Chapter 40

They drove home three days later, exhausted, Damon's border pack finally settling after Bram's release, though the question Fern had raised sat heavy in the car the whole way north.

Kade requested the old council archive the morning they arrived, before he'd even properly slept, standing in the same records room Damon had once pulled the Ashgrove registry from under far less honest circumstances.

"I need every file from my grandfather's tenure," he told the archivist. "Border actions. Council decrees. Anything marked 'cleansing' or 'security measure' from that era."

The archivist hesitated. "Some of those files are sealed, sir. Your grandfather sealed a number of records himself, before he died."

"Unseal them," Kade said. "All of them. I don't care what's in there. I need to know."

Ivy watched him work through the afternoon, jaw tight, methodical in a way that reminded her of the man who'd once told her the truth about a fated mate flag only because he couldn't stand hiding it any longer. Whatever guilt he carried about his grandfather's era, he'd apparently decided the only way through it was straight forward, eyes open.

"Here," Rhys said finally, sliding a thin, water-stained folder across the table. "Border security action, dated forty-one years ago. Location matches Damon's territory almost exactly."

Kade opened it, and Ivy watched his face go pale as he read.

"It's not just Bram's family," he said slowly. "There were four households targeted that night. Border packs deemed 'insufficiently loyal' during a succession dispute my grandfather was fighting at the time. The order authorized —" he stopped, throat working. "The order authorized removal of any household suspected of harboring dissent. Removal. That's the word he used."

"How many people," Ivy asked quietly, already dreading the answer.

"The file doesn't say. Just households. Four of them." Kade set the folder down, hands not quite steady. "If even half of what happened to Bram happened to the others, there could be more of them out there. More Hollows, forty years deep into grief nobody ever came looking for."

Odalys, who'd arrived that morning to check on the aftermath of the border trip, went very still.

"Four households," she repeated. "Kade. One of those names — is it listed?"

Kade checked the file again. "Ashworth. Calloway. Reyes." He paused, something shifting behind his eyes. "Sorrell."

Odalys's expression went carefully, deliberately blank, the same way Kade's did when something had rattled him badly enough to need controlling.

"Sorrell was an Ashgrove name," she said quietly. "One of the families that stayed hidden after the pack's dissolution, rather than scattering the way most of us did. I always assumed they simply vanished into the human world successfully, the way your own grandmother did, Ivy. I never once considered they might have been found and removed instead."

The room went very quiet.

"So it wasn't just a border dispute," Ivy said slowly, pieces sliding into place with a cold, sick certainty. "Your grandfather wasn't just clearing out disloyal packs. He was hunting down surviving Ashgrove bloodlines, forty years after the pack's official dissolution, and calling it border security so nobody would ever ask the real question."

"I don't know that for certain," Kade said, though his voice carried no real conviction behind the denial.

"I do," Odalys said, quiet and certain. "I've spent sixty-one years wondering why so few of us survived the scattering. I always assumed it was simply the chaos of exile. I never considered someone might have kept hunting us long after the official dissolution was supposed to have ended it."

Kade closed the folder slowly, something hard and resolved settling into his face.

"Then we find out," he said. "All of it. Every household, every name, every survivor who might still be out there hollowing out alone in the dark because my family never bothered to look for them." He looked up at Ivy, something raw and determined in his amber eyes. "I told you once I wanted to keep my word better than my grandfather kept his. I think this is what that actually looks like. Not just admitting what he did. Finding out how far it went, and fixing whatever's still fixable."

"That could take years," Rhys said carefully.

"Then it takes years," Kade said. "Rowan's going to inherit this pack's whole legacy someday, the good and the terrible both. I'd rather hand him a legacy we actually tried to make right, than one we just quietly agreed not to look at too closely."