Chapter 7_The Photograph

Neris's POV

"Where did you get that?"

Ysolde's voice cuts through my door before I even hear it open.

I shove the photograph flat against my chest so fast the corner bends, and by the time I turn around she's already three steps into my room, eyes locked on my hands like she can see straight through them.

"Get what?" I say.

"Whatever you just hid." She crosses her arms. "You've got that look. The one you get when you're lying badly."

"I'm not hiding anything."

"You're holding your arm like it's broken." She takes another step. "Show me."

"No."

The word comes out sharper than I mean it to, and for a second we both go still, surprised by it. Ysolde recovers first.

"No?" A slow smile. "That's new."

"It's mine." My heart is going too fast. "Not everything in this room belongs to the family, Ysolde. Some of it's just mine."

"Everything about you belongs to this family. That's the arrangement." She tilts her head, studying me the way she studies a fight she hasn't decided whether to start. "This is about the forest, isn't it. Everyone's talking about some kind of breach. A corrupted, dead. No survivors who saw anything useful, except apparently you were out past curfew that night too."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"You came back with dirt under your nails and your uniform torn at the shoulder. I noticed. I notice everything about you, Neris. It's one of my few real talents." She steps closer. "So tell me what happened in that forest, or I go straight to Father with a very interesting theory."

"There's no theory. I got lost. I panicked. I ran until it was over."

"Ran from what?"

"I don't know. I didn't see it clearly." The lie comes easier than it should, smooth and practiced, the way lying to her has always been easier than the truth ever was. "I was terrified. I hid. That's all."

She watches me for a long moment, and I make myself hold still under it, the way I've held still under worse.

"Fine," she says finally. "Keep your little secrets. But if Father finds out you were involved in something and didn't report it immediately, that's not a conversation I can protect you from."

"I don't need your protection."

"No," she says, almost thoughtful. "I suppose you don't. Not anymore." She glances once more at my crossed arms, at whatever she can't see beneath them, and something flickers behind her eyes that isn't quite suspicion and isn't quite something else. "Wash that uniform. Inspection's at dawn."

She leaves. I don't breathe again until the door clicks shut behind her.

The photograph is damp where my hand gripped it too hard. I smooth it flat against my knee and look at it again, because looking at it the first time wasn't enough to make it make sense.

My parents. My mother laughing at something outside the frame, her hand light on my father's arm. Behind them, carved into old stone half-buried under ivy, a symbol I have never told a single living person about: three interlocking crescents around a single point. The same one that's been burning behind my eyes almost every night since my eighteenth birthday, vivid enough that I wake up certain I could draw it in the dark without looking.

My father is standing right next to it. Like he knew it was there. Like it mattered enough to stand beside it and let someone take his picture.

I flip the photo over. Faded pencil on the back, barely legible.

Two days before.

Two days before the attack that killed them both. Two days before I was six years old and hiding under floorboards while my mother's hands shook trying to keep the boards silent above me.

That's not a coincidence. My father stood in front of that exact symbol two days before something came for our house, and nobody has ever told me why.

I slide the photograph beneath the loose board under my mattress, the same one Lucien apparently already knows about, and sit there a long time with my back against the wall, listening for footsteps that don't come.

The academy archive doesn't get visitors this late, which is exactly why I'm here.

Three hours into the intake records and my eyes are starting to blur at the edges, but I keep going, because something about the way Neris said I don't have a wolf* to my face, twice, without her pulse ever spiking the way a normal lie would spike, has been sitting wrong in my chest since the clearing.

She wasn't lying about not understanding it. She was lying about everything else.

I pull the servant intake files for the year the border refugees were absorbed into the lower ranks. Names. Dates. Sponsor households. Most of it is exactly as dull as it sounds, until I hit a gap in the filing sequence that shouldn't exist: a record number with no file attached, sandwiched between two ordinary entries like someone wanted it to look like nothing was missing at all.

I almost skip it. I don't.

The header is still legible, whoever redacted this file did a careless job of it, and one line survives intact.

ADEBAYO, N. — SEALED BY COUNCIL ORDER. DO NOT DISCLOSE ORIGIN.

I sit with that for longer than I should.

"You're still here."

Lucien, in the doorway, arms folded, like he already knows what I found before I've said a word.

"You knew." I turn to face him. "About the photograph in her room. Which means you already suspected something about her before tonight."

"I have good instincts."

"You have information you're not sharing." I turn the file toward him so he can see it without me having to say it out loud. "Sealed by Council order. Not academy order. Council."

Something in his expression finally moves.

"That predates her enrollment," he says.

"By years, from the look of the paperwork trail. Someone knew who she was before she ever set foot here, and buried it deep enough that it took a clerical mistake for either of us to find it."

"So break the seal."

"I intend to." I already have my hand on it. "You understand what this means, if it's what I think it is."

"That the Council's been watching her the entire time. That whatever happened in that forest wasn't the beginning of anything. It was a variable they were already waiting on."

I break the seal. It takes less effort than it should, whoever hid this assumed no one with clearance would ever think to look this deep, which tells me exactly how confident they were that it would stay buried.

Inside: one sheet. No history. No explanation. Just a name, a birth date that doesn't match her official intake papers by nearly a year, and one line, typed, underlined twice, like whoever wrote it needed absolute certainty that no one who read it could later claim they hadn't understood.

If Neris Adebayo ever awakens, notify the council immediately.

I read it three times before the words stop rearranging themselves into something less dangerous.

"Cassian." Lucien's voice has gone very quiet. "You understand what this means."

"It means the Council sealed her existence before she ever knew what she was." My hand tightens on the page. "It means we spent tonight deciding not to report a girl the Council's apparently been waiting for since she was a child."

"Waiting for what, exactly?"

I look at the word again. Awakens.

Not manifests. Not shifts. Not the language anyone uses for an ordinary wolf coming into her strength.

Awakens. Like whatever's inside her isn't only a wolf. Like it's something old enough, and dangerous enough, that someone buried her file three years before she ever crossed these gates, just in case.

"I don't know," I say. "But I intend to find out before the Council does.”