Lena POV
The library lock had taken me four minutes.
Not because I was particularly good at picking locks I wasn't but because the mechanism was old and I had learned a long time ago that old locks are less about skill and more about patience. You just have to be willing to stay with it longer than the lock expects you to.
I had patience tonight. I had nothing but.
The room I had been given was clean and quiet and comfortable and I had lasted exactly forty minutes in it before the walls started closing in. Too much silence. Too much space to think about Caleb and Priya and three hundred watching faces and the way Ember had reached toward his hand before I even understood what I was doing.
So I had gone walking. And I had found the library.
It was a long room, floor to ceiling shelves, thousands of books, and along the back wall a row of locked filing cabinets that were very deliberately not labeled. Which meant they were very deliberately important.
I was not here to steal anything. I was here to understand where I had landed and who had landed me here. Information was the only currency I had tonight and I intended to collect as much of it as possible.
The filing cabinets took longer than the door. Twenty minutes. But they opened.
I pulled the first drawer and started reading fast.
Territory law. Border agreements. Pack census data going back forty years. Supply chains, military contracts, alliance records. All of it dense and detailed and telling me a great deal about how Zane Ashford ran his territories which was thoroughly, and with the kind of attention to detail that suggested he trusted very few people to do anything correctly without his oversight.
I filed it all away and kept moving.
Second drawer. More of the same. Strategic documents, battle plans from border disputes three years ago, reports from pack monitors in six different territories.
Third drawer.
This one was different. The files in here were older. The paper had that particular yellowed quality of documents that had been handled many times over many years. And these ones were not labeled with territory names or case numbers.
They were labeled with names.
People's names.
I flipped through carefully. Most meant nothing to me. Some I half-recognized from pack school old political cases, disputed claims, historical records.
And then my hands stopped.
CROSS, D. and V.
My father's name. My mother's name. Right there in a filing cabinet in the Lycan King's private library, in a folder that had been handled enough times that the edges were soft.
I pulled it out.
I sat down on the floor right there between the cabinet and the shelf because my legs made the decision before I did, and I opened the folder and I read.
The file was thin. Six pages. Four of them were heavily redacted thick black bars covering whole paragraphs, sometimes whole pages, leaving only fragments visible. Dates. Partial location references. A few names I didn't recognize.
But the last two pages were less redacted. And on the second to last page, in the middle of a block of formal court language, I found what I was looking for.
Authorization of termination order confirmed enemy intelligence operatives posing as pack wolves. Threat classification: HIGH. Action: immediate and complete. Authorization signed:
And then his signature. Zane's. Written in a hand that was smaller and less controlled than I imagined he had now the signature of a younger man.
Dated eleven years ago.
I had been eight years old.
Below the authorization, in smaller print: Intelligence source Lord Caius Vane, Senior Court Advisor. Classification: VERIFIED.
I read it three times.
Then I sat very still on the library floor with the file in both hands and felt something go cold inside me. Not the sharp cold of shock I had known this was coming, I had come here specifically to find it. This was a different cold. The slow, settling kind. Like the temperature of a room after the fire goes out.
Confirmed enemy intelligence operatives.
My parents.
My father who used to fall asleep reading every night with his book on his chest. My mother who made the same soup every Sunday and sang off-key while she did it and thought nobody could hear her. My parents who had been murdered in their own home while I hid under a bed and listened.
Enemy operatives.
Someone had told Zane that, and Zane had believed it, and they had died.
I thought about the word verified next to Caius Vane's name. Verified by whom. Verified how. Verified with what evidence and at whose instruction and for what possible reason.
The cold feeling inside me sharpened into something useful.
Caius, I thought. Lord Caius Vane, Senior Court Advisor.
Zane had tracked Caius's movements to my pack tonight. He had told me that in the car not directly, but enough. He had followed a trail to me. Which meant Caius still had active interest in something connected to me, eleven years later.
Which meant my parents' file was not a closed case.
Which meant there was more.
I was still pulling at that thread when the library door opened.
I did not close the file. I did not hide it or put it back or pretend I had not been reading it. I sat on the floor with it open in my hands and I looked up at the man in the doorway and I held his gaze.
Zane stood completely still with one hand on the doorframe and his silver eyes on the file and he did not look angry.
That was the thing that hit me first and hardest. He had every reason to be angry I had broken into his private library, picked his locked filing cabinet, found documents that were classified beyond anything I had clearance for.
He did not look angry at all.
He looked like a man who had been waiting.
Not surprised. Not calculating his response. Not deciding how to manage me.
Just waiting. The way you wait for something you have known was coming for a long time, and when it finally arrives you feel less shock than a kind of tired, complicated relief.
He looked at the file in my hands.
Then he looked at my face.
And he said, quietly: "I have been trying to open that drawer for three years."