Chapter 15

The house looked smaller than Ivy remembered, the way childhood places always do once you've spent a week living somewhere with a wall around it and a name for every tree.

Kade parked at the curb instead of the driveway, out of habit or caution, Ivy couldn't tell which.

"You don't have to come in," she said. "I know this isn't really your world. Peeling paint and a porch step that's been broken since I was twelve."

"I want to come in." He looked at the house, then at her, something unreadable moving behind his eyes. "This is where you grew up. I'd like to see it, if you'll let me."

She let him.

The attic hadn't been touched in years, dust thick enough to leave footprints, boxes stacked in the same careless order Margaret must have left them in whenever she'd last had the strength to come up here. It took twenty minutes of searching before Ivy found the one marked, in her mother's careful handwriting, simply: MOM.

She carried it down to the kitchen table, hands unsteady, and opened it there instead of in the attic, needing better light and, if she was honest, needing to not be alone in that small dark space when she found out what was inside.

Letters, just like Margaret said. A dozen of them, folded soft with age, written in a script Ivy didn't recognize at all — not quite any human alphabet she'd ever seen, elegant and angular at once.

And underneath the letters, wrapped in cloth gone yellow with time, a pendant.

Kade went very still the second she lifted it out.

"What is it?"

"May I?" He held out his hand, careful, and she passed it to him. He turned it over slowly, thumb tracing a symbol etched into the metal — a crescent moon wrapped around something that looked almost like a tree, roots and branches both. "This isn't Voss territory markings. I've never seen this exact symbol before, but I recognize the shape of it. It's a pack sigil. An old one."

"Not yours."

"No. Which means your grandmother wasn't cast out of my pack's lineage at all." He looked up at her, and something in his face had shifted, sharper now, more careful. "This changes things, Ivy. If she came from an entirely separate pack, one that isn't part of our succession law at all, Damon's whole legitimacy argument might not even apply the way he thinks it does. He's been building his case assuming your bloodline runs through us somewhere. If it doesn't—"

"Then his whole argument falls apart."

"Maybe." Kade set the pendant down carefully on the letters, like it might break. "We need someone who can actually read this script. I don't recognize it, and neither will most of the pack. It's old enough that even our own historians might not place it right away."

"Do you know anyone who could?"

"One person." He didn't look thrilled about the answer. "An old pack historian who left the compound years ago after a disagreement with my father. Lives about forty minutes from here. She won't be happy to see me. She might talk to you, though. New faces tend to get more patience than old grudges."

Ivy was already gathering the letters back into the box. "Then let's go."

They were halfway to the car when Ivy noticed it — the back door standing open, just slightly, that she was certain, absolutely certain, she'd shut and locked behind them on the way up to the attic.

Kade noticed the same second she did. His whole posture changed, shoulders dropping into something coiled and ready that she hadn't seen since the clearing.

"Get in the car," he said, low. "Now."

"Kade—"

"Now, Ivy." He didn't raise his voice, but something underneath it left no room for arguing. "Lock the doors. If anything happens, you drive. Don't wait for me."

She got in the car, box clutched against her chest, and watched through the windshield as Kade moved toward the house slow and careful, every line of him gone dangerous in a way she'd never seen outside a full moon clearing.

He was almost to the door when a figure stepped out of the shadow along the side of the house — not Damon, not anyone Ivy recognized at all, a stranger in dark clothes who froze for exactly one second before bolting for the fence line at the back of the yard.

Kade went after him instantly, fast, faster than a man should be able to move, and disappeared around the side of the house in a blur that left Ivy alone in the car with her heart slamming against her ribs and a box of sixty-year-old secrets sitting in her lap like it had just gotten a great deal heavier.