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"This is why it doesn't work," Steph said. "You and me. Whatever this is. You default to charm and control and I default to independence and when those two things collide, someone gets hurt. Every time."

"Steph."

"I need to go." She grabbed her jacket from the back of the door. Her field pack was in the corner where someone had set it, and she shouldered it with her good wrist. "I have documentation to file before the council shuts me out again. And I need to talk to Emmett about what happened in the square, because someone used this town's foundational wards as a weapon and that's bigger than you and me and whatever this argument is about."

"It's not just an argument."

"No," she agreed. "It's not."

She looked at him standing in her room, his face open in a way she'd never seen before, stripped of the charm and the deflection and the easy grin. Just a man who'd made the wrong call for what he thought were the right reasons, standing in the wreckage of it.

She felt herself soften for a moment. Maybe she was overreacting? But it was too late. SHe was hurt either way and she needed out. She walked past him and out the door. Down the stairs, through the inn's front hall, past Diana who said something she didn't hear, and out into the grey morning where the storm had broken and the square was still torn apart.

24

STEPHANIE

She packed methodically. Field journals first, wrapped in waterproof bags and layered at the bottom of her pack where they'd be safest. Camera, memory cards, the portable hard drive with every photograph she'd taken since arriving. Magnetometer readings, printed and backed up. The sketches of the treaty stone with both inscription layers rendered in detail fine enough to survive peer review.

Two weeks of work compressed into forty pounds of evidence.

She sat on the edge of the bed at the inn and stared at the packed bag and tried to think clearly, which was difficult when her brain kept circling back to Criss standing in her room looking so…defeated.

Stop it.

She pulled out her field journal and opened it to the treaty stone pages. Focus on the work. The work was the reason she'd come. The work was the thing that mattered. Everything else was noise. She’d already wasted enough time looking into mate bonds. Why had she even done that?

Steph growled at herself in annoyance.

The original inscription, the one that had been magically shaved and overwritten, described a forced consolidation of tiger pride territories during what appeared to be an internal power struggle. Multiple family lines had been compelled to surrender holdings, autonomy, and what Steph's sensitivity had interpreted as bloodline magic, the inherited magical signatures that distinguished one pride family from another. The surrenders hadn't been voluntary. The emotional residue in the stone was unambiguous: coercion, grief, rage.

The replacement inscription, carved over the original, reframed the event as a "voluntary restructuring in the interest of community unity." The language was diplomatic, institutional. It used words like "consensus" and "shared sacrifice" and "collective stewardship," the kind of phrasing designed to look noble in a historical record while erasing the violence.

The gap in the Holt family ledgers matched the timeline. 1927 to 1943. Sixteen years of missing history, the exact period when the consolidation would have occurred. Whoever had rewritten the treaty stone had also rewritten the family records, creating a seamless revised history that turned victims into willing participants and the architects of the revision into invisible hands which apparently were Rydan Ashkar's.

She'd known men like him. Not supernaturally powerful, but powerful in the same essential way. Men who believed that control was care, that curation was protection, that deciding what other people were allowed to know was an act of love rather than dominance. Grant had been a smaller version of the same animal. Deciding her career was too consuming. That her sensitivity was a quirk to be managed and that eventually, she was too much work and someone simpler would do.

And Criss. Who'd sat on information that affected her safety and her research because he was "trying to figure it out first." Who'd shown up at her site twice without being asked. Who'd shifted in a public square and broken his own pride's code to drag her out of a collapsing street and then couldn't understand why she was angry about the things he hadn't told her.

She was angry. She was also honest enough with herself to admit that the anger was doing double duty, covering something softer underneath that she couldn’t afford to give any time to. Because if she did, it meant acknowledging that his silence hadn't come from arrogance. It had come from fear. The same fear she'd seen behind his eyes during their intimacy, the same careful restraint that had confused her before she'd understood what it meant.

He was afraid she'd leave. So he'd held back the information that might make her leave, which was exactly the kind of circular, self-defeating logic that people used when they cared too much and trusted too little.

She knew the pattern because she lived in it.

That didn't make it okay. But it made it harder to stay furious, and she needed the fury right now because fury was fuel and she had decisions to make.

The findings were significant enough to warrant external review. If she could get them to her department chair at the university, or to the independent council of supernatural archaeological preservation, the site would receive protected status that no local advisory committee could override. Rydan Ashkar could delay permits and reroute supplies, but he couldn't suppress findings that had been submitted to an external governing body.

But submitting externally meant leaving Hollow Oak. It meant crossing the Veil, reaching a cell signal, uploading files, making calls. It meant putting physical distance between herself and the site, the evidence, Criss, everything.

Maybe that was what she needed. Distance. Perspective. Time to sort the professional crisis from the personal one and handle each without the other contaminating her judgment.

She shouldered her pack, left a note for Diana on the front desk, and left the inn into the late afternoon.

The storm from that morning had broken but not cleared. Low clouds hung over the town in a heavy grey ceiling, the air thick with moisture that couldn't decide whether to fall. The square was still damaged, cobblestones cracked and displaced, the fountain roped off with caution wards that hummed faintly orange. A few shopkeepers were sweeping water from their doorways. The town looked bruised.

She took the western trail toward the Veil crossing, the same path she'd walked two weeks ago when she'd arrived in spring rain with her pack on her back and nothing on her mind but work. The trail wound through dense forest, climbing gradually before leveling off at the boundary zone where Hollow Oak's magic met the mundane world.