Elena knelt beside the mercenary and pressed two fingers against his neck.
Nothing answered.
“He is gone.” She looked up at Tyler.
He stood above the creek with his boots sinking into silt, one hand opening and closing against his thigh.
His panic jerked along the tether.
Elena kept her fingers in place another moment, wishing for a pulse she could work with, then withdrew them.
“My father lies under three feet of rock,” Tyler whispered.
“Then someone is spending pack gold under his signature.”
She wiped her fingers on her skirt.
Across the water, Vane held her sword toward the Silvercrest warriors; Tyler’s declaration kept them on the bank.
Elena looked uphill at the tower.
A living witness had slipped away beneath her hand.
Vane lifted the torn coin pouch from the grass.
A folded pay strip remained beneath its lining; she kept it with the coins, away from the water.
Elena would reach the study before anyone barred it.
“Take me to the high study,” she said.
Tyler pulled his sleeve across his sweat-streaked forehead.
“The council sealed that room three winters ago. I have not opened the blood lock since.”
“The fourth boundary stone crumbles at dawn.” Elena stepped out of the creek.
Tyler drew back.
“The lower orchard is standing because I bled into it. Open that door, or I ride north with Vane before midnight. You can put your guards to digging graves.”
He looked from the tower to the ridge.
A cough bent him over before he could answer.
“The council will call it treason.”
“Let them come to the door.”
Asteria stirred, but Elena had little strength left to give her.
The tether was still drawing enough to keep Tyler on his feet.
She tucked the wounded hand beneath her cloak.
Whatever remained of her mother’s story was upstairs, and she would not spend this last reserve arguing on the bank.
“Follow me,” Tyler said.
He climbed past the sentries.
Elena followed three paces behind, with Vane’s boots scraping the slope at her back.
Commoners pressed against the courtyard palisade as they passed.
Elena kept her head up.
The omegas could see her walking beside Tyler with an armed northern commander behind her; she let them look.
They entered the central keep and took the spiral stair toward the tower peak.
The cold rock pressed hard against Elena’s shoulder, chilling her through her thin tunic.
Near the top landing, the draft died, replaced by the sour stench of trapped air and old tallow.
A massive iron-banded door blocked the corridor.
A thick disc of crimson wax sealed the keyhole, stamped with the twin wolves of House Vance.
Tyler stopped before the threshold.
He leaned his forehead against the rough timber, his knuckles gray where he gripped the door frame.
His breath came in thin, ragged whistles that shook his whole frame.
“My father bound the latch with his own veins,” Tyler muttered.
“The lock answers to his bloodline. If someone tries an iron crowbar, the inner pins shear off and burn the records inside the chamber.”
“Then cut yourself,” Elena said.
Tyler drew his skinning knife, then turned from the seal toward her.
The blade hung unused at his side.
“Elena.” His other hand rose toward her jaw.
She stepped back until stone pressed against her spine.
His hand dropped.
“I made a mistake. In the clearing on your birthday, before those two hundred wolves—I thought choosing Camilla would keep the western garrison behind me. Her father held the grain.”
“You wanted his seat. And the crown.”
“The pack accepted me when my father died. Three winters ago. Harlan kept the wards; I held the patrols. Camilla could secure what was left.” He pressed his knuckles to his chest.
“Now I feel you shivering in the dark. This tether is tearing through us both.”
“You put me in the kennel straw.”
“I will tear up the betrothal tonight. Send her back to her father’s post before morning.” He stepped closer.
“I will stand before the elders and put the Luna ring on your finger.”
Elena looked at the knife.
Still no blood on it.
He could make promises for the length of the night and leave that door shut.
“You think I came for your seat?”
“This valley is your home. We can carve your mother’s name into the central pillar. Hold the boundary together.” His fingers twitched toward her cloak.
“Tell the Lycan King you renounce him.”
There it was: another thing she had to surrender before he would open his hand.
Elena moved away from the wall, making him yield the space before the seal.
“You watched Camilla take my mother’s hairpins. You said nothing when her maids emptied dirty water over my feet. You threw me to the dogs because you thought I had no wolf.” She looked from his face to the door.
“The land had to start rotting before you offered me anything.”
He bowed his head.
His shoulders shook beneath his mantle.
“Open the study. Or I walk out the gate.”
She waited until he turned.
Tyler drew the blade across his left palm and pressed the bleeding hand over the wax, curling his fingers around the latch.
