Chapter 225

AURORA

“Anything useful?” Dane whispered low so as not to disturb the silence in the room.

I scanned the next page, and the words blurred for only a second or two before snapping into place.

“It’s more personal than I expected,” I said.

“He speaks about the choices made as a first alpha, in respect to the weight he held for the security of his pack. There’s much remorse in this.”

Dane slanted his head, brow furrowing. “Remorse over what?”

“About the grove,” I said, flipping to another entry. “About how he underestimated its power and the curse that came with it.”

We read on in silence for a while, the dancing firelight casting long shadows around the room. Then my eyes fell to one particular entry, and my breath caught.

“The grove holds more than power,” I read aloud. “It holds a key.”

Dane straightened, his attention sharpening. “A key to what?”

“I don’t know,” I said, tracing the words with my finger. Maybe time had smudged most of the ink, but this sentence seemed to leap off the page as if it had been engraved there.

He leaned closer, interest now etched in his voice. “Does he explain?”

I shook my head and flipped the page over. “He writes of a chamber hidden beneath its roots. He was certain it housed something… something he called the ‘source of life.’”

Dane furrowed his brow. “The source of life? Of whom?”

“Of us,” I whispered.

There, it hung in the air between us, unsaid, yet palpable. That something so key could be buried here in this grove sent a chill down my spine.

“Did he find it?” he asked.

I shook my head from side to side. “No. He tried but couldn’t reach it. He left it unfinished.”

Dane leaned back in his chair, his eyes thoughtful. “Do we pursue this?”

I shifted, weighing the decision on my shoulders. “We have sacrificed enough,” I said. “The pack requires stability now, not another mystery.”

Dane nodded slightly. “Agreed. I think we can do with some peace.”

The subject was changed then, and I felt some of that tension ease just a little bit. As much as the journal made me curious, I wasn’t blind to the exhaustion still residual from all they’d been through.

After that, the rest of the night was pretty low key. Dane and I closed the journal, tucked it away, promising ourselves we’d revisit it at some time when that felt right to do so.

Morning came the following morning with all the noise of the packhouse. Pups ran along the corridors, their shrill giggles echoing around; wolves worked together as they prepared breakfast, the sound of roasted meat wafting across the house.

I found Piper in the kitchen, her hands stained with flour as she tried to teach Warrick to cook.

“This is a disaster,” he muttered, stirring a pot that smelled distinctly burnt.

“You’re the one who wanted to impress everyone,” Piper teased, nudging him with her elbow.

“I didn’t think it would involve smoke,” he shot back, waving a towel in the air.

Their teasing put a smile on my face. Amidst destruction, something about his manner was lighter, freer than I had seen before.

Later that afternoon, I saw Trajan sitting with Joclyn at the edge of the grove. She had a bunch of herbs in her lap, her fingers working nimbly as she explained their purposes.

“These are for burns,” she said, handing him a sprig of something green and fragrant. “And this one is for cuts and infections.”

Trajan listened intently, his usual guarded expression softening. It was rare to see him this relaxed, this open.

“You’re a quick learner,” Joclyn remarked, a small smile tugging at her lips.

He shrugged. “I’ve had to be.”

Slow, unspoken, but it was a bond. There were just things that were there between them, the quiet understanding grown out of time and respect.

Night had finally fallen, and the packhouse had quieted down once again. I was on a couch in the main room, the journal lying across my lap, firelight dancing gently over its worn leather cover.

For a moment, my fingers steeled to reopen it, peering deeper into Kael’s secrets. But the weight of the day pulled at me, and I set it aside carefully on a nearby shelf.

“Another time,” I whispered.

I stood up to leave. My broken pendant fragments lay on a table nearby, and in a flush of light they flared into a low hum, pulsing for a time, until, as it started, it was suddenly gone.

Of course, I saw nothing at all.

It was one of those silences that burrow into the marrow of bones. I extended my arms over my head, weighted with exhaustion, like some heavy cloak had been tossed over me.

It was predictably long, and what I needed was some hours of uninterrupted sleep.

The murmur, just as I was reaching and would have turned to leave the room, was against my ears, soft enough I must have imagined it.

I froze, eyes running across the shelf on which I laid the journal; it lay still within the worn leather, fire dancing across it.

“Just tired,” I said irritably, shaking my head. Still, I did nothing more.

There was something to that whisper; it did feel like no trick of the mind. It felt real.

I walked over to the table with the fragments of the pendant, still fresh in my head that slight radiance.

I bent closer to the pieces and took a close look at them. They were dulled now, lifeless, but something about that flashing light nagged at me.

What had made it do that? For days, the pendant had lain in pieces, its energy low. For that instant, it was alive, as if a heart were beating.

My hand hovered over the pieces, and my hesitation nipped at the edges of my mind.

“Just pick it up,” I muttered.

In an instant, the moment my fingers came into contact with the largest fragment, a sudden, sharp jolt shot down my arm.

I gasped, wincing as the pieces scattered onto the floor. I was staring at it now, glowing faintly once more, its light soft but insistent, and my heart was racing.

“What…” I whispered, not finishing.

The light diffused, creeping along the floor as if liquid, then turning into forms I couldn’t quite make out. Circles. Lines. Symbols.

My chest constricted as the patterns finally coalesced into something I could almost recognize—runes, just like those chiseled into the grove’s heart.

It disappeared just that quickly. Only the broken pieces of the pendant stood on the floor. The room was chill now; the warmth of the fire didn’t seem to reach even my side of the room.

“What was that?” I whispered, backpedaling.

My instinctive reaction was to call Dane, to warn him about what I’d seen. But there was something that whispered, ‘Not yet.’