

"From whom?"

He searched for it and came back empty, his expression tightening in a way she was starting to recognize. "I can't remember."

She let it go this time and crouched instead beside an overturned chest half-buried under rotten timber, its iron hinges the only part of it that hadn't surrendered to time. "Since it's no use remembering, make your hands useful if your brain wouldn't. Help me," she breathed, snapped in a tone of finality

They pushed the beam aside together, watching the lid give way with a groan and a cloud of dust that set them both coughing.

Inside lay little worth the effort— a rusted compass, maps gone soft with mold, a cracked flask— and beneath all of it, a leather-bound journal, its cover so weathered the title had long since vanished.

She lifted it free and brushed the dust away.

"North Tower rotation, third week," she read aloud. "Nothing unusual today." She turned another page. "Patrol notes. Supply counts. Guard schedules." She looked up. "It belonged to a watchman."

"Keep reading."

The entries grew hurried as the pages turned, the handwriting tightening into something anxious. "Something doesn't feel right. Too many visitors asking questions. The young Alpha heirs are meeting again. I shouldn't have listened. They didn't see me. If they discover I was there—"

The page after that had been torn out. So had the next. And the next. All that remained were jagged edges where whole sections of the man's fear had once been recorded.

"These weren't damaged by time," Kieran said.

"No. They were taken."

One page had survived time and everything it came with. It was not a full entry, just a single line scrawled in a hand that had clearly been shaking. Trust none of the four."

For the space of a heartbeat, neither of them spoke. Then Kieran frowned first, repeating the words. "The four?"

"There were only three Alpha heirs," Selene said. "Blackridge. Silverclaw. Thorncrest. Damien, Ryker, you. Three. Always three."

"Then who's the fourth?"

Her mind raced through every name the last five years had handed her, and then it stopped— not because she'd found the answer, but because the answer had been standing beside her the entire time.

"Victor."

"He wasn't an heir," Kieran said. "He'd already inherited Ashfang."

"Exactly." The word landed like a stone dropped into still water. Whoever had written that line hadn't been counting titles. They'd been counting men who couldn't be trusted, and they'd counted Victor among them.

"That doesn't make sense," Kieran said. "He told everyone he was nowhere near the northern border that night. He testified to it himself."

"I know."

"He said he was meeting the western patrol captains."

"I know." Her voice had gone quiet in a way that frightened her more than shouting would have. She stared past him, into her memory instead of the room. "The morning after the massacre, Victor told me he'd ridden back before sunrise. The northern border is nearly six hours from Blackridge." She lifted the journal, staring at the four words as though they might finish the thought for her. "He couldn't have made it back before sunrise unless he was already close. Unless he lied about where he was that night."

Below them, the fire cracked and settled, and neither of them heard it.

Because for the first time since the massacre, the questions that had haunted Selene for five years stopped pointing backward into the past and turned, all at once, toward the man who'd spent those same five years... Standing at her side.