Chapter 23: The Letter From The Dead

FELICIA

“Read the first line aloud,” Orion ordered.

I folded the letter before anyone else could see it.

“…No.”

Every eye turned toward me.

“Because whoever wrote this isn’t trying to frighten us.”

I looked slowly around the room.

“They’re proving they’re already inside these walls.”

⸻

I forced myself to keep reading anyway, my face carefully still even as my pulse climbed with every line, my grip tightening on the parchment until the edges crumpled beneath my fingers.

The letter listed everyone I loved, in order. Orion. Cassian. Lucien. My royal healer. My personal guard. Even a servant girl I’d thanked once in passing weeks ago, her name spelled correctly, a private detail beside it that only someone who’d watched her closely could have known … the kind of detail no spy gathers from a single glance.

This wasn’t a threat.

It was a record. Someone had been cataloguing every person who mattered to me, quietly, patiently, for longer than I wanted to imagine, tracking my life like a hunter mapping a den before the strike.

Someone inside these walls had been reporting everything, and I felt the weight of every familiar face in that room settle differently on me as I read.

The council dissolved into panic around me, voices climbing over each other, but I barely heard any of it.

⸻

“Everyone leave,” I said finally, cutting through the noise. “Except Lucien.”

Orion’s eyebrows rose. Cassian went very still beside him. Neither objected, though I caught the look that passed between them on their way out … uneasy, questioning, the kind of glance that said they’d be waiting just outside the door.

The room emptied. The heavy doors swung shut behind the last advisor, and I crossed to Lucien without a word, holding the letter out between us.

I didn’t tell him what to look for. I only watched his face as he read … watched the color drain from it page by page, watched his jaw tighten with every line like each word cost him something physical.

⸻

LUCIEN

I read the names without much reaction until I reached the final page, and then my whole body went cold at once, my breath catching somewhere behind my ribs, my hands trembling hard enough that the parchment rattled.

One name, written in crimson ink darker than the rest, standing out from the page like a wound.

Alpha Magnus Blackthorn.

“No,” I whispered, before I’d decided to say anything at all, the word escaping on its own.

Felicia looked up. “Who is Magnus?”

The words barely made it out of me, my throat closing around them. “My father.”

Silence swallowed the room. Everyone knew Magnus had died twelve years ago defending Blackthorn’s borders. I’d stood over his coffin myself. I’d lowered it into the ground with my own hands, had grieved him every year since on the anniversary of that day.

Or so I’d believed every day since.

⸻

I pulled the memory apart out loud without meaning to, piece by piece, the details arranging themselves into something far uglier than grief.

No one had seen the body. Only the Elders had confirmed his death, their word taken as fact because no one questioned Elders. The coffin had stayed sealed through the entire funeral, which had happened within a single day … too fast, I realized now, for a death that should have demanded proper rites.

The more I spoke, the more the story fell apart in my hands.

Felicia went very still beside me, her eyes narrowing at the letter.

“The handwriting,” she said slowly. “I’ve seen it before.”

It matched the forged council decree that had forced my rejection ceremony. The same careful, deliberate strokes.

This hadn’t started with Selene at all.

It had started years before I ever became Alpha, every decision that led to Felicia’s exile engineered long in advance by someone patient enough to wait over a decade for it to pay off.

⸻

FELICIA

Something in me reacted before my mind caught up … my wolf surging hard against my ribs, a memory tearing loose that I hadn’t known I still carried, buried so deep I’d never once dreamed of it in twenty years.

A man’s voice, low and steady, murmuring something I couldn’t quite make out. Strong arms carrying me through smoke and flame, my small hands fisted in fabric that smelled like ash and something metallic underneath it. A silver ring on the hand holding me, engraved with a wolf crest I hadn’t thought about in twenty years, cold against my cheek where it had pressed as he ran.

The same crest pressed into the letter’s wax seal, unmistakable now that I was looking for it.

“I’ve seen this before,” I breathed, my hand trembling as I set the letter down.

⸻

Orion burst through the door moments later, drawn by whatever he’d heard through the walls, and the instant his eyes found the seal on the desk, every trace of color left his face.

“…Impossible.”

He knew it instantly … not an enemy’s mark at all, but the Royal Crest of Silvercrest’s former Commander, a man believed to have died protecting my family the same night I vanished. A hero we’d mourned for two decades.

⸻

Lucien stared at me, horror moving plain across his face.

“If my father is alive…”

Orion finished the thought before either of us could, his voice hollow.

“…then the man who kidnapped you wasn’t the mastermind.”

⸻

A knock thundered against the chamber door before any of us could say more, hard enough to rattle the hinges. A scout stumbled in, blood streaking one side of his face, barely able to stand, one hand braced against the doorframe to keep himself upright.

“Your Majesties…” he gasped.

The room held its breath, no one daring to move.

“We found him.”

He swallowed hard, chest heaving, like the next words cost him more than the wound bleeding down his temple, his eyes darting between Lucien and me like he wasn’t sure which of us the news belonged to.

“…Alpha Magnus Blackthorn is waiting for you at the Moon Temple.”