Chapter Forty-Two

Wren slept for almost a full day after she arrived. When she woke, she sat at the kitchen table with a mug of tea and stared at Rowan like he was a ghost.

"He has Ashgrove eyes," she said quietly. "Under the amber. Look, when the light hits them just right."

Ivy hadn't noticed that before. She looked, and there it was. A faint ring of silver around the dark center.

"Odalys says it means the bloodline is strong in him."

"It means he's going to be hard to hide," Wren said. Not unkindly. "Anyone who knows what to look for will see it."

"Like the Warden."

Wren's hand tightened around her mug. "Like the Warden."

Odalys spent that whole week in the old pack library, going through shelves nobody had touched in decades. Kade joined her every evening after Rowan went to bed. Ivy brought them tea and sat on the floor between the stacks, reading whatever pages they handed her.

"Here's something," Odalys said on the sixth night. She laid a brittle book on the table, open to a page covered in tiny, cramped writing. "This is a ledger. Not a pack record. Something older. It lists the Wardens by name, going back almost four hundred years."

"Four hundred years," Kade said. "That's when the packs first formed."

"It's when the packs first agreed to be packs. The Wardens were there before that. They were the ones who set the rules in the first place." Odalys ran a finger down the page. "Each Warden trained one successor. One at a time. The old one stepped aside, and the new one took the title."

"So there's a list," Ivy said. "Which means there's a last name on it."

"There is." Odalys turned the page. Her finger stopped. Her face went very still.

"What?" Kade asked.

"The ledger stops sixty-three years ago. The last Warden listed is a man named Aldric Vance. After him, the page is blank." She looked up. "Either the title ended with him, or someone stopped writing it down."

"Vance," Ivy said slowly. "I know that name."

Everyone turned to look at her.

"The fertility clinic. Larkspur. Priya's boss signed all the paperwork." She pressed her fingers to her forehead, digging for the memory. "Dr. Vance. I never met him. His name was at the bottom of every page in that folder."

Kade went completely still. Ivy watched the color leave his face.

"That's a common name," he said. But he didn't sound like he believed it.

"Is it?" Odalys asked quietly.

Rhys made the call at dawn. He had a contact at the state business registry who owed him a favor, and by nine o'clock, they had their answer.

"Larkspur Fertility and Wellness," Rhys read from his laptop. He stood in the study doorway, jaw tight. "Founded sixty-one years ago by Aldric Vance. Still owned by the Vance family trust. The current registered director is a Dr. Marcus Vance. The trust has the same address as the clinic."

"Sixty-one years," Ivy said. "That's the same year Ashgrove was dissolved."

"Same year," Rhys said. "Same year the last Warden entry stops."

The room was very quiet.

"The clinic," Kade said slowly. He sat down hard in the nearest chair. "Priya has been running my screenings for three years. Every candidate. Every scent test. All of it went through that clinic." He pressed both hands against his face. "I picked that place because it was discreet. Because it was old and quiet and nobody asked questions. I thought I was being careful."

"You were," Ivy said. "Anyone would have done the same."

"The Warden's been watching who comes through there for sixty-one years." Kade dropped his hands. His eyes were hard now, hard and furious and scared all at once. "Every mate flag. Every strong bloodline. If someone wanted to find surviving Ashgrove blood, there's no better place to wait for it than a clinic that screens for exactly that."

Ivy's stomach turned over. She thought about the intake form. The ancestry questions she'd barely paid attention to. The way Priya had said it flagged something in the system.

"Then it wasn't an accident that I walked in there," she said. "Or it wasn't only an accident."

"I don't think anything about that day was an accident," Kade said quietly. "Including you."

Ivy's phone rang.

She almost ignored it. Then she saw the name on the screen, and her heart dropped.

Priya.

She answered on the first ring, and she put the call on speaker before Priya could say a word.

"Ivy." Priya's voice was low and strained. She was whispering. "Don't say my name. Don't say anything. Just listen."

"Priya, what's—"

"Someone came to the clinic this morning. A man. Older. He asked about you by name." A shaky breath. "He asked about the baby. He asked where you lived now. I told him I didn't know. I don't think he believed me."

Kade was already on his feet, reaching for his jacket.

"What did he look like?" Ivy asked.

"I didn't get his name. He didn't give one." Priya's voice cracked. "But Ivy, when I wouldn't tell him anything, he smiled. And then he said something I haven't been able to stop hearing."

"What did he say?"

"He said, Tell the girl the Warden would like to meet her son."

The phone went silent. Rowan's laughter drifted down the hallway from the nursery, bright and sweet and completely unaware.

Ivy stood frozen. Then she was running.