Unopened Letters Novels & Stories

Who could not send it and could not throw it away. “He kept it,” I say. “Yes,” Bren says. “Like my mother kept the copy of the acknowledgment,” I say. Bren looks at me. “Yes,” she says quietly. “Like that.” I open the folder. The letters are inside, organised in date order, the way someone has kept them who understood they were evidence of something and treated them accordingly. At the back, separate, folded once. The unsent letter. I do not open it yet. I look at Bren.

Margaret stands frozen by the hearth, her hand over her mouth, her eyes wide, her breathing shallow. The door swings open slowly, the hinges groaning. No one is there. But a letter is on the threshold. White envelope. No name. No stamp. No address. It sits on the worn wooden boards as if placed there with care. The paper is crisp, expensive, out of place in this dusty farmhouse. Marcus picks it up with gloved hands. He holds it to the light. He opens it carefully, sliding a knife under the seal. He reads it. His face goes pale. He reads it again. His hand trembles slightly.

Four of them were not nothing. They are not clever letters. I want that understood, because everybody who hears about them afterward imagines something elegant. They are dull, and short, and they read like a woman passing on gossip to a friend, and that is the entire craft of them. Nobody keeps a dull letter and nobody burns one either. It simply goes into the box. Four letters, spread across six years, unsigned, in the same unplaceable hand, each one arriving inside a fortnight of a decision House Thorne afterward made and could not entirely explain to itself.

I lifted it out and set it on the desk. Inside were my letters to Blackthorne. All of them. Every letter I had sent since she left — the first careful one, the less careful ones that followed, the one I had written at the end of a long night and sent before I had the chance to reconsider it. I had sent eleven letters over four months. All eleven had come back unopened. I looked at them laid out on the desk. The envelopes still sealed, still carrying whatever I had said inside them, unread and unreceived.

Each is tied with a blue ribbon. I try to organize them by date. But still, it is starting to become overwhelming. The letters bulge out because of their unbroken seals. And the shelf is growing cramped for space. “Will he draw on the next one?” I lift the new envelope. I pause at the illustrations just once more before I hear the door open without a knock. There is only one person I know who doesn’t. I move the newest letter to the most recent pile just as his footsteps come near.

I can’t imagine anyone in the world who would need to contact me that I’d want to talk to anyway. I shrug. “I didn’t open it.” My maid’s eyes bulge slightly as her mouth drops open. “You didn’t even open it? Why not? Don’t you want to know what it is? Who it’s from?” A wave of anxiety washes over me. Something about that letter seems ominous to me, and I can’t say exactly why that is. I don’t want to open it. I don’t even want to acknowledge its existence, though I can’t say exactly why.

The association didn’t know about our marriage, and it will remain that way for as long as it can. As I took the letter out of the envelope and opened it, my heart stopped beating for a moment and the world around seemed to come to an abrupt stop on seeing ‘FROM ALPHA HERMES COSTIN,’ on the top.

It came in the form of a letter—a mysterious envelope that arrived at our doorstep, bearing no return address. I hesitated, a shiver of apprehension running down my spine as I held the envelope in my hands. The weight of it seemed to carry an ominous presence, as if it held the power to upend everything we had worked so hard to achieve. With a deep breath, I summoned the courage to open it. Inside, I found a single sheet of paper, folded neatly. As I unfolded it, the words on the page came into focus, stark and unyielding. It was a demand—an ultimatum that threatened to expose the dark secrets we had fought so hard to bury.

Mauris and I exchanged a curious glance, sensing a shift in the atmosphere. Before we could ponder further, a letter materialized on the porch, seemingly out of thin air. Intrigued, I picked it up, my heart quickening with anticipation. The envelope bore no name, but its contents held a secret waiting to be unveiled. With trembling hands, I broke the seal and unfolded the letter. As I read the words inscribed on the page, my breath caught in my throat, and I felt a surge of emotions welling within me. Mauris leaned in closer, his eyes scanning the message, his expression mirroring my astonishment.

Apparently, creepy uncles with too many secrets. I didn’t open it right away. I tucked it under my arm and moved to the study—Silas’s favorite hiding hole. I didn’t find him there, but I did find something else. Letters. Sealed, unsigned, but addressed to an Alpha I knew wasn’t from our pack. And they were recent. Blue Cross Alpha. What the hell?