The heavy pins inside the timber gave way with a muffled clatter.
The door swung inward.
Elena pushed past him into the gloom before he could catch his balance.
The air smelled of dry paper and sour grease.
Vane brought a torch to the threshold; its light reached a wide worktable piled with ledgers and split seals.
Elena ignored the open shelves and walked straight toward the heavy drawers beneath the desk.
Tyler lingered in the doorway, wrapping a scrap of linen around his bleeding hand.
Vane lifted her torch toward the narrow upper window.
Its latch had been filed through; the cut shone beneath the dark iron, and a frayed length of rope lay caught on the sill.
The blood lock had guarded the door, not this opening.
She laid the pay strip beside a torn pad on the worktable.
Its ragged corner fitted the missing edge.
Elena held the join flat.
The old heading read Thomas Vance, High Study account.
Below it, a different hand had added today’s date, noon and the amount paid.
The signature space was empty.
She searched the next intact sheet: the same old account heading, with the payment spaces blank.
Someone had taken the dead Alpha’s stock and used his name to issue new money.
Elena knelt at the desk and pulled the bottom drawer open with both hands.
The effort stung through her binding.
Tax rolls and boundary reports spilled onto the floor; she pushed them aside and felt along the back until her knuckles struck metal.
A narrow box was wedged against the rear partition.
The key hung beneath the desk’s knee hole.
She took it from the peg, worked it into the rusted lock, and turned until the lid released.
A black leather ledger lay inside, stamped with the dead Alpha’s running wolf crest.
Asteria surged as Elena opened it.
She passed the timber tallies and found her mother’s maiden name beneath a winter date.
The year was the winter she had turned eight.
“He said forty years. This was ten winters ago.”
She brought the page closer to Vane’s torch.
The surrounding accounts held the same year.
Whatever the mercenary had known, his chronology did not fit this record.
Tyler stepped across the threshold, drawn by the sudden silence.
“What is in there?”
Elena read the ink line by line, her voice dropping to a harsh whisper.
“‘Paid to the Crimson Fang: forty gold coins for the removal of the Warden of the Stones along the high crest.'”
Tyler stiffened against the door frame.
“That is a forgery.”
Elena turned the leaf.
A separate payment followed the forty gold coins: twelve bags of silver to suppress the inquiry.
Her father’s name appeared nowhere.
The dead Alpha’s instructions continued in the same sprawling hand.
On the following winter pages, four collections were entered against “Evans girl,” each beside an orchard ward expense.
Below them the kitchen allotment gave her one bowl a day.
A margin note forbade a first-shift rite without the Alpha’s permission.
The last instruction was shorter: “Keep her name off the boundary roll.” Elena turned back to the date of the forty gold coins.
Dishwater broth.
Yard stones beneath her knees.
The visits they had called sickness checks after her mother died.
Elena had tried to earn a second bowl by finishing the kennel floors before dusk.
Beside the allotment, the book put a value on the ward collections she had never been asked to understand.
She pressed her injured palm against the binding.
Four entries on this leaf did not tell her how much had been taken, or whether every winter had followed it.
She knew what one bowl had meant.
She had spent years believing the failure to wake her wolf was hers.
“He did not take me in out of mercy,” she said.
“Your father paid to kill my mother, took her territory, and kept me at his hearth so his walls would stand.”
Tyler backed into the desk.
Papers slid beneath his hands as he tried again to tie the linen around his cut.
His fingers would not hold the knot.
“He swore she died of lung rot.” A pull along the tether folded him against the wood.
“He swore it to me.”
“Then his book and his promise disagree.” Elena held the page open.
“Forty coins, ten winters. Not forty years.” She placed Vane’s pay strip inside the ledger’s rear cover.
“Today’s strip came from this table. It bears his account name, not his signature.”
Tyler looked from the empty signature space to the cut window latch.
“He called it my father’s payment.”
“His account name is on old paper. The date and payment are new.” Elena kept her hand on the rear cover.
“That window offers a way in. It does not tell us who came through it. We still need the hand that issued this.”
“Your entire pack is built on my mother’s blood,” Elena said, and slammed the heavy ledger down onto the table.
The wood cracked under the blow.
A floorboard groaned in the dark corridor outside.
Camilla stood framed in the open doorway, her fingers gripping the wool of her heavy cloak so hard the seams tore beneath her nails.
Her eyes burned with venom as she glared at Tyler’s cowering frame.
“You were going to cast me aside,” Camilla said.