Chapter 16

Kade came back alone, ten minutes later, breathing hard, a torn scrap of dark fabric caught in one fist.

Ivy had the car door open before he'd even reached her. "Did you get him?"

"No. He knew the ground better than I did, which tells me he'd scouted it before today." Kade opened his hand, showed her the fabric, and something else caught in the torn threads — a small metal disc, no bigger than a coin, warm from being carried close to skin. "This came off him when I grabbed his jacket. He got the jacket back. He didn't get this."

Ivy took it carefully. A crescent moon wrapped around a tree, roots and branches both.

The same symbol from the pendant.

"That's not a coincidence," she said, voice unsteady.

"No," Kade agreed. "It isn't."

They sat in the car a long moment, the box of letters between them, the little metal disc resting in Ivy's palm like it might start burning if she held it too long.

"So it's not just Damon," Ivy said slowly, working through it out loud. "Someone from my grandmother's actual pack knows about me. Knows enough to send someone to search my mother's house the same week Damon's building a legal case."

"Which means whoever they are, they've been watching for a while. Long enough to know exactly which house to break into, and exactly when it would be empty." Kade's jaw was tight, his eyes scanning the street like the stranger might still be somewhere close, watching. "I don't like how many people suddenly seem to know things about you that you didn't know about yourself a week ago."

"Neither do I."

"We need to get to the historian. Today, not tomorrow." He started the car, glancing in the mirror one more time before pulling away from the curb. "If someone else already knows what those letters say, we can't afford to be the last ones to find out."

The historian's house sat at the end of a gravel road with no other houses in sight, a narrow cottage half-swallowed by ivy, smoke curling from a chimney despite the mild afternoon. An older woman answered the door before they'd even reached the porch, silver hair pulled back tight, eyes sharp enough to make Ivy feel instantly, thoroughly assessed.

"Kade Voss." Not a warm greeting. "Didn't expect to see you on my porch again in this lifetime."

"Mara. I need your help. It's not for me."

Mara's gaze shifted to Ivy, then down to the box in her arms, and something in her posture changed — not friendlier, exactly, but more attentive.

"Who's the girl?"

"My mate," Kade said, plain, no hesitation in it at all, and Ivy felt the word land somewhere warm and strange in her chest despite everything else happening today. "Her grandmother's bloodline. We think it runs through a pack we don't recognize. We found letters. A pendant. We're hoping you can read what we can't."

Mara studied Ivy a long moment, then stepped back from the door.

"Come in, then. Quickly. And shut that door behind you — some conversations aren't meant for open air."

The cottage inside was warmer than it looked from outside, every wall lined with books and papers, a fire crackling low in a stone hearth. Mara cleared space on a cluttered table and held out her hand for the box without another word.

She went through the letters slowly, lips moving faintly as she read, and the silence stretched long enough that Ivy's nerves started fraying at the edges.

"This script," Mara said finally, "is Ashgrove. A pack that doesn't exist anymore. Not officially. They were dissolved sixty-some years ago — driven out, scattered, records erased by decree, after a conflict most packs don't like to talk about even now."

"Erased by who?" Kade asked.

"By a council vote," Mara said, "led, as it happens, by your grandfather."

The fire popped in the silence that followed. Ivy watched Kade's face go carefully, deliberately blank, the way it only did when something had actually rattled him.

"That's not in any history I was ever taught," he said.

"No," Mara agreed. "It wouldn't be. Erased means erased, Kade. Even from the people meant to inherit the seat that ordered it." She turned back to the letters, one finger tracing a line of the old script, and her expression shifted into something Ivy couldn't quite name. Pity, maybe. Or dread. "Your bloodline didn't just find its way into a stranger's territory by chance, girl. Your grandmother's pack was destroyed by his family. And from what this letter says, she didn't leave quietly. She made a promise before she vanished, one her own kind still remembers."

"What kind of promise?"

Mara looked up, and for the first time since they'd walked in, her sharp eyes held something that looked almost like fear.

"That her bloodline would come back one day," she said, "and take back what was taken. I think, Ivy Marsh, that whoever broke into your mother's house today wasn't looking to hurt you. I think they were making sure the promise was finally about to come true."