Chapter 37

The sound of breaking glass hit me harder than the creatures’ stolen voices ever had.

Ty and I were moving before the last shards finished falling. The forest blurred around us in a violent rush of trunks, breath, mud, and bond-light instinct. Behind us, the wolf-wearing things crashed through the underbrush in a broken imitation of pack pursuit, too coordinated to be wild and too wrong to be mistaken for our own. The north window. The records. The old ledgers. Whatever they wanted, they wanted the history as much as the blood.

“Tell me Alpha Cameron moved the ledgers,” I said, forcing breath past the burn in my lungs.

Ty vaulted a fallen log and landed beside me without breaking stride. “Tell me you’ve met Alpha Cameron,” he shot back. “If he was told to rest, he probably doubled the locks and called that recovery.”

Even under the terror, a ragged breath of humour escaped me. “You say that like you didn’t learn stubbornness in that house.”

“I learned it from him,” Ty said. Then, lower, for me alone, “I learned better from you.”

The words landed somewhere warm enough to hurt. There was no time to answer them. The pack house exploded into view ahead of us, lanterns swinging wildly in the yard, wolves shouting over one another, guards converging on the north side where shattered glass glittered across the ground like ice under moonlight.

The north window of Alpha Cameron’s office was gone. Not merely broken. Removed. The frame had been peeled outward from the wall in one terrible, precise motion, as though something with paws had learned how to think like hands. Wolves filled the courtyard in partial shift—fur over shoulders, claws at fingertips, eyes lit with alarm. Luna Lea stood in the middle of them barking orders sharp enough to skin fear off the room. Alpha Cameron, pale but upright, was already limping toward the office with murder in his expression.

“Cameron, stop pretending your leg doesn’t exist,” Luna Lea snapped as we reached them.

“It exists just fine,” Alpha Cameron growled. “What may not exist in a minute are the things that came through my wall.”

Ty stepped in before the argument could catch fire. “Status.”

Luna Lea pointed toward the office. “Two guards heard the glass and came running. They saw one wolf-shape inside, maybe two. No one pursued without confirmation because I am not losing people to silver panic in my hallway.” Her eyes cut to me and Ty. “Tell me you two know what we’re dealing with.”

“Not enough,” I said. “They wear wolves. They copy voices. And one of them warned us not to let this thing reach Alpha Cameron. So either something in there still has enough self left to fight—or we’re being steered.”

“And they’re after the records,” Ty said. “The north room holds old ledgers, bloodline lists, territory maps, and anything your grandfather thought deserved hiding behind locks instead of sunlight.”

Something hard passed across Alpha Cameron’s face—anger, shame, old inheritance surfacing where it still had teeth. “Then they don’t leave with a scrap of paper,” he said.

“Not if it costs one of ours,” I said sharply. “We heard one of them break through. There may still be living wolves trapped inside whatever this is.”

Alpha Cameron looked at me for one hard second, then nodded once. “Fine. We contain first. Cut second.”

Ty glanced sideways at me, quick and fierce. “You were right in the forest.”

“I know,” I muttered, because fear had stripped me of the energy for false modesty.

We entered the office in a slow crescent formation—Ty and I first, Alpha Cameron just behind despite Luna Lea’s very audible disgust, two guards flanking the broken wall, Luna Lea holding the doorway. The room smelled wrong immediately. Paper, cedar, lamp oil, and old leather were all still there, but under them was that same brine-metal rot from the boundary. Drawers had been yanked open. Ledgers lay scattered across the floor in broken spines and torn pages. Muddy paw prints marked the desk and the wall, too deliberate and too curious, as if the things had not only searched the room but studied how it had been arranged.

“They weren’t hunting at random,” I said.

Ty crouched near the desk, fingers hovering over a half-shredded ledger page without touching it. “No,” he said. “They knew where to go. Knew what mattered. Or knew enough to ask the room the right questions.”

My eyes tracked over the wreckage and stopped on the gap before anyone else saw it. A shelf near the inner wall had been cleared of dust in a sharp rectangular outline. One box missing. Not large. Metal-bound. Old. “Something’s gone,” I said.

Alpha Cameron swore softly and with feeling. “My grandfather’s field journal.”

The room seemed to contract around the words. Ty straightened too fast. Luna Lea made a disgusted sound under her breath. “Tell me that’s not as bad as it sounds,” I said, already knowing the answer.

“It’s worse,” Alpha Cameron said. “He kept records no one else was supposed to see. Old rites. Bloodline notes. Places he considered… strategically important.” His mouth tightened around the last phrase like it tasted rotten. “If these things took it, they aren’t just imitating wolves. They’re following a map.”

A floorboard creaked in the hall.

Every head turned. The sound had not come from outside. It had come from deeper inside the pack house, somewhere beyond the office corridor where the family wing met the old records room. Ty’s hand found mine for the briefest second, then let go as he shifted his blade. The touch was gone almost immediately. The message wasn’t. Still with me?

I moved to his side. “Try getting rid of me now,” I said quietly.

His mouth almost curved. “I was worried you were finally getting wise.”

We advanced into the hall, boots silent on runner rugs still dusted with plaster from the broken north wall. Shadows pooled between the sconces. At the far end, near the turn toward the old archive room, something moved behind a screen. Not fast. Not hiding either. Just waiting to be seen. When it stepped out, it wore the shape of a young pack wolf I recognised from the kitchens—a boy barely seventeen with a laugh too loud for enclosed spaces and one front tooth chipped from a training accident last winter.

Its smile was his. Its eyes were not. “Alpha?” it called in the boy’s exact voice, uncertainty trembling through it so convincingly that one of the guards took an involuntary step forward before Luna Lea’s snarl stopped him cold. The thing tilted its head, learning from the reaction. “I found the records,” it said. “Come see.”

“Subtle,” I muttered.

“Apparently they’re still workshopping sincerity,” Ty said.

The creature’s body jerked. Its mouth opened too wide. For one split second, something real looked out through the counterfeit. “Don’t—” the kitchen boy’s true voice burst through, ragged with terror. “It’s in the walls—” Then black brine surged up his throat and drowned the words in a choking hiss.

The house answered him. A shudder ran through the floorboards under our feet, then another, deeper, as though something had just woken inside the walls and discovered it was already home. Behind us, in Alpha Cameron’s office, shelves crashed. Above us, claws began to scrape between the ceiling beams. And from somewhere inside the pack house itself, a dozen stolen wolf voices started laughing.