Chapter 5 What The Record Says
Chapter Five
What the Records Said
The Alpha's quarters were empty.
My father was still outside coordinating the cleanup, which gave me a small chance I did not know how long it will last . I moved through the front rooms quickly, making sure I didn't touch anything, staying close to the walls out of old habit. This was the house I grew up in . I new every corner of it. And the fact that I had no wolf made me scentless so he won't find out.
The private office was at the end of the back corridor. A heavy wooden door with iron fittings, always locked. I had walked past it a thousand times and never thought to wonder what was inside. It had just been a closed door. Since I was a child.
I pulled the key from inside of my boot where I had kept it since I was sixteen. A Small iron. I had never used.
The lock turned smoothly. Like it was Recently oiled.
I pushed the door open and stepped inside.
The room was smaller than I expected. A desk, a chair, book shelves along two walls lined with record books. A single lantern hung from the ceiling,it was unlit. I used the small torch I had grabbed from the corridor wall to see by.
The record books were organized by year. Pack census, territory maps, alliance agreements, trade records. The kind of documentation that every Alpha kept. Nothing seemed unusual at the surface.
I went straight to the bottom shelf. With The oldest records. The ones that were written back before I was born.
I pulled the book from the year the curse began.
My grandfather's time. The first generation to be affected. Pack records described it carefully, the way official documents always described things that frightened people. Declining shift rates among senior warriors. Unusual mortality patterns. Consultation with regional seers. No cause identified.
I turned pages.
Consultation with regional seers. I stopped on that line and read it again.
There was a name. A seer from outside the pack, brought in for a private consultation with the Alpha. The name was written in my grandfather's hand and below it, another was written in different ink, a handwriting I recognized because I had grown up watching it sign documents and write me birthday notes, four words.
Arrangement confirmed and Ongoing.
My father's handwriting.
Which meant he had not inherited this situation.
He had inherited the arrangement.
I sat down on the floor of the office because my legs stopped working.
My grandfather had started it. And My father had continued it. Some deal made with an outside seer, something exchanged for something else, and the cost had been paid by every member of the Ironblood Pack for three generations.
The warriors who had died.
The families who had left.
The wolves going silent mid-shift.
All of it is deliberate. All of it was chosen. By the men whose entire job was to protect these people.
I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth and sat with it for sixty seconds. Then I put it away somewhere deep and stood up and kept looking.
I needed to know what they had gotten in exchange.
I pulled three more record books and finally found it in the second one. A territory agreement, written in formal pack language, between the Ironblood line and something referred to only as the Old dark Power. The Ironblood Alpha would maintain a channel, a deliberate weakening of the pack's collective wolf energy, fed back through the curse. In exchange the Alpha line itself would remain strong. Their personal wolves will be untouched. And Their authority unchallenged within the territory.
The pack weakened so the Alpha stayed powerful.
My father's wolf had never faltered for once. While warriors around him were dying mid-shift, Damon Blackwood's wolf was as strong as it had ever been. I had always thought it was The strength of a true Alpha. I thought it was that simple.
But instead It was a payment. He was receiving what the curse took from everyone else.
And the prophecy, my prophecy, the one I had been built around my entire life, was the one thing that threatened all of it. An ancient wolf with the power of the Moon Goddess who could break the arrangement. Could end the curse. Could expose everything.
I was not just the pack's hope.
I was my father's problem.
I heard the front door of the quarters open.
Footsteps in the corridor. Heavy and familiar.
I had maybe thirty seconds.
I put the record books back exactly as I had found them. Making sure it has same angle, same spacing, my hands were shaking and I made them stop. I stood up, crossed to the door, eased it shut behind me, and locked it. The key went back in my boot.
I pressed myself into the shadow of the corridor alcove and did not breathe.
My father walked past me three feet away.
He did not look into the alcove. He went straight to the office door, stopped and looked at it for a moment, then touched the handle. He was Testing it. Checking the lock. To know if anyone went in.
He stood there for a moment longer than natural. Then he turned and walked back toward the front of the quarters.
I stayed in the alcove until I heard him settle into the main room. Then I moved to the back window, slid it open, and jumped down silently into the dark outside.
I leaned on the wall letting the cold night air on my face and thought about what came next.
I had no wolf with no allies I could fully trust. The pack had already loosed their hope on me calling me False Moon the will never believe me. and then a father who had spent my entire life making sure I would never be strong enough to threaten him.
I had proof maybe small prove but not all of it. Not enough to bring before the elders yet.
But enough to know the shape of the thing I was fighting.
I looked up at the moon. Full and white and indifferent above the sky.
The prophecy said I would save this pack or destroy it.
My father had been betting on the second option for eighteen years.
And I already decided right then that he had bet wrong.
But before I could do anything else I needed one person. The one person in this pack who might actually help me and who did not yet know the full truth.
Kael.
My brother who thought he was going to be next Alpha with out knowing he had been a piece in it the whole time.
If my father had been managing me, he had been managing Kael too. Using him. Setting him up as heir not because he intended Kael to ever lead, but because a rival heir kept me distracted and the pack divided.
Kael was going to be furious when he
found out.
I was counting on it.
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End of Chapter Five
