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The older text, the one that had been scraped away, told a different story. She couldn't translate all of it from touch alone, but the emotional residue in the stone was unmistakable. Grief. Rage. The particular frequency of magic performed under duress, when a practitioner's power is channeled not by choice but by force. The people who had carved the original inscription hadn't agreed to anything. They'd been compelled, and then their own words had been taken from them and replaced with a version that made the compulsion look like consent.

Tiger pride sacrifices. That's what the original text described. Not the honored, voluntary offerings that "unity" implied, but forced surrenders of territory, autonomy, and something else she couldn't quite parse, possibly bloodline magic or familial bonds. The tiger prides that had helped found this settlement had been stripped of something essential and then had their own history rewritten to frame the stripping as a gift.

Steph pulled her hand away and sat on the chamber floor with her back against the opposite wall, staring at the treaty stone in the beam of her headlamp. Her hands were shaking and her jaw ached from clenching and the professional detachment she relied on in the field had cracked down the middle.

She'd uncovered altered records before. History was written by the survivors, and archaeology was the practice of finding the drafts they'd thrown away. But this was different. This wasn't a king's scribe polishing an unflattering battle into a noble victory. This was an entire community's experience being surgically removed and replaced with a lie, carved into the same stone where the truth had once lived.

She had to report this. The problem was that reporting required evidence, and evidence required translation, and translation required access to resources that were controlled by the very council whose predecessors may have authorized the alteration. Her sensitivity gave her impressions, emotional residue, the ghost of what the stone remembered. But impressions weren't proof. A council review board wouldn't accept "the stone felt coerced" as a basis for reopening historical records.

She needed the full translation of both layers, a comparative analysis with the surface wards and the overnight symbols. But more over, she needed everything documented so thoroughly that no amount of administrative delay or convenient misplacement could make it disappear.

The light outside the chamber entrance had shifted from bright morning to the warm amber of late afternoon, and she'd barely noticed. She pulled her phone out and checked the time. She'd been underground for seven hours.

She texted Diana: Working late at the site. Don't wait up.

Then she texted Tom: Significant findings in the newly exposed chamber. Full report forthcoming. Please confirm my documentation access is current.

She put the phone away and opened her journal to a fresh page. Her pen moved fast, sketching the treaty stone, noting the dimensions of both text layers, transcribing every symbol she could make out in the headlamp's beam. The chamber was cool and quiet around her, the weight of the stone pressing in from all sides, and the only sound was her breathing and the scratch of pen on paper and the faint, steady hum of magic.

The sky through the chamber entrance was going purple with dusk. She didn't pack up. She switched to a fresh battery in her headlamp, drank the last of her thermos, and kept working.

Whatever Rydan Ashkar was afraid she'd find, she'd found it. And she was going to document every inch of it before anyone had a chance to bury it again.

18

CRISS

The thing about Rydan Ashkar's words was that they worked like slow poison. Not the kind that hit you all at once and knocked you flat, but the kind that seeped, finding the cracks and settling in.

Criss had spent the afternoon splitting firewood behind the cabin because it was the only thing he'd found that made his brain shut up for more than five minutes. Swing, crack, split, stack. Repeat. The rhythm was good and the ache in his shoulders was better, and as long as he kept moving, he didn't have to sit with the cold knot that had taken up residence in his chest since Rydan had looked at him and decided he was obedient.

Your bloodline survived. Not by accident. Not by strength. By silence.

Swing. Crack. Split.

I knew most of the Holts who mattered.

The log exploded under the axe and both halves went flying. Criss buried the blade in the stump and stood there breathing hard, sweat cooling on his neck despite the evening chill.

It had been over a week since the night at the Silver Fang. Over a week since Stephanie Ward had left his bed before dawn without a word, and in the days since, she'd managed to be exactly nowhere he was. Not at the Griddle & Grind when he stopped in for coffee. Not at the Mercantile when he ran errands for Kieran. Not on any trail or street or corner of Hollow Oak where their paths might have naturally crossed. She was either avoiding him with surgical precision or the universe was collaborating, and given his luck, it was probably both.

He'd told himself it didn't bother him. He'd told himself that plenty of times, and it hadn't gotten any more convincing. The truth was that her absence had left a gap in his peripheral vision that his tiger kept trying to fill, orienting east toward the ridge every time Criss let his attention slip, like a compass he couldn't degauss.

And now Rydan Ashkar was in town, asking questions about the dig, meeting with Steph, making veiled references to the Holt family's complicity in whatever the hell had been scrubbed from those ledgers. The man had as much as told Criss that his bloodline owed its survival to looking the other way, and then suggested that Criss's "personal interest" in Stephanie was a liability.

Which meant Rydan knew about them. Or suspected. Or didn't care either way and had mentioned it just to watch Criss flinch.

He pulled the axe free and set another log on the stump. The sky was darkening fast, the last light catching the treetops while the ground fell into blue shadow. Somewhere inside the main house, he could hear Sage laughing and the low murmur of Kieran and Freya talking over dinner. Warm sounds. Family sounds. The kind of thing Criss usually found comforting and tonight found unbearable.

He needed to talk to Kieran about Rydan. Not the vague, half-deflected conversation from the study, but a real one. If Kieran knew who Ashkar was and what he'd done to the family records, then his "leave it alone" carried more weight than Criss had given it at the time. And if Kieran didn't know, then he needed to.

Criss stacked the last of the split wood and headed for the main house. He made it as far as the back porch before his tiger locked up.

One second he was climbing the steps, hand on the railing, mind already forming the opening line of a conversation he didn't want to have. The next, every muscle in his body seized and his vision sharpened as his tiger surged forward with a force that nearly drove him to his knees.

East. The pull was east, violent and absolute, like a hook set in his sternum and yanked. Not the lazy compass drift he'd been ignoring for days. This was urgent. This was fear, not his own but something transmitted through a channel he didn't understand and couldn't close, and it tasted danger.

He was off the porch and running before the thought fully formed. The trail into the eastern woods was dark, the canopy blocking what little twilight remained, and his human eyes couldn't keep up with the speed his body was demanding. He stripped his shirt mid-stride, kicked off his boots, and let the shift take him.