Chapter 4 4

The security footage Milo pulled up showed a nondescript van parked outside a bar I recognized instantly, the same bar where I'd taken the Curtis Boone job two weeks ago, and the two men climbing out of it moved with a precision that had nothing to do with random surveillance.

"They're not watching the bar," Kieran stated, jaw tight, studying the footage with the same controlled intensity I'd come to recognize as his version of genuine alarm.

"They're watching for anyone matching your description going in or out."

"That's not comforting."

"It wasn't meant to be." He rewound the footage, freezing on a clear shot of one man's face. "Milo, run this through our contacts. I want a name by morning."

"On it." Milo was already moving, tablet in hand, some of his usual chattiness replaced by genuine focus.

"For what it's worth, this confirms they're actively hunting rather than passively monitoring. That's a meaningful escalation."

"I'm aware."

I stared at the frozen image, a stranger's face that apparently belonged to the organization that had murdered my family, and felt something cold and furious settle low in my stomach. "I want to see the file. Everything you have on the massacre. Not the summary version. All of it."

Kieran hesitated, and I watched him war visibly with the same instinct that had kept him at a careful distance for twenty two years, the urge to protect me from information rather than arm me with it.

"Sable."

"Don't. You promised me honesty two weeks ago. I'm collecting on that promise right now."

He nodded once, decisive, and led me to a locked archive room three doors down, considerably more organized than I expected, folders arranged by date with an obsessive precision that made my chest ache before I'd even opened the first one.

"How many folders are there," I asked quietly, taking in the sheer scale of the archive.

"Twenty two years of them. One per year, at minimum. Some years considerably more." He didn't look at me while he said it, focused instead on pulling the earliest folder from its place. "I want to warn you, some of this is going to be difficult to see. I can leave, if you'd rather go through it alone."

"Stay."

He stayed.

The photographs inside were worse than I'd braced for, and better, in the specific, aching way that finally seeing something you've spent twenty two years not remembering can be both.

My mother, younger than I remembered her, laughing at something outside frame.

A pack house I had no conscious memory of but which some old, buried part of my chest recognized instantly, painfully.

"You kept all of this."

"I told you. I've been watching for twenty two years. Some of that meant collecting everything I could find about who you'd lost, in case you ever wanted it." His voice had gone rough. "I wasn't certain you ever would. I kept it anyway."

I flipped through slowly, and near the bottom of the folder found a page that stopped me entirely, a genealogical chart, my family's bloodline traced back generations, with a notation beside my own name in handwriting I didn't recognize. Carrier. Confirmed. Priority elimination.

"What does this mean."

Kieran went very still, reading over my shoulder, and his face drained of color in a way I hadn't seen from him yet.

"That's not my handwriting. That's not anyone in this pack's handwriting."

"Then whose."

"I don't know," he admitted, and for the first time since I'd met him, genuine uncertainty cracked through his usual controlled calm. "Which means someone had access to detailed information about your bloodline that predates my own involvement entirely."

"Carrier of what."

"I don't know that either, not with certainty, though I have theories I don't want to voice until I'm considerably more confident in them." He met my eyes, something protective and fierce replacing the uncertainty.

"Whatever it means, Sable, it's specific enough that the Concord considered it worth destroying an entire pack over. That's not a small thing."

Something in my chest had gone tight and cold, twenty two years of assumed random violence suddenly reframed as something considerably more deliberate, more targeted, more terrifyingly specific to whatever ran in my own blood.

"I need air," I announced, standing abruptly.

Kieran didn't follow immediately, some instinct apparently telling him I needed the space more than I needed company, and I found myself on the warehouse roof twenty minutes later, staring out at the waterfront, trying to reconcile a lifetime of believing my family's death was senseless with the possibility that it had been precisely, coldly calculated instead.

He found me there eventually, settling beside me without a word, close enough that our shoulders brushed but not close enough to crowd.

"I'm sorry," he murmured quietly. "For all of it. For not being fast enough that night. For not telling you sooner. For every version of this you should have gotten to learn on your own terms instead of finding out from a stranger's handwriting in a folder."

"You're not a stranger anymore."

"No," he agreed, something almost surprised in his voice. "I suppose I'm not."

We sat in silence a while longer, the city humming below us, and I let myself, for one unguarded moment, lean into his shoulder instead of away from it, some old, exhausted wall finally too tired to keep standing.

"We're going to find out what this means," he promised finally. "Together. Whatever it costs."

"That's a big promise for a man I've known three weeks."

"I've known you twenty two years, Sable. I'm simply new to being allowed to say so out loud." His arm settled carefully around my shoulders, and I let it stay there. "Whatever the Concord wants with your bloodline, they are not getting it. Not while I'm still standing."

Somewhere below us, a car alarm shrieked to life, sharp and sudden in the quiet night, followed almost immediately by a second, and Kieran went rigid beside me, every trace of the moment's warmth vanishing into cold, immediate alertness.

"That's not a damn coincidence," he stated, already on his feet, pulling me up with him. "That's Ashgrove's perimeter alarm. Someone just breached pack territory."